It goes without saying that President Donald Trump is tangled up every which way in this year’s elections in Georgia. The question is what difference that’s going to make.
The Republican primaries demonstrated Trump’s dominance within the party, like several earlier contests around the country this year. No one perceived to have crossed the president made it into the runoffs. Whether they had his endorsement or not, every successful Republican trumpeted his name.
Another twist in that tangle is the turnout in the Democratic primaries, which is way up this year, largely because of unhappiness with Trump, and among black Democrats in particular, with the U.S. Supreme Court after its recent Voting Rights Act decision.
You can make a good argument that the Republican Party in Georgia has a smaller core but a potentially larger electorate, making this reversal in recent primary turnout patterns less significant than it might seem. But go up and down the ballot with an eye on the raw vote for individual candidates, and it’s obvious that so far the Republicans have had more candidates competing for fewer votes than the Democrats. For instance, in the Democratic primary runoff for lieutenant governor, both Josh McLaurin and Nabilah Parkes each put up more than 400,000 votes, while the Republican runoff candidates, John F. Kennedy and Greg Dolezal, got just a little more than half as many votes. That leaves the Republican runoff winners with much more work to do before November.
In the Republican U.S. Senate race, a Trump-endorsed congressman has ended up in a runoff with a newcomer with no political record, at the expense of another prominent Republican who made a major bid for the nomination. We’re talking about Mike Collins, Derek Dooley and Buddy Carter here in Georgia, right?
Yes, but we could also be speaking of U.S. Rep. Barry Moore, former Navy SEAL Jared Hudson and Attorney General Steve Marshall next door in Alabama.
Marshall has been active among the Republican attorneys general who have filed amicus briefs supporting the Trump administration’s policies. Carter — “Warrior! Great guy,” as we were reminded several times daily leading up to the primary election — even introduced a bill in Congress to rename Greenland Red, White and Blueland.
But the lesson from both these races is that without Trump’s endorsement, simply being enthusiastically for Trump isn’t worth much. If for some reason they don’t like the candidate Trump endorsed, his voters seem to be saying they’d just as soon try somebody who’s never been elected to anything.
This brings us to the race, which I don’t think has any parallel in another state this year. In the runoff between Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and billionaire businessman Rick Jackson, we’ve got a different wrinkle on those other Republican primary contests where everybody’s for Trump.
Jackson conceded in the Atlanta Press Club debate that he was “late to the Trump train.” His way of making up for that has not just been to make extravagant claims of allegiance to the president. He has cast himself as a billionaire businessman who’s sent politicians “a ton of cash” with no results, an outsider willing to take on the establishment in defense of the taxpayer — in other words, a newer version of Trump. The biographical details — the foster homes, the hardscrabble climb to success — are different, of course, but the hard-line, outsider message is the same.
Does any of that matter if the other candidate has the Trump endorsement? These well-financed opponents will be going at each other hard over the next three weeks. Jones will cast Jackson as a fraud, in other words not like Trump at all, and Jackson will attack Jones as the kind of corrupt career politician Trump opposes in Washington. It’s going to be a contest that many in the GOP will be looking at as a glimpse of the political landscape ahead.
If his name hasn’t been mentioned as often as Trump’s, Gov. Brian Kemp has been tangled up in this election also, even as he prepares to conclude his second term. Simply getting Dooley, the candidate he recruited, into the Senate runoff ahead of a sitting congressman with a lot of money, was impressive. There could be more to come.
