Candidates running for their party tickets in Tuesday’s runoff election made their last-ditch campaign efforts over the weekend and on Monday.
Gov. Brian Kemp had a particularly busy Monday, when he campaigned both for Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in the governor’s race and former football coach Derek Dooley in the U.S. Senate race, and stood firm on his argument of backing a candidate based on electability. Jones is facing wealthy businessman Rick Jackson and Dooley is going up against firebrand Congressman Mike Collins.
Kemp’s preferred Senate candidate was dealt a setback over the weekend when President Donald Trump endorsed Collins. Kemp then made a last-minute endorsement of Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is the Trump-backed candidate in the race to succeed Kemp, who is term limited.
At a Monday morning event at a northwest Atlanta barbershop, joined by several Republican officials, Kemp reaffirmed his Jones endorsement and said that he made his endorsement based on the candidate he thinks can win against former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms in November. Kemp also pointed to their work together over the years and focused on their response to the pandemic, contrasting that with Bottoms’ leadership during that time.
“We’ve just done some incredible things, or you can go the way of the disaster of Keisha Lance Bottoms,” Kemp said. “You think back to that time you had people that were advocating to make sure lives were just as important as livelihood. And then you had Keisha Lance Bottoms wanting to keep our state shut down, keep the city shut down, not allow businesses to open up.”
“You think about the disaster of violent crime under her administration versus the Republican leadership that Burt Jones and I have worked on, going after criminal street gangs, creating the crime suppression unit,” Kemp added.
About 30 minutes away in Alpharetta, Jackson held a rally with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and other high-profile officials in Georgia like Insurance Commissioner John King and outgoing House Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones. Jackson’s supporters are making a similar pitch, arguing that Jackson, as an outsider, is the best-suited candidate to win in the November general election.
“I’m here because he’s the strongest conservative who can win,” Cruz said.
Bottoms’ campaign spokesperson, TaNisha Cameron, dismissed both GOP candidates as “Trump wannabe(s)” after Kemp’s endorsement.
“As mayor of Atlanta, Keisha led the city in historic investments to keep communities safe — delivering a record pay increase for police and firefighters, creating Atlanta’s public safety training center, and raising public safety funding every year she was in office. As governor, she will invest in public safety, lower costs and protect Georgia’s economy from harmful policies in Washington,” Cameron said in a statement Monday.
Kemp also campaigned for Dooley on Monday, making the same argument about electability. He said at the event that when he’s asked why he’s working hard to get Dooley elected, he responds with “there’s one reason: I want to win our U.S. Senate seat back.”
“He’s a political outsider, and if you just take personalities out of the equation for this runoff election, and you look at where Republicans have been successful beating Democratic incumbents around the country, it has been political outsiders that have had the most success doing that,” Kemp said.
Collins, who campaigned across Georgia on Monday, held a tele-rally with Trump Monday afternoon. In the call, Collins implied that he was also an outsider but with Washington experience, pointing to his background as a trucker who was a major sponsor of the Laken Riley Act, a law signed by Trump that was named after a Georgia college student who was killed by a man who had entered the country illegally.
“I’m just a blue-collar trucker. Been in the trucking business all my career. Like President Trump, I have not had a career in politics,” Collins said during the tele-rally. “My career has been in one of the toughest, most regulated, taxed industries there is in this country, but I think it was that experience over those 30 years that allowed me to go to Washington, D.C., and just be successful.”
On the Democratic side, voter turnout has lagged so far due to lower profile races that made it to a runoff. But left-leaning voters are also choosing nominees for several important roles, including lieutenant governor and secretary of state.
Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
I’ve seen elections that were decided by just one vote. In local races on off-year elections, we’re talking about a couple hundred people deciding who the mayor is—which is kinda sad because most of the stuff you complain about isn’t handled by Washington D.C.
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