Carr tries to break through in Georgia governor’s race

Chris Carr believes he’s the kind of Republican who can win the governor’s race in Georgia in November. 

“One of my opponents, I’ll just tell you, can’t win the primary, and the other can’t win the general election,” Carr, the state’s attorney general, told an audience of some three dozen people in a frigid St. Simons on Saturday.

The 53-year-old Carr was referring, of course, to his main rivals for the nomination to represent the GOP in the general election in November, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. 

Three months ahead of the party primaries on May 19, the state’s top law enforcement official sought to distinguish himself from Jones and Raffensperger, casting himself as a principled Republican who isn’t a captive of the culture wars and is, at the same time, tough on crime and corruption.

Carr knows that gaining recognition in a crowded field — let alone clearing the 50% threshold needed to avoid a primary — is a daunting challenge and that the race for the Republican nomination is likely to go to a runoff in June.

“And I’m going to be in it,” he told an audience at the Uptown Tap and Cigar that included Brunswick Mayor Cosby Johnson, Glynn County Manager Bill Fallon, and local business leaders. With some well-known golf courses close by, he couldn’t resist an obvious metaphor to describe his strategy:

“I call this operation ‘two putt’ — to be in the runoff and win the runoff.”  

‘Public corruption’

Touting his crime-fighting credentials and his nearly decade-long tenure as attorney general, Carr cited his office’s creation of special units to combat human trafficking, gangs, corruption, and organized retail theft — all firsts, he said, in the state’s history. 

Efforts to curb retail theft, he said, reinforce Georgia’s reputation as the “best state to do business.”

“You got people stealing from retail or selling online. You got scams, and you now got cargo theft. Well, here we are. We got the greatest port in the world in our backyard in Brunswick and Savannah. We’re back to cargo theft, we’re robbing trains and trucks,” he said. 

Curbing public corruption and restoring public trust in government are also crucial for the state, he said.

“Public service should not be a business opportunity for anyone. It is an honor to be in public service,” Carr said. “It is a great privilege, and we have to make sure that this state is number one as it relates to those doing it the right way.” 

Asked by Camden County Commissioner for District 3, Cody Smith, if he would be willing to deploy his office’s anticorruption unit to investigate allegations of mismanagement of funds by Brunswick Judicial Circuit District Attorney Keith Higgins following a complaint filed with the Prosecuting Attorneys Qualification Commission (PAQC), but apparently shelved, Carr demurred.

“I will say that this is the reason I’ve called, not [for] this particular case, but for issues like — this is why I’ve called for the state to have a public corruption unit,” he said. 

Carr went on to say that he wants to give organizations such as the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the state attorney general’s office more authority and resources to address allegations of impropriety in public office. The current process, he acknowledged, is disjointed, in part because a district attorney’s status in the state’s judicial system means they are treated just like judges. 

“If I am presented with facts and evidence of a criminal act. No matter who the elected official is, I’ll do everything I can right now, and I would like more authority for the AG, going forward,” he said. 

‘A great privilege’

While Carr’s focus on retail theft was welcomed by many in his audience, the extent of the problem in Georgia isn’t clear. 

The section of the attorney general office’s website on organized retail theft cites statistics from the Retail Industry Lenders Association, a retail-industry lobbying organization, which relied on proprietary data from some of the largest retailers in the country. That organization estimates that $68.9 billion worth of products were stolen from retailers in 2019. 

However, a study by the Council on Criminal Justice (COCJ), which publicly details its methodology, estimates total retail theft losses at approximately $129.2 million in 2019. 

According to COCJ, in 2019, the median value of stolen goods nationally was $74. Additionally, 90% of stolen goods were valued at $572 or less; in 10% of shoplifting incidents, the value exceeded $572.

The attorney general’s website also claims that, in Georgia alone, businesses lose more than $3 billion annually to retail theft, though it is unclear how this figure was calculated. The Georgia Retailers website estimates that organized retail crime costs retailers an average of $719,548 per $1 billion in annual sales –– approximately 0.072%.

Affordability, not social and cultural issues

Carr said he believes Georgia is the model for the nation when it comes to jobs. He suggested most people in the audience initially came to the coast for a job, like his father with his van-conversion business. 

“We moved down here because Georgia was that shining city on the hill,” Carr said of his family’s decision to move to Georgia from Michigan in 1978. Carr was quick to say, however, that the “city on the hill” faces challenges, starting with what has become a top Democratic Party mantra: affordability.

A poll of likely Republican Party primary voters conducted in late October by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed Carr trailing the Trump endorsed-Jones by 15% and Raffensperger by 8%, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1%. Some 55% of those surveyed were undecided. Carr believes he can win over those undecided. 

“We’re talking about issues that are important to people in this state and in our country. Affordability is one of them. You know what the number one thing that you can do to help with the affordability issue is to make sure somebody has a job,” he said, insisting that political fence-sitters care more about jobs, safety, affordability, and education than social and cultural issues. 

“Things are real unaffordable if you don’t have a job that you can provide for yourself and for your family, but that’s what this state has done,” he said, “We’ve got to have the lowest tax base of any state in the nation, and we’ve got to make sure that we focus on education and that we focus on literacy, and we got to keep people safe.” 

As practical avenues to support improved education, Carr suggested a greater focus on artificial intelligence tools and technical school options, starting with artificial intelligence — or AI:

“Here’s the deal. AI is here, we can lead, or we can get run over. I was reading this article the other day from a CEO of an AI company that said, Look, you’re not likely, over time, to lose your job to AI. You’re gonna lose your job to someone that knows how to use AI better than you.”