For Trump, Derek Dooley’s original sin was telling the truth about 2020

Looking back, it was always going to be this way. Early Sunday morning, Derek Dooley failed to get the one thing a first-time candidate really needs to get ahead in Republican politics these days, the endorsement of President Donald Trump.

At 12:56 a.m., Trump posted the note to Truth Social that U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, Dooley’s rival for the GOP nomination for Senate, had been waiting for and that Dooley’s team had hoped would never come.

“It is my great honor to endorse MAGA Mike Collins, a highly respected congressman who has been with me since the beginning,” Trump wrote.

The lengthy, wee-hours note said that Collins had been endorsed by many “MAGA patriots,” while also attacking U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff as a “Dumocrat,” who “doesn’t have what it takes.”

But a key point toward the end went to the heart of the matter. Trump wrote that Dooley “didn’t vote in 2020 or 2016 and said I lost Georgia in 2020 when the facts have proven I actually won by a lot!”

It’s true that Dooley didn’t vote in 2016 or 2020. In fact, he didn’t vote for two decades before the 2024 elections. He has said that a political awakening during COVID roused him to become more active and engaged in the political process.

From the beginning, Dooley’s lengthy record of not voting threatened to be disqualifying for some Georgians. After all, how does a person go from not bothering to vote to suddenly wanting to be in the Senate? It’s a question he’s answered many times on the campaign trail, usually leaving voters satisfied.

But for Trump, not voting in 2016 or 2020 meant that Dooley hadn’t voted for him. In a fair-is-fair world, maybe it’s too much to ask anyone like Trump to endorse Dooley if Dooley didn’t even go to the polls the first two times he could have supported the president.

But it was the president’s last point, that Dooley acknowledged Trump lost Georgia in 2020 that was Dooley’s original sin. Although the facts are that Joe Biden won the state, any Republican who wants to be endorsed by Trump has to act like he didn’t. Full stop. Months ago, Way back in February, Derek Dooley did the opposite.

It was at a private event in McRae-Helena in South Georgia and something Dooley said, almost as an aside, in the course of answering attendees’ questions about Trump and the 2020 election.

“If you guys remember, this was a time where it was a tough time in Georgia politics, back in 2020, 2022, the president lost Georgia,” Dooley said. “He got a little upset with Gov. Kemp, and it’s a little bit why we’re in this mess we’re in right now.”

It’s also a little bit why Dooley is in this mess right now, heading into the Tuesday GOP runoff for Senate without the president’s endorsement for the simple act of saying Trump lost in 2020, which he did. Collins, on the other hand, has repeatedly said the election was “rigged.”

When the Washington Examiner reported Dooley’s remarks in February, his campaign spokesperson quickly added that Dooley also thinks the 2020 election was “rife with irregularities.” Dooley said that Georgians deserve to trust their election results, and that Kemp, his friend and main supporter, has since signed Republican-passed laws to make elections even more secure.

But it really didn’t matter what else Dooley said after that day in February. It also didn’t matter that he has never said a word against the president for the entire campaign. It didn’t matter that Dooley has traveled the state for months meeting voters and building support. And it didn’t matter that Kemp has supported Dooley from the beginning.

It also didn’t matter that Collins is in the middle of a Congressional ethics investigation for misuse of taxpayer funds or that he had to finally fire his campaign manager for his most recent offense, making fun of an alleged rape victim.

It didn’t matter that Ossoff would surely rather run against Collins than Dooley, for all of the reasons listed above. And it didn’t matter that the president’s endorsement came just two days before the runoff, and thus too late for Collins to use it strategically during early voting, which is already over.

The president’s refusal to acknowledge that he lost in 2020, along with his instinct to punish Republicans who say the opposite, is also the reason that a parade of Trump appointees have recently refused to answer Democratic senators during their nomination hearings when they ask, “Who won the 2020 election?”