In many ways, the invitation to what was billed at a “campaign kick-off reception” last week at a private home alongside the Vernon River in south Savannah said all you needed to know.
Listed as honorary campaign chairs at the top of the invitation were former U.S. Sen. Mack Mattingly, former state lawmaker Eric Johnson, and state Sen. Ben Watson and his wife, Bernice. Farther down were Camden County businessman and 2020 Trump elector CB Yadav and multimedia publisher Charles Hill Morris, Jr.
In short, the invitation offered a who’s who of old-guard Coastal Georgia Republicans, all gathered to raise money for Jim Kingston, the 34-year-old son of one of the region’s most eminent politicians of the past half-century, Jack Kingston.
With Coastal Georgia Congressman Buddy Carter opting for a U.S. Senate run next year and longtime local GOP state lawmakers such as Watson, Ron Stephens and state Rep. Jesse Petrea choosing to stay in their posts, the younger Kingston has entered the fray to succeed Carter.
He and his supporters hope to parlay his name — if not his experience — into the same seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that his father held for 22 years.
Although Jim Kingston has never run for elected office or held one, the Kingston magic appears to be working, at least among the network of contacts amassed by his father during his long political career.
The roughly $657,000 raised from the invitees is part of the whopping $750,000 in campaign contributions that Kingston has raised, said his campaign consultant, Jason Hebert, who also serves as senior political strategist to U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.
‘Money don’t buy votes’
By trumpeting their huge fundraising haul, Kingston’s hopes to draw financial support away from his declared opponents, discourage others from entering the race, and create an air of inevitability about the outcome of next year’s Republican primary and the general election.
Kandiss Taylor, one of Kingston’s opponents for the Republican nomination who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 2022 and for governor two years later, made it clear she wouldn’t be driven from the race by Kingston’s bulging campaign coffers.
“Money don’t buy votes,” she said during a fundraiser at a private home on the shores of Moon River, a mile away from where Kingston’s and his supporters had gathered the previous evening.
Highlighting what is likely to become a theme in the primary campaign, Taylor, from Appling County, took aim at nepotism in politics and Jack Kingston’s post-congressional career as a Washington lobbyist for Squire Patton Boggs.
“We’re not going to have a seat that is a dynasty with a daddy’s last name,” she told The Current. “We’re going to have someone to go to D.C. to represent our interest, not foreign nations, because his daddy’s been doing lobbying for foreign nations. We’re not interested in any of that. The Kingston legacy is done in the 1st District.”
Like Taylor, Patrick Farrell, another candidate for the 1st District seat, shrugged off Kingston’s fundraising haul.
“I’ll run my campaign, get my message out there,” Farrell, a longtime Chatham County commissioner representing District 4, said Monday as he repaired a fence on his thousand-acre cattle ranch and farm in Jenkins County.
“I’m in it to win.”
Shallow footprint
To prevail in next spring’s Republican primary, Jim Kingston will have to convince GOP voters that casting a ballot for the Next Kingston is more than an act of political nostalgia.
At first glance, that appears to be a challenge, for while his father’s career is well-documented, the younger Kingston is somewhat a cipher and his footprint in Coastal Republican circles shallow, according to Republican leaders up and down the coast.
Born in 1990, he attended St. Andrew’s School, a prep school on Wilmington Island, according to the school’s website. After graduating in 2009, he attended the University of Georgia, where he majored in economics. After leaving Athens, he worked on his father’s unsuccessful 2014 U.S. Senate campaign.
Hebert, who is co-founder and president of The Political Firm, sent The Current a brief bio of the candidate that was short on details.
The document said Kingston is a “Senior Vice President for a Fortune 500 company,” but doesn’t specify which one. It also said that he “spent much of his adult life in politics helping conservative Republican candidates in Georgia as a volunteer and fundraiser,” but doesn’t name specific candidates.
In 2015 James Magazine published stories written by a Jim Kingston featuring notable Coastal Georgia Republicans, such as then House Majority Leader Jon Burns.
In 2017, Kingston formed a company called Tarboro Holdings LLC, listing his Atlanta home as its address, and dissolved it two years later., according to the Secretary of State’s website.
It’s unclear if Kingston has a LinkenIn profile page. An online search showed a connection to the John’s Creek insurance company Partners Risk Services, but a person who answered thephone said that Kingston he hadn’t worked there for “a long time.”