Things are far from peachy in the Georgia US Senate race.
State and national party officials are furious at Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s tactics after a PAC backed by the governor smoked two sitting Republicans and blamed them for the shutdown while talking up Kemp’s preferred candidate in the race – former University of Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley.
“They all failed and shut down the government,” the ad says –– one of the first to weaponize the shutdown in a major race. The move incensed the two candidates who got blamed, GOP House members Mike Collins and Buddy Carter, who had each voted for “clean” bills to keep the government open.
There are already fears in Republican circles that the infighting puts the effort to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff at risk.
“You have a golden opportunity to unseat the most vulnerable Democrat on the map and it’s like we are on the verge of fumbling that opportunity,” fumed one Republican strategist in the state who called the episode a “massive distraction.”
”Club for Growth” president David McIntosh told The Post it’s “deeply concerning” that Dooley’s backers “were so quick to sell out Republican leadership in a failed attempt to score cheap political points. Georgians deserve better.”
Ossoff picked up the seat in 2020 with just 50.6% of the vote. Now he’s the best-funded Senate Democrat in the nation.
Collins accused the governor’s nonprofit of “parroting the anti-Trump Democrat lie that ‘Republicans are to blame for the shutdown’” in an ad that lumped him together with Ossoff. The National Republican Senatorial Committee also slammed the ad.
Dooley’s brother, Daniel, a former Kemp college roommate, sits on the board of the Hardworking Georgians Inc. PAC, which ran the ad. Kemp announced in May that he would pass on the race himself, despite the entreaties of the White House and GOP leaders.
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