Georgia Sen. David Perdue is used to taking late-night and early morning phone calls from President Trump.
As one of the president’s closest confidants, the Macon, Georgia, native has weighed in on everything from immigration to the economy. He’s stood by loyally and defended Trump through six controversies and an impeachment.
Perdue has also voted in lockstep with the president’s agenda 94% of the time and recently sided with Trump over members of his own party on allegations of election-rigging and voter fraud.
Now, as Perdue faces the toughest challenge of his political career in a Jan. 5 runoff race against Democratic rival Jon Ossoff, he is turning to his powerful pal to get him over the finish line.
How the election shakes out will determine which party takes control of the U.S. Senate next month.
On Monday, the Perdue campaign released a 30-second ad featuring Trump. In it, the president claims that “nobody in Washington” has advocated more strongly for his “America first” policy than Perdue.
“There’s nobody in Washington that is more respected than David Perdue,” Trump added, telling his unwavering base in Georgia to “get out and vote.”
A week earlier, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. also got in on the action and released his video imploring Georgians to cast their ballots for Perdue.
“The radical Left wants to tear down everything we’ve accomplished: defunding the police, eliminating private health insurance, and dismantling the Supreme Court. On Jan. 5, the U.S. Senate is on the line, and my father’s accomplishments are on your ballot. Don’t let them take Georgia,” Trump Jr. said.
Perdue’s unconventional coziness with the Trumps, the elder Trump specifically, has been a double-edged sword for the GOP incumbent.
On the one hand, Perdue’s got the support of a very popular president. On the other, his success is tied to Trump, who has blasted conspiracy theories about the integrity of the state’s election system and accused Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, of working with Democrats to steal the election.
The political tightrope Perdue finds himself on now is a far different place than his humble beginnings as the son of two schoolteachers growing up in the 1960s in Warner Robins, Georgia.
Perdue’s father, David Alfred Perdue Sr., was elected school superintendent of the Houston County school system and was one of the first superintendents in the state to integrate a school system.
Perdue has credited his parents with teaching him “the importance of education, hard work, and equality at a young age.”
After graduating from Northside High School in 1968, Perdue enrolled at the Air Force Academy before transferring to Georgia Tech. Perdue paid for college by working warehouse and construction jobs.
After he graduated the Atlanta college with a degree in industrial engineering, he married a woman named Bonnie Dunn, whom he had met in first grade. They were wedded in 1972 and have two sons and three grandchildren.
Before he made a splash in politics — Perdue replaced Sen. Saxby Chambliss in 2013 — Perdue, 70, spent decades in the business world, where he started off as a management consultant but quickly climbed the corporate ladder at Sarah Lee, Dollar General, and Reebok, where he is credited with rejuvenating its sneaker line.
Things took a turn after he left Reebok in 2002 to head up PillowTex, a North Carolina textile company that had emerged from bankruptcy with massive debt. Perdue left the company after nine months, walking away with $1.7 million in compensation. The company folded several months after Perdue’s departure, but an internal audit noted that he was a no-show much of the time he was there and that his long absences were “terrible for morale.”
Perdue’s political opponents have used his background to sharpen their attacks on him.
Almost all of them, including Ossoff, have recycled a comment he made in 2005 about how he spent “most of” his career outsourcing jobs.
There have also been questions about his appointment to the Georgia Ports Authority by his first cousin Sonny Perdue, Trump’s current agriculture secretary and Georgia’s former governor.
During his time in the Senate, Perdue has faced multiple accusations of blurring the line between his private financial interests and his work as an elected official. He has bought and sold shares in companies that the committees he sits on have jurisdiction over. The Justice Department investigated him for possible insider trading, which Perdue strongly denied.
While prosecutors decided not to bring charges against him, it hasn’t stopped Democrats from using them to paint Perdue as someone with questionable ethics.
Perdue recently grabbed headlines when he declined to debate Ossoff at a Dec. 6 Atlanta Press Club event. Ossoff showed up and stood next to an empty podium while he answered questions. The optics alone gave Ossoff more press coverage than money could buy and turned Perdue into a punchline.
His campaign manager, Ben Fry, said Perdue would take his “message about what’s at stake if Democrats have total control of Congress directly to the people.”
Perdue, who has pitched himself as “the original outsider,” said that if he is reelected, he will continue to roll back “onerous regulations” and take action to “unleash our energy potential.” He’s also pledged to cut taxes for small businesses and vowed to fight the “defund the police” effort.
