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Georgia served former President Donald Trump another piece of humble pie Tuesday night after two of his hand-picked House candidates lost their primary runoff elections.
The bruising defeats, coupled with last month’s high-profile primary wins by his nemeses Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, as well as damning testimony from state election officials during this week’s Jan. 6 hearings, have turned Georgia, a once-reliable stronghold for the former president, into his kryptonite.
Trump has struggled to translate his sought-after endorsements into wins in the Peach State, with nearly all of the candidates he endorsed floundering.
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In the 6th Congressional District runoff, Dr. Rich McCormick trounced Trump-backed attorney Jake Evans, 67% to 33%. In the 10th District contest, trucking executive Mike Collins crushed Vernon Jones, the self-proclaimed “black Donald Trump,” 74% to 26%.
“I’d say the writing’s on the wall,” Georgia voter Ashlee Colgin told the Washington Examiner.
Election 2022 Georgia
Cole Muzio of the conservative Frontline Policy Action group, which endorsed Collins and McCormick, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the runoff results showed Republicans “declaring their independence once again by picking the most principled conservatives and refusing to be told what to do.”
Evans and Jones lost their party’s nomination after building their campaigns around endorsements from the former president, which they flaunted at every turn. They also took a cue from Trump and tried to paint their staunchly conservative opponents as RINOs (Republican In Name Only) — a move that largely backfired.
The race to be the Republican nominee for Georgia’s 10th Congressional District turned into a proxy war in the last few days leading up to the runoff between Trump and Kemp, who the former president scapegoated for his 2020 presidential election loss.
The 10th District is a conservative bastion made up of 18 counties that stretch from the outskirts of Henry County in metropolitan Atlanta to the South Carolina state line. Kemp, who has lived in the district for decades, rallied around Collins, calling him a “trusted conservative.” Kemp won several of the district’s counties by more than 80% during his landslide primary victory over Trump’s hand-picked candidate, former Sen. David Perdue. Kemp’s monster win and subsequent endorsement of Collins turned Tuesday’s congressional contest into a fight between the two political heavyweights for the soul of Georgia’s GOP.
Donald Trump, David Perdue
Jones, who has been staunchly anti-Kemp from the start, routinely argued that a Trump endorsement carried more weight than a Kemp one.
“While our opponent may claim to be pro-Trump, President Trump has shown time and time again that he is not pro-him,” Jones told the Washington Examiner. “I’m not running for Congress to join the establishment. I’m running for Congress to destroy it.”
Vernon-Jones-Trump.jpeg
Trump has used the midterm primary elections as a way to show he is still a kingmaker. But in Georgia, it seems as though the king has lost a lot of his loyal subjects.
Suwanee Republican Grant Autler said he doesn’t think Trump “really fits in with his party anymore” and added that the president’s losses in the state show that “people really just don’t want Trump to be involved anymore.”
That’s not to say Georgia Republicans have rejected Trump’s America First policies. Almost every GOP candidate ran on a conservative platform that embraced policies Trump put in place and ideas he had for the future of the United States.
Even Kemp, who was turned into Trump’s verbal punching bag, said he will not alienate Trump’s base and has vowed never to speak ill of the former president.
Collins and McCormick, neither of which received Trump’s endorsement, have promised to back the former president at every opportunity and said they stand with him on abortion, gun rights, and other cultural issues designed to energize the party’s far-right-leaning members.
Colgin, a lifelong Republican, said it would be interesting to see how the candidates run their campaigns in the general election.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Are they going to align themselves with [Trump], or are they going to appeal to Georgia conservatives who are looking forward and are sick of hearing about how Trump thinks the election was rigged?”
