PAULDING COUNTY, Georgia — The most combative, hard-line conservative vying to replace former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) hoped he had earned the endorsement of President Donald Trump through his years of effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
But when Colton Moore texted the president seeking his support earlier this month, Trump declined. The president wrote back that Moore was too unpredictable, according to people familiar with the exchange. Trump stressed that he needed to avoid another dissenting Republican voice in Congress.
Instead, Trump threw his support behind Clay Fuller, a district attorney and White House fellow in his first administration who is well-liked by local officials and national GOP leadership. The president is expected to double down on his endorsement Thursday when he travels to the northwestern Georgia district, a reliably deep-red slice of an increasingly purple state.
Fuller has pitched himself as the “100 percent Trump guy” willing to go to the mat to enact the president’s policies. Moore has said he will bring the same confrontational style to Capitol Hill that first drew his neighbors to the president — even if it means breaking with Trump at times.
The president is accustomed to defining the race. But many of the voters in Georgia’s 14th District do not like being told what to do.
The stakes of this race extend well beyond the region. Trump’s choice of Fuller and wariness regarding Moore reflect the importance of this phase of his presidency, in which a razor-thin margin in the House means that any GOP defiance can tank the president’s legislative agenda. The race is also coming on the heels of Trump’s public split with the seat’s former occupant, who is known in this district only as “Marjorie” — a once-powerful Trump ally whose rebuke of the president revealed burgeoning fractures in the Make America Great Again coalition.
“It is my Great Honor to endorse America First Patriot, Clay Fuller, who is running to represent the wonderful people of Georgia’s 14th Congressional District,” Trump wrote earlier this month on Truth Social. “… He is strongly supported by the most Highly Respected MAGA Warriors in Georgia, and many Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
Outside of the steel distributor Thursday, where Trump would soon speak, candidates looked to capture the support of the president’s die-hard fans. Jim Tully, chair of the district’s GOP committee, parked his massive campaign bus next to a bus adorned with Trump’s face. Beside it, Fuller had yard signs that said, “TRUMP ENDORSED!”
“I don’t vote for somebody because of who endorses them,” said Edward “JD” Kitchens, 72, a veteran and retired elevator technician, speaking from his doorstep Wednesday after a door-knocking visit from Moore.
Instead, Kitchens said, he has done his own research, and Fuller and Moore both stand out in the crowded primary field. He said it was hard to explain why, other than that he had heard of them both and liked that they seemed as though they would have his back.
“You just have to vote your conscience and hope and pray,” Kitchens said.
The special election is scheduled for March 10, and there are 22 candidates on the ballot, including more than a dozen Republicans still in the race. Early voting started Monday. If no candidate earns more than 50 percent of the vote, the race will go to a runoff between the top two vote-getters — a situation that could lead to a surprise Democratic upset if the GOP fails to unify and turn out.
“This is the absolute best chance a Democrat will ever have in this district to win,” said Ricky Hess, chairman of the Paulding County Republican Party. “There are so many Republicans out there and so much splitting.”
State and local officials and campaign advisers say the race is narrowing, with Fuller and Moore emerging from the pack.
Moore, a former state senator, made a name for himself clashing with leadership in the Georgia Capitol until he was suspended from the party caucus and barred from the building. In his introductions to voters this week at luncheons and on their doorsteps, he repeatedly highlighted that he was arrested for showing up at the Capitol in an effort to pressure leadership over what he considered a lack of accountability in the investigation into Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis.
“I led the fight against Fani T. Willis,” he told Jimmy Young, 69, a retired printer, on Wednesday afternoon as he knocked on doors in Powder Springs, a quiet suburban area. “I just want to make sure our God-given rights are fiercely defended.”
Young nodded. “The law’s no good if no one get arrested.”
At campaign events and while door-knocking, Fuller said voters in the district have asked first about his call with Trump after his endorsement, eager to hear what the president said. The moment was surreal for Fuller, who said Trump’s 2017 inaugural address — with its stark descriptions of drug addiction and overdoses in communities abandoned by political leadership — inspired him to work for the president.
Fuller tells Georgians that he will help the president bring manufacturing back to their community.
“I want to make sure that a fifth-rate student at one of our public schools in Georgia 14 can get one of those good manufacturing jobs and raise the family on one paycheck where their ancestors are buried,” he said.
In this district, political choices are often about gut feelings, about secure and fair elections, about how much people can afford, and how to best keep the government small and far away, according to nearly two dozen residents and political operatives who spoke with The Washington Post. These are the people who suffered some of the steepest job losses in the nation when the housing market collapsed in 2008, and over the past decade, their distrust of the government has only grown.
“If Republicans really cared, if Democrats really cared, do you think the national debt would be what it is?” Reagan Box, a longtime horseback rider and trainer now running for Congress, said while addressing the Paulding County Republican Women’s group at a luncheon Wednesday.
For many residents, that distrust is not abstract. The district is home to a city known as the carpet capital of the world. For years, a lack of state and federal regulations allowed carpet companies and their suppliers to use PFAS, cancer-causing chemicals that polluted the river system that provides drinking water for thousands of people.
Fuller, who survived cancer, said at the Wednesday luncheon, “God gave me more time to come back to north Georgia and fight for this community.”
Last week, a candidate forum showed the many candidates largely in alignment with Trump. But there were also reminders of tensions between Trump and his base that Greene — still largely well-liked in her former district — magnified as she clashed with the president and then abruptly left Congress.
Asked if he supported the “full and transparent release” of the government’s files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Moore said he initially trusted Trump had “some reason” to withhold them but changed his mind after a congressional hearing featuring U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“My blood pressure hasn’t been that high in a very long time,” Moore said, declaring that the federal government had “failed us” and saying the files should lead to arrests.
Asked where they might break with their party, some candidates brought up health care, echoing Greene’s frustration when Republicans declined to extend pandemic-era Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Fuller, meanwhile, emphasized his stamp of approval from the president at the forum, telling the audience that “if you want to hundred-percent support President Trump, I’m asking for your vote.”
Jill Musgrove, a 59-year-old business owner, missed last week’s forum hosted by the League of Women Voters in Dalton, the district’s largest city and the center of the carpet industry. But she came to the Wednesday luncheon armed with a yellow notebook, prepared to understand the options before her.
She liked Trump, and she knew whom he wanted her to vote for.
But while she trusted him, she didn’t want to make a decision based on his desires.
“He has advisers now, who give him information on who to endorse,” she said. “I take everything with a grain of salt.”
Musgrove listened to the 11 candidates who joined her over lasagna. One by one, they made their case to the room. She wrote notes after each address.
Hannah Knowles contributed to this report.
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