In retrospect, Rick Jackson didn’t have to base his political persona on Donald Trump quite as much as he has.
After all, Jackson has a compelling personal story and a ton of money to sell it with, and that has turned out to be the biggest factor in his campaign to win the Republican nomination for governor. Identifying himself with Trump probably looked like the obvious thing to do when Jackson launched his primary campaign, maybe the necessary thing in a contest with an enthusiastic Trump disciple like Lt. Gov. Burt Jones.
Since then, however, the political winds have shifted in a way that could affect the general election. Trump’s poll numbers have fallen into negative territory over this year in all but four or five states, and Georgia’s not one of them.
It’s important to keep in mind that what we’re talking about here is a span of not quite six months, from the day in February when Jackson launched his campaign to last week, when he accepted Trump’s endorsement on a stage at Wheeler High School in Cobb County. That’s not a lot of time for a candidate to introduce himself, and Jackson has compared himself to Trump as a way to fill in the blanks.
At the rally, Jackson doubled down on his Trump impersonation, announcing that if elected he would ask the legislature to match the $1,000-a-child “Trump Accounts” savings program. If the legislature turns him down, he said, he would fund the matching program himself.
There were 126,437 births recorded in Georgia in 2024, the last year for which there are complete records. That would mean the legislature would have to approve more than $126 million to cover that year alone, which makes it highly unlikely it would. That’s a healthy price tag for one billionaire, as well.
At the end of his brief (compared to Trump’s) remarks, Jackson repeated his pledge that he is “going to be this man’s favorite governor.” He has contributed at least $1 million to Trump’s Make America Great Again PAC, which should help in that regard.
The rally gave Republicans a chance to exercise some unity after a fractious primary, but it caused a row at the Cobb Board of Education meeting the following day. Dozens of Democrats, who hope to break the Republicans’ 4-3 majority on the board this year, showed up to protest the board’s decision to allow the event at the school. And among those who worked hardest to publicize the Trump event was Jackson’s Democratic opponent, Keisha Lance Bottoms.
This week, Jackson announced an $87 million television and digital ad buy. It will be interesting how much of that ad money will be spent on further comparisons with the president, as the race moves into the final stretch.
At about the same time the Georgia Democratic Party announced it will have 30 field offices open by August, with 60 full-time field organizers and 100 campaign staff. This will not be a campaign year that will be easy to miss.
Jackson made reference in his Wheeler High speech to the flap over a visit by Jackson to Toast of Buckhead, a black-owned restaurant which released a statement that it had nothing to do with the Jackson campaign after the Republican candidate posted a picture from a recent visit on social media. That led to online calls for a boycott of the restaurant; there is no indication these came from the Bottoms campaign, as Jackson implied in his remarks.
“My opponent wants to cut down businesses and cancel them just because I visited a restaurant. Well, that’s just wrong,” said Jackson. We could be hearing more about this.
As this incident illustrates, we don’t know what direction this race will take, between two candidates who come to the governor’s race as outsiders, each in their own way. Inescapably, however, a Democrat who favors expanding Medicaid and a Republican who heads a major healthcare firm are going to square off over healthcare, and that moment cannot come too soon.
