Drew Ferguson’s Republican primary challenger once sought a job on the West Point congressman’s staff and doubled down on his bid to run for U.S. House shortly after being turned town for a position.
Philip Singleton met with Ferguson to discuss a potential job opportunity in his office in July 2017, roughly a month after the veteran and political neophyte filed papers with the Federal Election Commission to raise money as a GOP candidate in Georgia’s 3rd Congressional District. After the freshman lawmaker later told him there were no positions available in his office, Singleton indicated he would move forward with his primary challenge, according to text messages obtained by the AJC.
“I was hoping to be able to affect change from within the system, but understand your position,” Singleton told Ferguson in a July 12 text. “We will move forward with our campaign and look forward to lively and honest debate about the way forward for our Nation as we strive to serve the great American’s (sic) of the 3rd district.”
Singleton said he met with Ferguson on July 7 after a mutual contact said the congressman wanted to talk with him. He said he went into the meeting expecting Ferguson to try and convince him to run in the neighboring 2nd Congressional District instead of challenging him directly.
Ferguson spent much of the meeting trying to dissuade him from running, according to Singleton. He said he expressed his openness “to serving in any capacity,” including on staff, “where God could use me to impact positive policy change.”
“I left that meeting open to the idea of working with the congressman instead of running against him to fill the major gaps, with the impression that he was open to addressing the issues I had pointed out (in his platform, including health care and the Syrian civil war), and that he wanted to bring me on to strengthen his team,” Singleton said in a statement to the AJC.
So Singleton said he felt duped when Ferguson texted a few days later saying he didn’t have the money in his budget to hire him and that the best he could do was offer an unpaid advisory role.
“This text, as well as the tone of the conversation confirmed to me that he was not interested in perpetuating conservative ideals or addressing the issues I had brought to him, but rather seemed only concerned in preventing me from opposing him in the primary and that the job offer was a ploy,” Singleton said of Ferguson.
The Ferguson campaign indicated that Singleton was the one who requested a meeting through the mutual contact, not the other way around.
“He thought Drew was a hell of a Congressman when he was asking for a job but I guess he changed his mind,” campaign spokesman Dan McLagan said of Singleton.
A former Army officer who served two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, Singleton moved with his wife and four children from South Korea to run for Congress. He’s vowing an “issues-based approach” to politics and is pushing for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, decentralizing the education system and the “safe, legal and moral integration of immigrants into our culture.”
Ferguson, meanwhile, is currently wrapping up his first term in Congress with nearly $210,000 in the bank. The former dentist has aligned himself with party leaders and is angling for a plum position on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.
Beyond Ferguson and Singleton, two Democrats are also running to represent the 3rd District, which stretches from Peachtree City in the northeast to the suburbs of Columbus in the southwest.
