If the polls are to be believed, former Georgia Sen. David Perdue is headed toward a crushing primary defeat Tuesday in his challenge to GOP Gov. Brian Kemp.
A recently released Fox poll showed Kemp at 60%, compared to just 28% for Perdue, a stunning finding that suggests the incumbent isn’t going to just win — he is going to romp.
Which, at first glance, may seem weird. After all, former President Donald Trump encouraged Perdue to enter the race in the first place and endorsed him. Kemp has been enemy #1 for Trump since he refused to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.
But there’s a lesson to be learned here.
And that lesson is this: Running a campaign solely on the false notion that the 2020 election was stolen isn’t enough to win.
The truth of Perdue’s candidacy is that he has never found any message beyond a) the election was stolen (it wasn’t) and b) Kemp didn’t do enough to, ahem, stop the steal.
On everything other than that, Perdue seemed to be generally simpatico with Kemp. Both were down-the-line conservatives who, generally speaking, supported the Trump-ward turn of the GOP.
“Perdue thought that Trump was a magic wand,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (and a Perdue endorser) told The New York Times about the race. “In retrospect, it’s hard to understand David’s campaign, and it’s certainly not the campaign those of us who were for him expected.”
The conclusion here seems simple: A campaign built exclusively on the idea that the 2020 election was fraudulent — despite all evidence to the contrary — isn’t enough to win.
While Trump-aligned voters clearly agree with the unfounded sentiment that something was fishy about the 2020 election, in Georgia at least, it’s not an issue that on its own sways their votes. Perdue is learning that lesson the hard way.
The Point: Election denialism is rampant among Republican base voters. But Perdue’s likely defeat suggests that it’s not an issue that drives people to the polls.
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