Republican David Perdue Wins Georgia Senate Race

The former CEO beat the Democrats’ best hope for a pickup.

Jon-Michael Sullivan/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


There weren’t many bright spots on the map for Democrats this year. But in Georgia, the party was hoping that Senate candidate Michelle Nunn might harness the state’s changing demographics for an upset against GOP nominee David Perdue.

The state’s growing black population, however, and a mammoth effort by Democrats to register these new voters, weren’t enough to boost Nunn to victory. And on Tuesday, Nunn appeared to lose to Perdue handily. This wasn’t a huge surprise: In recent weeks, Nunn’s support slipped among Georgia’s white voters. Nunn needed to win over about a third of them, in addition to drawing a record number of black voters, in order to have a realistic shot of winning the race.

Nunn would have been Democrats’ only pickup in the Senate in an otherwise bleak election. Perdue and Nunn were competing for the seat held by the retiring Chambliss.

Republicans and Democrats both ran huge, data-driven voter mobilization campaigns in Georgia in response to a small but steady shift in the state’s demographics. But local GOP officials may have given Republicans an edge by using dubious reasoning to purge the state’s existing voter rolls of untold numbers of black residents.

The New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan group with Democratic connections, collected applications to register more than 86,000 mostly young and minority residents. But in October, the group discovered that 40,000 of those potential voters never appeared on the voter rolls. New Georgia Project blamed the missing applications on Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp. But a judge declined to force Kemp to register the missing voters, meaning those voters would have to cast provisionary ballots.

Any Democrat still would have faced long odds in Georgia. Nunn had an edge thanks to resume. Nunn spent several years as CEO of Points of Light, a non-profit volunteer corps with roots in a service initiative started by President George H. W. Bush. And her father is a popular former senator, Sam Nunn.

Nunn’s chances looked best early on in the race, when she faced a Republican primary field of Todd Akins-in-waiting—including one candidate, Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey, who said that Akin was “partly right” about “legitimate rape.” Perdue, however, who won the GOP nomination in July, is a sober-seeming former CEO. He touted his work as a “job creator” and led in most polls against Nunn throughout the race.

But Perdue’s past as a business leader presented its own controversy. In early October, reports emerged that Perdue spent most of his career—as he put it—outsourcing. “Defend it? I’m proud of it,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, when questioned on his outsourcing record. Nunn’s campaign and EMILY’s List, a political group that supports female Democrats, spent millions of dollars airing several ads about Perdue’s record on women. The ads focused on the fact that Dollar General paid its female store managers less than male managers while Perdue was CEO.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate