Colton Moore, an auctioneer, dump truck driver and former Republican state senator, can make Marjorie Taylor Greene, the audacious, formerly Trump-loving congresswoman he hopes to replace, seem positively dull.
Standing out as one of around 20 candidates in Tuesday’s special election for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District might sound difficult, but it isn’t for Mr. Moore. In 2023, his hounding of Fani Willis, the district attorney pursuing President Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, was so overzealous it got him kicked out of his own State Senate caucus.
Last year, he was arrested at the state capitol in Atlanta after trying to enter the House chamber, from which he had been banned by the Republican speaker.
But in a Republican Party that tends to favor over-the-top antics, Mr. Moore, 32, is apparently too much of a maverick for America’s maverick-in-chief, President Trump, who endorsed a more mainstream candidate, the former prosecutor Clay Fuller. After Ms. Greene’s flashy break with the president and his struggles with another Republican maverick, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, even Mr. Trump understands that sometimes a team player in the House is useful.
The snub has injected an air of unpredictability to a race in which Mr. Moore had hoped name recognition would see him to victory.
“I’ve already had the clashes with the establishment,” said Mr. Moore, who has shrugged off the handicap and the snub. “Therefore, I’m already in the news.”
Tuesday’s jungle-style special election, which throws Democrats and Republicans onto the same ballot, will almost certainly go to a runoff, with no one winning an outright majority. With more than a dozen Republicans running (including Jim Tully, a former field representative for Ms. Greene), a Democrat named Shawn Harris might actually lead the first round, said Josh McKoon, the chair of the Georgia Republican Party.
The question is about the second-place finisher: Can Mr. Moore capture the imaginations of more Republicans than Mr. Fuller and the others in a conservative Northwest Georgia district where drama seems to play well?
Ms. Greene’s career, full of wild right-wing conspiracies and eyeball-attracting stunts, is proof of it, and Mr. Moore knows that his penchant for hell-raising has similarly bolstered his profile. Other lawmakers, he said, tend to “hide under the desk” at the first sign of controversy.
But in early February, Mr. Trump, who had praised Mr. Moore in the past, threw a wrench in the outrage machinery when he sided with Mr. Fuller.
The endorsement may have reflected electoral math. In a tight race for the House this year, Democrats are targeting a number of hard-right Republicans who have emulated aspects of the Greene style — among them Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee (who made waves with his heavily armed family Christmas card) and Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida (who sponsored the bill to add Mr. Trump’s likeness on Mount Rushmore).
The importance of the special election to Mr. Trump was underscored by his visit to the district in February. There, at a rally, he promoted both his economic plan and Mr. Fuller.
Mr. Fuller, in turn, told the crowd he promised to be a “warrior” for the president.
The district they all hope to represent stretches from rural homesteads in the Appalachian foothills to the booming suburban sprawl along metro Atlanta’s western flank. A contrarian spirit has historically been part of the mix. In the late 1970s, Northwest Georgia was represented by Larry McDonald, a conservative Democrat and conspiracy theorist who only bolstered his mystique by dying in a Korean airliner shot down by the Soviet Union.
In modern times, Mr. Moore, like Ms. Greene, helped spread the unfounded conspiracy that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump. After Mr. Trump’s indictment in Fulton County, Mr. Moore called on the legislature to impeach or defund Ms. Willis. That triggered his suspension from the Senate caucus; Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, called Mr. Moore’s effort a “grifter scam” to raise campaign funds.
Mr. Trump, however, declared at the time, “Highly respected Georgia Senator Colton Moore deserves thanks and congratulations of everyone for having the courage and conviction to fight the radical left lunatics.”
Mr. Moore has incorporated that 2023 statement into his promotional material. He has also stretched the truth. One of his TV ads references a January 2025 Fox News story that purportedly said that Mr. Moore was “arrested for defending President Trump.”
No such story exists. Fox News did cover the 2025 arrest of Mr. Moore, which was not about Mr. Trump but about Mr. Moore’s fight with Republican leadership after he accused a former House speaker of corruption. A spokesman for Mr. Moore did not return a call seeking comment on the issue.
Mr. Moore grew up on Lookout Mountain, on the Tennessee border, and said he was a fifth-generation product of the region. His interest in politics, he said, stems from his anger over the arrest of his father, the owner of a trucking business, on state marijuana charges, when Mr. Moore was a boy.
“You know, I want to fight for justice,” he said.
He favors decriminalizing marijuana but believes that drug legalization is “out of hand,” he said. His more prominent campaign themes are his calls to “deport all illegals,” lower taxes and defend the right to bear arms.
Before receiving Mr. Trump’s endorsement, Mr. Fuller had mostly garnered attention for calling Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor of New York, a “beta” male and mocking his bench-pressing prowess.
Even if the Democrat, Mr. Harris, finishes Tuesday in first, the retired Army officer will be a long shot. He thinks he can pull off an upset, arguing that Mr. Moore and Mr. Fuller are out of sync with the mood of an electorate more worried about the cost of groceries and health care than pledging allegiance to Mr. Trump.
“Both of those individuals, when you listen to them talking, they want to be further out there than Marjorie Taylor Greene,” he said.
Mr. Moore thinks he has the edge.
“I mean, Clayton’s got the swamp money,” he said of his opponent this week. “But we’ve got all the volunteers.”
On a Thursday night in mid-February, around 200 voters gathered at an event center in Dalton, Ga., under a billboard that announced “Jesus or Hell,” to hear the Republican candidates speak. Mr. Moore received the warmest reception and won a straw poll with 85 votes to Mr. Fuller’s 37.
A voter named Gina Pittman, 54, said she was a “Colton girl” who had followed his career from its beginning.
“I like how he is not afraid to say what he wants,” she said. “And anybody that’s willing to go to the House and get their self arrested to try to get on the floor and speak on our behalf is, you know, a stand-up guy.”
Richard Fausset, a Times reporter based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.
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