What told the story of Tuesday night’s election results? Try Facebook.
Around 10:30 p.m., as it had become clear David Perdue was going to pull a mild upset over U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston in the GOP’s runoff for the Senate, a friend and active Republican threw up her virtual hands.
“Just don’t understand who is voting for him,” she wrote. “Clearly I need better friends on my FB (Facebook) feed.” Another GOP activist echoed the sentiment.
Within the hour, at Perdue’s victory party in Buckhead, I heard a similar refrain in the form of gripes from two of his supporters. They had tired of seeing the vast majority of the state’s GOP establishment repeating #IBackJack on social media. The proverbial silent majority, they maintained, had spoken up for Perdue.
This isn’t to deny the power of social media — though, clearly, the fact Kingston’s campaign page on Facebook had seven times as many “likes” as Perdue’s didn’t translate into victory. Nor is it to suggest there’s a lingering, Mississippi-esque divide between the winning and losing sides: Kingston and prominent allies of his have already thrown their support behind their party’s nominee.
But there is a message here for Georgia’s GOP establishment, if they’ll pause long enough to ponder it before going full-tilt against the Democratic ticket headlined by Michelle Nunn and Jason Carter.
Perdue’s appeal to voters included not just an attack on Washington, but an acknowledgment Republicans had played a key role of their own in making a national mess. Often, he was running against his own party.
Maybe that’s hard to avoid when you’re branding yourself the “outsider” against a host of career politicians who have spent decades in office. But Perdue didn’t back away from it while addressing the press after clinching the nomination Tuesday night:
“I think our role is to talk about the potential solutions,” he said of the plan as he pivots to the general election, “and the principles the Republican Party has always stood for, but maybe hasn’t lived up to the last decade.”
Get outside the establishment bubble, and you find a lot of reliable Republican voters who are looking for both elements of that statement: solutions, and a return to the party’s principles of free enterprise, fiscal responsibility and limited government.
They just don’t necessarily trust the party establishment, or its preferred candidates, to deliver on either one.
Should he prevail against Nunn, Perdue will have to record some progress toward principled solutions. You can only run and win as an “outsider” once.
And it’s worth remembering Perdue is running for federal office, and the problems in Washington differ from those considered under the Gold Dome.
But there are problems here nonetheless. And just as in Washington, there are also conservative solutions that in many cases, to borrow a line from G.K. Chesterton, have not been tried and found wanting, but rather have been found difficult and not tried.
