Just days before launching a pointed attack against President Trump at a Virginia political confab, the political machine of Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp suffered a crippling blow after failing to remove pro-Trump conservative firebrand CJ Pearson, who is currently running in a special election for Georgia House of Representatives set for Tuesday, from the ballot.
It’s a political necessity that superpacs should inspire confidence in allies and fear in opponents not giggles among everyone.
Unfortunately for Georgia’s Governor Kemp, his superpac team are in danger of becoming fodder for guffaws and belly laughs.
The Georgians First Leadership Committee PAC – a “leadership pac” Kemp and his allies made legal to funnel unlimited sums of money to meddle in state elections — launched a series of attacks against Trump conservative CJ Pearson in a State House race.
When asked for comment, the Pearson campaign responded by saying he was “focused on his America First campaign and representing those in his community, not Real Housewives of Atlanta type political drama”
Such races are usually relatively sleepy affairs but this one was different. CJ is a 21-year-old African American who is mixing visits with Republican women’s clubs with appeals to black churchgoers in an attempt to form a bigger coalition than has been the norm for Republicans.
His sin, in the eyes of the Kemp crowd? His longtime support of President Trump since he was just 13 years old, when he wrote an article for TIME Magazine titled “I’m a young black man and I support Donald Trump” and his work on the frontlines of the election integrity movement.
Enter Georgians First. They have based their assault on the clearly inaccurate allegation that CJ does not reside in his district — where he went to school from the age of 4, where he graduated from the local high school and where he helps take care of the grandparents who raised him.
This was clearly false but the attack itself was also botched through a premature launch and hubris. They left time to rebut the residency challenge in front of a Judge who ruled swiftly and unequivocally that CJ was, of course, a resident and threw the Kemp challenge out. Kemp’s dimwitted PAC consultants also couldn’t help but admit that were behind the attack confirming it to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Cody Hall, one of these consultants, can hardly contain his hatred for Trump Republicans. He worked for Ron DiSantis’ disaster of a campaign as well as Never Trumper Larry Hogan and, of course, Kemp. Now his lie has been proven a lie, residents of the Augusta-area community are mad, and they know exactly who to be mad at.
The Governor’s pac handled this about as well as Joe Biden handles stairs. Now, days before the election, everyone in Columbia and McDuffie Counties knows not to believe a word this group says.
The polling available in this race shows Pearson well ahead but, whoever wins, the damage to the credibility of Governor Kemp’s PAC and the credibility of the Governor himself has been severely tarnished.
If Kemp’s candidate — a septuagenarian moderate who has used previous elected office to try and zone competitors of his car washes out of business — wins, the PACs reputation is still in tatters. If Pearson is victorious, Kemp will have lost both his credibility and the image of power his PAC needs to be effective.
