In September 2021, former Senator David Purdue felt he was running for governor of Georgia. During dinner with an old friend on Sea Island, he pulled out his iPhone and showed the list of calls he had received from Donald J. Trump, lobbying him to decide.
“He said Trump called him all the time,” said Martha Zohler, a former contributor to Mr. Purdue who now hosts an electric radio show in Gainesville, Georgia. “He showed me these many recent calls on his phone and said they were from the President.”
Ms. Soller and a legion of other former Perdue aides and advisers told the former senator that running was a bad idea. Instead, he listened to Mr. Trump.
Mr Purdue is now watching an epic defeat at the hands of Governor Brian Kemp, the Republican whom Mr Trump has blamed for his 2020 loss more than anyone else. Perdue’s campaign puts an end to the low-money race, with no TV commercials and a candidate even described by his supporters as murky and distracted.
“Purdue thought Trump was a magic wand,” said Newt Gingrich, a former House Speaker and ally of Trump who was one of Mr. Purdue’s most prominent supporters in Georgia. “In retrospect, it’s hard to understand David’s campaign, and it’s certainly not the campaign that those of us who were for him expected.
Mr Purdue’s impending fall in Tuesday’s primary gubernatorial election is the biggest electoral failure for Mr Trump since his own defeat in the 2020 election. Perhaps there is no contest in which the former president has done more to try to influence the result. Mr Trump recruited, raised and cleared the field for his ally as he attacked Mr Kemp, recorded television commercials and gave $ 2.64 million to groups helping Mr Purdue – the most he had ever invested. in another politician.
Still, the race revealed the limits of Mr. Trump’s influence, especially against established Republicans.
Mr Purdue’s failures were not his own fault. He was surrounded by a sensible incumbent in Mr Kemp who used his cabinet powers to cut Mr Purdue from allies – including Mr Purdue’s own cousin Sonny, a former governor and Trump’s agriculture minister whom the allies Mr. Kemp was appointed Chancellor of the University System of Georgia.
Mr Kemp also seems to be punishing those who cross him: a seat in Congress has been withdrawn to exclude the home of a candidate whose Perdue-backed father has publicly criticized the governor.
And he offered extras to voters, including a gas tax holiday that will conveniently last until the end of May, just after the primary election.
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On Thursday, as Mr. Purdue campaigned for Semper Fi Bar and Grille in Woodstock, Georgia, he did not think of a way to win, but bargained for the scale of his much-anticipated defeat after a Fox News poll showed he was down 32 percentage points.
“Hell, I’m not down by 30 points,” insisted Mr Purdue, whose campaign did not respond to requests for comment on the article. “We may not win on Tuesday,” he added, “but I guarantee-hell-we-aren’t down by 30 points.”
Tuesday’s key threshold is 50 percent: Mr Kemp must win an absolute majority in the five candidates to avoid a one-on-one runoff in June.
The story of Mr Purdue’s efforts is less of a political collapse than a failure. Since announcing his candidacy in December, Mr Purdue has never demonstrated the same commitment to victory he showed in his first Senate race in 2014.
His case for the removal of Mr Kemp has always relied heavily on the support of the former president. Mr Purdue argued in his campaign presentation that the governor had alienated Trump’s loyalists so much that they would not unite around Mr Kemp against Stacey Abrams, the alleged Democratic nominee and leading villain for Republicans.
But Mr Purdue, 72, a wealthy former chief executive of Dollar General, never came close to the $ 3.8 million of his own money he invested in his race for the Senate in 2014. He invested only $ 500,000 in his candidacy for governor.
That’s less than he and his wife spent last year on a plot of land on a secluded peninsula on the picturesque island of St. Simons, a purchase made shortly after his defeat in the run-off at the hands of the then 33-year-old Democrat. control of the Democrats. Permission to build a nearly 12,000-square-foot mansion worth about $ 5 million – on land, including “over 625 feet of lake face”, according to the list – was given two weeks after he announced his candidacy, records show.
Mr Trump is also investing heavily in Mr Purdue with his $ 2.64 million and trying to avoid accusations as the candidate faltered, telling The New York Times in April that the media focus “should be on the approvals, not on David Perdue one ”to measure his influence.
Mr Trump’s last rally in Georgia was in late March. He did not return, as Perdue’s allies had hoped, but instead held a conference call for supporters in early May.
“I’m with David all the way because Brian Kemp was the BEST governor in the country in terms of the integrity of the election!” Mr Trump insisted on Friday on his Truth Social news platform.
Mr Purdue, like the mayoral candidates in Idaho and Nebraska this month, has learned that Trump’s approval does not in itself guarantee the support of Trump voters or Trump donors.
“Trump’s approval is very important, but it is only approval,” said former MP Jack Kingston, who lost the 2014 Senate primary to Mr Purdue and is a former Trump adviser. “This is not an army of infrastructure and door knockers, as it would be if you have a Sierra Club or an NRA or an AFL-CIO.”
The juxtaposition between the Kemp and Purdue camps was particularly sharp on Friday.
Mr Kemp was outside Savannah, announcing that Hyundai was investing $ 5.5 billion in an electric battery and vehicle plant, one of the largest economic development projects in Georgia’s history. There was a toast with champagne.
Mr Purdue was on hand to host an approval event with Sarah Palin, a 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, who is making her own attempt to return to the Alaska House race.
“I’d rather stand on stage and advertise 7,500 jobs than stand next to Sarah Palin,” said Kemp’s vice governor, Jeff Duncan, a fierce critic of Trump who has decided not to run for re-election this year.
Randy Evans, a Perdue supporter who served as ambassador to the Trump administration in Luxembourg, said Kemp’s operation was ruthless in using what he called the “harassing” powers of the governor’s office.
Mr. Evans’ son, Jake, is running for Congress in the suburbs of Atlanta. When Republican lawmakers agreed with Kemp drew new lines of redistribution, the younger Mr. Evans was suddenly withdrawn from the county in which he planned to run.
“They cut a piece the size of your little finger,” said the elderly Mr. Evans. “Jake had to move, buy a new house.”
Mr Kemp, 58, has used his powers in other important ways. He signed a tax refund measure of up to $ 500 for couples, then announced on May 11, after early voting began, that the checks had been mailed. He called on Georgians in rural areas by raising teachers’ salaries and delighted conservatives by signing comprehensive legislation restricting access to the ballot, expanding gun rights and banning the mandate for school masks.
Mr Purdue’s efforts may seem weak in comparison. In March, he attacked Mr Kemp for hiring an electric truck manufacturer to open a factory in rural Georgia – creating thousands of jobs – because George Soros, a prominent Democrat donor, had recently invested in the company.
The Kemp-Perdue competition was full of the drama of personal betrayal.
Mr Kemp spent weeks campaigning with Mr Purdue before the Senator’s defeat in the January 2021 Senate run-off. Mr Kemp had since infuriated Mr Trump by defending the legitimacy of Georgia’s presidential performance.
Last spring, Mr Kemp’s aides said, Mr Purdue assured Mr Kemp that he did not intend to run for governor. That same June, Mr. Purdue introduced the governor of the annual convention of the Republican Party of Georgia.
But Mr. Kemp, cunningly, had already begun the process of appointing Sonny Purdue, a popular former governor, to run Georgia’s public universities, an appointment that effectively left him out. (Sonny Purdue, through a speaker, declined to comment.)
Mr Kemp also preemptively secured the loyalty and fundraising power of Alec Poitevint, a South Georgian businessman who chaired the campaign for David Purdue’s campaigns in the Senate and Sony Purdue’s campaign for governor, one of many ways to which Kemp’s operation refused. Mr. Purdue financially.
Mr Poitevint said he was among the many longtime supporters of David Purdue who had urged him not to run.
“I didn’t think it was serious,” Mr Poitevint said. “I have expressed the fact that I do not agree that I think the governor has done a great job and deserved to be re-elected.”
Avoided by the state’s political establishment, Mr Purdue tried to present himself as a political outsider – “I have been an outsider since I entered politics”, he said on Thursday – but this is a difficult case for a former senator who boasts of his support from a former president.
Even Mr. Trump’s $ 2.64 million infusion was flooded with $ 5.2 million in television commercials paid for by the Republican Governors’ Association to help Mr. Kemp.
For all of Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Kemp, the governor never responded. Mr Kemp’s advisers believe discipline has helped give permission to even Trump’s most loyal supporters to cling to the governor.
Meanwhile, Mr. Purdue’s campaign was laser-focused on lies for 2020 – repeating Mr. Trump’s lie and …
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