David Perdue's Campaign is a Risky Gamble

Sen. David Perdue (R-GA)

Sen. David Perdue is not a particularly noteworthy politician.  The history of hte US Senate is littered with one-term senators who were nothing more than footnotes, and he is certainly among them.  When he ran for the Senate in 2014, he had never held political office beforehand, and his most noted successes were at a string of large corporations where he served in high-level executive positions, making him a multimillionaire.  He spent most of his career outsourcing American jobs overseas (something rural Republican voters, who supposedly hate such practices & are disproportionately impacted by it, never punished him for).  His greatest success was at Dollar General as their CEO, overseeing the company's large expansion during the recession (when the demand for cheap consumer goods led to great success for the chain).  He won his Senate race in 2014 against three House members (and one future one), largely by spending a fortune in the race differentiating himself, and beat another first-time candidate (Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Georgia Senator Sam Nunn) in a general election that favored his party nationwide.  His time in office was marked largely by scandals both big (he repeatedly was accused of using his congressional position to trade stocks ranging on things from the Covid-19 pandemic to the opioid crisis) and small (he once stole one of his constituent's phones away from him when he tried to record the senator).  Arguably the most noteworthy thing about him is that he lost a race most assumed was in the bag for him, to a documentary filmmaker most noted for losing a high-profile House special, making it the first time in 40 years a losing House candidate beat an incumbent senator in their next race.

Perdue, though, is about to add a weird chapter onto his political resume.  Though he's 71, and has money that most of us could only dream of (i.e. he could be spending the rest of his life sipping Pina coladas at a luxury resort rather than doing the grueling work of campaigning for public office), he has decided to challenge incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp (R) for the Republican nomination in 2022.  The reasons Perdue is running, though, are quite staggering & gives us a glimpse into just how badly the Republican Party has fallen in 2022.

In his campaign announcement, Perdue drew virtually no line on any policy between he and Kemp.  There's two reasons for that.  One, I don't know that there is a policy disagreement between the two men.  Though the Republican Party is no longer a party of ideas (they didn't even craft a platform in 2020...only the Democrats seem to give a damn about policy anymore), Kemp is not someone that Perdue could run to his right.  The former Republican Secretary of State is genuinely one of the most conservative major officeholders in the country.  It is, in fact, that conservatism that made him such a vulnerable politician three years ago against Stacey Abrams-he was considered too conservative for an increasingly purple Georgia.  If you look at the states that Biden/Trump lost by less than 5-points, with the exception of Ron DeSantis, no state has a Republican (or Democrat) as far to the fringe as Kemp is-he is easily as conservative as you can find, certainly in Georgia.

Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA)

The second reason is that Perdue is not running based on policy-he's running based on the simple theory that Brian Kemp has become toxic in the eyes of Donald Trump, still the driving force of the Republican Party.  While Kemp actively campaigned for & endorsed Trump in 2020, he did not stop the counting of ballots in Georgia (it's unclear how much, legally, he would've been able to do even if he'd had the appetite to do this), and Trump holds Kemp personally responsible for him losing the state (the fact that he should hold himself & his campaign responsible since they're the reason that he didn't get enough votes has obviously never crossed his mind).

It is very, very rare that an incumbent governor is ousted in a primary, but it does happen.  Frank Murkowski, for example, lost to Sarah Palin in 2006 who later went on to win the general election.  Bob Holden lost in 2004 to Claire McCaskill, who went on to lose the general election, but McCaskill was the first person to pull that off in twenty years.  The reason here is pretty simple-incumbents have proven they can win, and most parties aren't willing to take that bet, certainly not in a state like Georgia, which did vote for not just Joe Biden last year, but Jon Ossoff & Raphael Warnock earlier this year.  There's an argument to be made that competitive primaries don't hurt a party as much as conventional wisdom dictates, but that's not really the case against an incumbent-trying to knock out an incumbent can be brutal.  Just ask Arlen Specter, Jimmy Carter, or Gerald Ford...it's a bad sign if your party thinks you're so weak that you can go down in a primary.

Next year is probably going to be a year that Republicans have a good midterms.  I don't subscribe to this being fate, but history is definitely on their sides.  But even in waves, there are calms in the storm.  In 2004, Republicans clobbered nationwide...but they still lost a Senate & House seat in Colorado, the rare state that gave the Democrats good news.  In 2014, while Republicans were clobbering nationwide, in Minnesota Democrats held the governor's mansion & a Senate seat by solid margins, both of which they'd won initially by recount margins.  Georgia is a state that has a lot of juice in it-it has not just a governor's mansion, but also a Senate seat and a Secretary of State position that we know too well could be crucial in 2024.  It is, to pardon a regional pun, quite a peach.  If Democrats are hoping to have a calm or two in a rough storm next year, it's possible that David Perdue, a senator of little consequence, could provide just that if he falters in a race that looks like it will be vicious, and be a harbinger of just how badly the Republican Party wants to tie itself to Trump (even if it means giving seats to the Democrats in the process).