There are many reasons why state Rep. Steven Sainz should be kicking back a bit this summer before the general election in November, when the Republican candidate for the District 180 seat in the Georgia House of Representatives will be the overwhelming favorite.
Sainz is, after all, a three-term incumbent. He has a large campaign war chest. And Camden County’s establishment, along with Georgia’s Speaker of the House Jon Burns and other Republican leaders in Atlanta, have backed his reelection.
Instead, the 29-year-old social service entrepreneur is struggling to win Tuesday’s Republican primary runoff. He’s facing Glenn Cook, a lawyer and former U.S. Navy and Delta Airlines pilot, in a race surprisingly close given Sainz’s large campaign war chest and ties to lobbyists.
In a sign of the Sainz campaign’s worries, outside groups are flooding the district with fliers depicting Cook, a self-described “Reagan Republican,” as insufficiently conservative and Republican. One even describes Cook as a “friend” of former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
(In Glynn County, the runoff for the District 2 County Commissioner race also has featured a negative campaign flier describing one of two Republican candidates erroneously as a “Democrat.” Read more here about Tuesday’s other runoff race].)
Sainz, who has touted himself in the campaign as a champion of “Camden County and Coastal Georgia values,” disavowed the mudslinging of his supporters.
“I can’t control those who are very passionate about making sure Camden continues to have good, sound conservative representation,” he told The Current, adding that the primary isn’t about him or Cook but about the “folks of District 180.”
A trouble-free political rise
Until this year’s elections, Sainz has enjoyed a remarkably trouble-free political rise.
In 2018, he first won the District 180 seat after three-term incumbent, Jason Spencer, exposed himself and yelled racial epithets during a fake military-training session organized by actor Sacha Baron Cohen, who was posing as an Israeli “anti-terror expert” for his show, “Who is America?”
Sainz defeated Spencer by 665 votes. Since then, he has faced primary and general election opposition only once, in the 2022 Republican primary.
As chairman of the House Special Rules Committee and one of seven Latino lawmakers during the last session of the 236-member Georgia General Assembly, Sainz enjoys the support of top local Republicans in Camden County, which together with a sliver of south Glynn County and Jekyll Islands, comprises District 180.
The chairman of Sainz’s campaign committee, according to documents submitted to the state elections commission, is Camden County businessman Chandra “C.B.” Yadav, a longtime ally of Gov. Brian Kemp as well as one of 16 “alternate” or “fake” electors who declared Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 presidential contest in Georgia.
A Fulton County jury recommended Yadav’s indictment last year for his involvement in efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia, but District Attorney Fani Willis did not charge him.
Meanwhile, the chair of the Camden County Republican Committee, Rachel Baldwin, has longstanding ties to Sainz.
Since at least 2019, she has served as secretary of Camden Connection, the St. Mary’s-based social service and consulting firm that Sainz heads, according to the organization’s 2019 and 2022 Internal Revenue Service filings.
Those ties motivated Cook to challenge Sainz for the District 180 seat. In his view, Sainz’s incumbency and ties to Camden County’s establishment have made him a careless, inattentive lawmaker who does only what House Republican leaders tell him to do.
“He’s a backbencher that raises his hand when they need a vote. And they’re going all out for him,” he told The Current in an interview last week.
Baldwin did not reply to a request for comment about the primary race.
‘Every single playing field’
Sainz’s establishment connections, both in Camden County and Atlanta, have proved to be a boon to his fundraising.
As of April 30, the Committee to Elect Steven Sainz had contributions totaling $358,372 to Cook’s $55,993, a margin of more than 6-to-1, according to documents filed with the state’s campaign commission.
Most of Sainz’s 216 contributions come from industry groups, political and social organizations that influence how legislative business is carried out in Atlanta.
Sainz’s reelection campaign also has received a boost from so-called “non-candidate committees” or “independent expenditure committees,” which fund phone banks, flier printing and distribution, and other forms of parallel campaigning. By law, they are barred from consulting with candidates and campaigns, or coordinating their activities with them.
Since April 25, the Georgia Realtor IE Committee, an industry group, has donated $26,784 to such efforts, and the American Federation for Children Action Fund-Georgia Legislative IE Committee has given $16,556, documents submitted to the campaign commission say.
The Dallas-based federation promotes taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools nationwide, according to its website.
Sainz told The Current that in accordance with the law, he’s never spoken to the federation, the Realtor committee or any other independent expenditure committee.
Still, he said, the financial support for his campaign shows that he holds an advantage over his opponent “on every single playing field” — the result, he added, of having a “great record that my constituents believe in.”
Cook’s 118 campaign donors, meanwhile, are individuals, with the candidate himself the largest single contributor, according to Cook’s submissions to the campaign commission. To his knowledge, he said, no non-candidate committee is helping his campaign.
Low — really low — voter turnout
That Sainz, despite the advantages he enjoyed entering the primary, now finds himself fighting for his political life is partly a matter of arithmetic.
Faced with not one but two challengers for the Republican nomination, Sainz didn’t exceed the 50% of the vote required to avoid runoff in last month’s primary. He received 49.69% of the vote, falling roughly 20 votes short of winning the Republican nomination outright. Cook received 27.04% of the vote and David Rainer, 23.27%.
Low voter turnout tends to reduce an incumbent’s advantages and minimize a challenger’s deficits. With turnout on Tuesday expected to be even lower in District 180 than it was for last month’s primary, the margins of victory — and defeat — could narrow to the hundreds, perhaps even dozens, of votes. Door knocking to rouse a candidate’s supporters to the polls will be crucial in deciding the outcome.
‘Brokering’ federal, state money
Sainz also continues to be nagged by questions about the agency he heads, the Camden Connection, which has state and federal contracts to operate social services for needy children and families.
His salary has increased from $57,398 in 2019 to $87,967 out of grants and contributions totaling $517,123 in 2022, according to the group’s most recent 990 filing to the IRS.
While the group’s IRS submissions describe him as the organization’s chief executive officer, he told The Current that he is the organization’s “managing principal.”
Despite his record as a “small government champion” and zealous tax-cutter, Sainz said there’s no contradiction in running an organization that relies on state and federal funding to operate and pay his salary.
He spoke proudly of the group’s role in brokering federal and state funding for southeastern Georgia communities.
“We specialize in navigating complex federal contracts and private contracts for smaller cities and municipalities that might not have an expertise in that. I’m getting competitive funds that otherwise not might not be allocated to Southeast Georgia to these entities. So, we play a kind of consulting role —a brokerage role — in that relationship.”
‘Atlanta liberal’
Ahead of Tuesday’s primary runoff, the Sainz campaign has spent nearly $144,000. His supporters, meanwhile, are casting the 67-year-old Cook, a resident of the Glynn County portion of District 180, as an Atlanta-oriented outsider to Camden County.
They’ve also deployed what could be the strongest rhetorical weapon in the conservative Republican arsenal: They’ve accused him of being a “liberal.”
Mailers distributed by the Columbia, Maryland-based American Federation for Children Action Fund in recent days show a photo of Cook side-by-side with the image of former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. The flyer says: “Just Like Other Atlanta Liberals, Glenn Cook Won’t Fight to Secure Our Borders” and “Stop Cook’s Liberal Agenda on June 18th.”
“Weak on Trump. Weak on the border. A risk we can’t take,” warns another anonymous mailer disseminated in the district that targets Cook.
Another, paid for by Advancing Conservative Values, Inc., accuses Cook of bringing his “Atlanta values” to Camden and Glynn.
The messaging doesn’t conform with Cook’s public statements. Previously, the candidate has been quoted saying that a state lawmaker has very little input on immigration, which is largely a federal matter, not a state one. That factual statement is a far cry from saying he’s “weak” on the border.
At a candidate forum in Kingsland last week, Cook deplored the campaign’s “nasty” turn. Chuckling, he said that it was “kind of amazing” to be depicted as a liberal and “friend” of Stacey Abrams, when he views himself as a “Reagan Republican.”
He told The Current he has never met Abrams or had any form of communication with her.
“I’m a constitutionalist. I share his [Reagan’s] stance on finances, a small government, strong military, religious and individual freedoms,” he told The Current last week. “People should be able to make up their own mind without a lot of interference from the government.”
For Sainz, the success of the negative campaigning by outside interest groups will be determined on Tuesday by the number of voters he mobilizes to the polls on Tuesday. Meanwhile, it allows him to take the high road and distance himself from the negative campaigning.
The campaign isn’t about me or Cook or alleged smears by outside groups, he said. It’s about the “folks of District 180.”