In the marathon that is a political campaign, Buddy Carter is going through an especially difficult stretch.
Last week, Gov. Brian Kemp told Carter that he would not support him in next spring’s Republican primary to decide who will face Democrat Jon Ossoff in the U.S. Senate race.
Instead, Kemp explained to Coastal Georgia’s congressman, as well as Insurance Commissioner John King, that he was throwing his weight behind Derek Dooley, a Kemp family friend and former football coach at the University of Tennessee as well as the son of legendary University of Georgia football coach Vince Dooley.
Within hours of his conversation with Kemp, King dropped out of the race, leaving Carter and Reagan Box, a horse trainer from northwest Georgia as the only two declared candidates in the race.
It did not stay that way for long.
As expected, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins of Jackson, who also was told by Kemp that he was supporting Dooley for the GOP nomination, announced his entry into the race on Monday. Dooley, who has never run for political office, is expected to join the field soon.
Kemp’s decision to back Dooley, a family friend, rankled Carter, who said he would stay the course.
“Politicians don’t elect our Senators — the people of Georgia do,” he said.
Name recognition
Carter’s Senate bid was facing daunting obstacles even before Kemp decided to play kingmaker instead of awaiting the outcome of the GOP primary in May.
Branding himself a “MAGA warrior,” the 67-year-old lawmaker from St. Simons plunged into the Senate race just three days after Kemp announced in May he was passing on a Senate run.
He quickly spent more than $2 million on an ad campaign in the Atlanta area to boost his name recognition, crucial for a Coastal Georgia politician seeking statewide office. He amassed a campaign war chest that by the end of June totaled $4.1 million.
Nevertheless, his declarations of loyalty to President Trump and his campaign war chest, which includes $2 million of his own money, have not scared others out of the race or deterred party leaders and large donors from seeking out other candidates.
It also has not generated a groundswell of support or gained traction among grassroots Republicans.
Last month, Carter’s campaign touted an internal poll of 970 likely Republican primary election voters showing him with a nine-point lead over a hypothetical field that included Collins, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and King.
Other polls, however, did not echo those findings, including one that showed him lagging behind Raffensperger, Collins, and Kelly Loeffler in a head-to-head race with Ossoff.
And thanks mostly to Collins’ sponsorship of the Laken Riley Act, a law that requires federal officials to detain any migrant arrested or charged with crimes like shoplifting or assaulting a police officer or crimes that injure or kill someone, it was he, not Carter, who won the cheers of grassroots Republicans at the state party’s recent annual convention in Dalton.
Trying to get traction
The inability so far of Carter’s campaign to generate momentum for his candidacy is not for lack of trying.
In the fierce competition for Trump’s blessing — and hopefully his endorsement — Carter has echoed some of the president’s most cherished conceits and causes.
He continues to champion his “Red, White and Blueland Act,” a bill that supports Trump’s call for the acquisition of Greenland. Since he announced his Senate run, he has bashed “liberal elites” in California, urged an investigation into Joe Biden’s use of the autopen during his presidency, and nominated the president for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Yet even as Carter has sought to win over Trump, news reports that Trump and Kemp were in discussions about which Republican would be best placed to defeat Ossoff in the general election have continued — a sign that they and other Republican leaders did not think Carter could do so.
Now, with Kemp’s move to support Dooley, those discussions between Trump and Kemp may be over, dashing hopes among Republicans that the governor and Trump could unite behind a single candidate in next year’s Senate race.
White House officials, reportedly angry that Kemp himself passed on the race, are crying foul.
“We had a deal to work together,” Fox News quoted a “top political source in the Trump orbit” as saying Friday. “Kemp went out on his own – which has frustrated and pissed off” close allies of the president.
Proxy wars?
Kemp’s decision to support Dooley adds to the challenges facing Carter’s Senate bid.
He now faces a battle with Collins for the MAGA vote, while the more moderate Dooley, backed by a popular governor, looks on.
His bid for the Republican nomination now shapes up as a contest pitting the Kemp-backed, more moderate Dooley against he and Collins, two self-proclaimed “MAGA warriors.”
That, in turn, threatens to ignite what Kemp was said to be keen to avoid: a bitter, expensive primary battle that deepens divisions within the party and exhausts it ahead of the general election race against Ossoff.
Already, party activists are accusing Kemp of instigating a two-front proxy war — one between the governor and Trump and the other for the future of the Georgia GOP, a fight that pits the party’s MAGA wing and its more center-right establishment wing.
On Saturday, far-right GOP activist Kylie Jane Kremer predicted an “all-out bloodbath” between the governor and Trump over the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate.
“Kemp couldn’t care less about winning the Senate. He’s out to cripple Trump, undercut MAGA, and block [Vice President] JD [Vance] from 2028,” wrote Kremer who, with her mother, Amy, helped organize the January 6, 2021, “stop-the-steal” rally in Washington that culminated with the siege of the U.S. Capitol.
Dooley is a “RINO puppet Kemp can control” ahead of his own run for the presidency, she wrote on X.
Run for reelection?
If Carter, like King, decides to drop out of the race, his career in elected office, which began on Pooler’s planning and zoning commission in 1989, would not necessarily be over when his current term ends in January 2027.
If he decided to drop out of the Senate race, he would be the odds-on-favorite to win the party primary and ease into a seventh, two-year term in the House of Representatives if he opted to run again for the 1st District House seat. He won reelection last year by 24% of the vote.
Carter has until the first week of March to decide. The four-day filing period for candidates starts March 2.