Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has a lot of supporters, and the Republican Party needs to take action before she becomes too hard to defeat.
Greene raised more than $3.2 million in the first quarter of 2021 from more than 100,000 donors. The average donation size was $32. This should scare the Republican Party. Also scary: Greene has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory and has called “Q,” the supposed leader of the movement, a patriot who is “worth listening to.” She has questioned whether or not a plane flew into the Pentagon on 9/11. She has talked about “Jewish space lasers.”
In short, she is an embarrassment to the Republican Party.
She hurts the conservative movement because she gives liberals an easy target. She allows them to paint the GOP as a party of crazed conspiracy theorists. In large part, because she appears to be one herself. For that, she deserves to lose her primary. But that’s going to be more difficult the longer the GOP waits around. It will almost certainly have to be a primary defeat that unseats Greene: Georgia’s 14th Congressional District is an R+27 seat, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index.
The GOP challenge is real.
Greene is going to keep raising money. While money is not everything in politics, it certainly helps candidates win elections. To beat Greene, a candidate may need to raise millions of dollars. Mailers, lawn signs, advertising, political consulting, campaign staffers, and the necessary infrastructure to host campaign events are not cheap. Candidates also need to garner name recognition and explain both why people should not vote for Greene and why their candidacy offers a preferable alternative.
If a Republican candidate waits until next January to announce they’re running, all of this becomes a lot more difficult. The upside to a district like this one is that candidates can be as right-wing as they want and, in all likelihood, still win it. This dynamic presents candidates with an opportunity to take some risks and bring bold ideas into the Republican Party fold.
Defeating Greene might seem like a small step, but it’s one giant leap toward making Congress saner.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
