It’s been a month since billionaire Rick Jackson unexpectedly entered the Republican primary for governor in Georgia.
He’s quickly shaken things up.
Jackson, a health care executive, is pumping millions of dollars of his own money into an already crowded race and aggressively courting supporters of Donald Trump — even though the president has backed a different candidate.
Prior to Jackson’s late entrance, the May 19 primary had seemed to be shaping up as a three-way race among Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is the Trump-endorsed front-runner, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and state Attorney General Chris Carr.
But after launching his campaign in early February with a pledge to spend at least $50 million, Jackson has vastly outspent his opponents on the airwaves and has rapidly seen dividends in some early public polling. He’s even leading in some of them, though most of those surveys also show a plurality of voters undecided.
It’s all scrambled the contest to succeed term-limited Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in the battleground state into a slugfest for MAGA voters as Jackson attempts to paint himself in the mold of Trump against a field of better-known rivals and maintain his early jolt of momentum.
“You can’t get into the race promising to spend $50 million and not see a significant impact, which is exactly what has happened,” said Katie Frost, an Atlanta-based Republican political strategist not currently working with any of the campaigns. “This effort means he thought there was an opening.”
Another X-factor in the race is that the primary would head to a runoff between the top two vote-getters if no one gets 50% of the vote — an outcome that is likelier now that it’s a four-way race.
Since Jackson’s Feb. 3 campaign announcement, he has spent nearly $16 million on ads, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact — almost six times as much as Jones and nearly twice the amount of the next closest spender in the race. An outside group called Georgians for Integrity, which has spent nearly $9 million over the same time span, has been running attack ads targeting only Jones for month.
During that period, Jones’ campaign has spent $2.7 million on ads, according to AdImpact, with a Jones-aligned outside group spending another $900,000. The Raffensperger campaign spent $12,000 on ads over the same time period, while Carr’s campaign dropped only $1,500.
Jackson’s ads have mostly leaned into introducing himself to voters, while also making overt comparisons between himself and Trump.
The spots with the most money behind them mostly feature him talking about his experience in his youth in the foster care system, after having fled abusive parents before becoming a business owner. He so draws on Trump’s background as a political outsider and businessman, while also taking a veiled jab at the experienced statewide officials he’s running against.
“Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything, and like you, I’m sick of career politicians,” Jackson says in one TV ad. In another, Jackson casts himself as “the straight-talking, Trump-supporting self-made outsider” who “tells it like it is.”
Another ad — part of a much smaller buy — rips into Raffensperger, who as Georgia’s secretary of state rejected Trump’s plea to overturn the 2020 election results after Joe Biden won, accuses him of having “turned on his own kind” and invokes the word “Judas.”
Unlike Jackson’s other ads, which ran almost entirely in Georgia markets, this spot also ran in media markets in Washington, D.C., and West Palm Beach, Florida, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home is located.
It’s part of a broader strategy, GOP operatives said, to flatter Trump while also not crossing him by going after his preferred candidate in Jones. At his campaign launch event, Jackson even descended to the stage in a glass elevator, drawing comparisons to Trump’s escalator entrance to announce his 2016 presidential bid.
“He clearly is trying to get the attention of the Trump administration and the president himself,” Frost said.
In an interview, Carr said Jackson’s entrance was more of an issue for Jones than him.
