Rick Jackson leaves Trump out of his general election pitch to voters
CLEVELAND — Republican Rick Jackson rarely missed a chance to remind primary voters that he would be Donald Trump’s “favorite governor,” saying he’d be just like the president but with a “Southern tone.”
So it was striking that the billionaire healthcare executive opened his first rally of the general election Thursday with a 19-minute speech that did not mention Trump’s name.
Speaking at a sauna-like event hall in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Jackson focused instead on affordability, tax cuts and drawing a contrast with Democratic nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms, whom he portrayed as a failed Atlanta mayor who abandoned the city when it was in crisis.
“I have, because of my background, severe abandonment issues,” Jackson said, invoking his turbulent upbringing in Georgia’s foster care system. “And let me tell you one thing: I will never abandon you.”
It wasn’t as if Jackson lacked an opening to invoke Trump. The event came just hours before the president was set to deliver a primetime White House address that revived his false claims that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
Jackson appealed for Republican unity, nodding to the divisions that still linger from the bruising primary. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, whom Jackson defeated in the runoff, pointedly declined this week to endorse him or even say whether he would vote for him.
The rally, which attracted hundreds of supporters, offered an early glimpse of Jackson’s strategy in a tossup race for governor: mobilize Trump loyalists without making the president the center of his campaign while reaching for the swing voters who could decide it.
Senior Republicans increasingly see Jackson as the party’s best chance of winning one of Georgia’s marquee races. Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff leads Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins in polls and holds an enormous fundraising advantage with $42 million in the bank.
Collins’ campaign has been mired in recent revelations that his son-in-law has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories and shared Nazi imagery. Collins said through an aide that he “has always condemned all forms of antisemitism, including this, and always will regardless of the source.”
Jackson, who spent more than $108 million of his own fortune to win the Republican nomination, has shown little interest in running as one half of a GOP tandem ticket with Collins, even as Bottoms and Ossoff increasingly stump together across Georgia.
Nor is Jackson running away from Trump. The president backed Jones in the Republican primary but quickly congratulated Jackson after his upset victory. Jackson’s path still depends on mobilizing MAGA loyalists, and he has little incentive to antagonize the president.
But Jackson is not embracing Trump as tightly as Collins, who has built his political identity around being one of the president’s fiercest allies and recently repeated the false claim that Trump “won Georgia” in 2020.
Instead, Jackson is taking another page from his primary playbook by connecting with voters through his biography. He described his own upbringing in the foster care system and outlined an agenda focused mostly on broad-based issues.
He pledged to raise literacy levels, limit property tax spikes, audit government to slash wasteful spending, bring more accessible healthcare options to rural Georgia and turbocharge the state’s job recruitment strategy.
“I’ll make a prediction to you,” he said. “I’ll create more jobs than has ever been done in the history of Georgia because I’ve been doing that my entire life.”
A 2020 redux
Trump’s renewed fixation on the 2020 election could complicate that approach. The issue remains of singular importance to the president, but it distracts from the economic message Jackson wants to make central to his campaign.
Jackson has said “what happened in 2020 is just terrible,” and that it’s “really easy to believe that, for the last 40 years, Fulton County has been cheating on voting.”
Shortly after launching his campaign, Jackson also aired an ad comparing Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to a modern-day Judas for refusing to help Trump overturn his 2020 defeat.
That messaging helped Jackson establish MAGA credentials in a primary electorate that views loyalty to the president as a litmus test. It also gave Trump less reason to target him during the nomination contest.
But Jackson is now speaking to a different electorate. Swing voters and independents weary of the fight over 2020 could decide the governor’s race, giving him every reason to shift the focus to Bottoms.
Bottoms is trying to deny him that room. During a fundraising swing through the Northeast, she argued that Trump’s message could reverberate beyond his 2020 defeat.
Bottoms’ allies were in Cleveland, too, casting Jackson as a Trump loyalist despite his general election pitch. Caitlyn Gegen, a Democratic congressional candidate in the district, said Republicans like Jackson are “prioritizing their pocketbooks over we the people.”
“We need representatives who are going to fight for us, not their bank accounts. We need representatives who are not going to capitulate to MAGA conspiracies,” she said. “Rick Jackson is supporting Trump’s election denials, but we need a representative who is going to uphold our Georgian values.”