Republicans look beyond Georgia for campaign cash
ATLANTA — Roy Briley doesn’t typically dip into his bank account to back campaigns outside of his home in Alaska, but this year the real estate entrepreneur set aside $20,000 to give to candidates he learned about in conservative media.
One of his first contributions was to Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Herschel Walker of Georgia.
“This country is a tinderbox right now,” he said from Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, “and we have the potential to win honorably this next cycle.”
A few years ago, Georgia Republicans wouldn’t have been so eager to boast about a network of donors such as Briley who live outside the state lines. But last week, Walker’s campaign proudly announced it amassed contributions from nearly 50,000 donors who live in all 50 states.
The plethora of out-of-state donors, revealed in recent campaign disclosures, underscores a new political landscape for Georgia Republicans after defeats in the November presidential election and January’s U.S. Senate runoffs.
Over much of the past decade, Georgia Republicans slammed Democrats for mining “outsiders” for political contributions. Now, building a nationwide donor network is a cornerstone of the GOP strategy to oust U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock and other vulnerable Democrats in 2022.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution review of thousands of donor records between July and September shows the extent of the trend.
Walker, a former football star running for office with former President Donald Trump’s blessing, raised more than half of his itemized donations — generally, contributions of more than $200 — from outside of Georgia since he moved here from Texas in August and entered the race.
He’s no anomaly among Senate Republican hopefuls in Georgia, though, according to the review. Roughly $1 in every $5 that former Navy SEAL Latham Saddler raised over the threemonth period came from donors who live outside Georgia, along with one-third of the contributions to military veteran Kelvin King.
Only Georgia Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, who lagged behind both Saddler and Walker in the most recent report, had a more traditional fundraising quarter. All but a tiny fraction of his donations came from Georgians.
With Democrats ascendant, veteran strategists say, Republicans feel that to be competitive in 2022, they can’t afford to be picky about the whereabouts of their donors.
“When you’re in a gun fight, you don’t care where your ammo was manufactured, only that it works,” said John Watson, the former chairman of the Georgia GOP. “Same, increasingly, goes for campaigns on both sides of the aisle.”
‘MONEY, MONEY, MONEY’
Keeping pace with Warnock might take that kind of expansive approach.
Warnock raised about $100,000 each day over the past three months to amass more than $9 million in donations over that span, a haul that set records in Georgia at this stage in an election cycle and made him the top Democratic fundraiser aside from congressional leaders.
Roughly 85% of his donations came from outside the state, and his campaign said the average contribution from the roughly 145,000 donors was $37. Still, Warnock also collected more than $1.3 million from Georgians, including roughly half that in itemized contributions. His campaign said he’s amassed more money from Georgia donors than any statewide campaign in state history at this stage in the race.
The Democrat is effectively picking up where he left off after the last election, when he and Jon Ossoff scored victories in the most expensive Senate races in the nation’s history.
Warnock’s campaign alone raised roughly $150 million to oust GOP incumbent Kelly Loeffler in the January runoff, part of a Democratic sweep that flipped control of the chamber.
In that race, about 90% of the campaign contributions for both candidates came from outside the state, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And the amount of money washing over Georgia this early only signals the wave of spending ahead.
“Money, money, money is the honey, honey, honey, and nobody seems to care where the money comes from anymore,” said Rick Dent, a veteran Democratic strategist.
“The public can’t keep up with the sheer quantities that we are discussing these days,” Dent said, “and when the last two Senate races here spent $700 million, how can anyone expect the public to keep up?”
The Republicans looking to unseat Democratic U.S. Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux and Lucy McBath in Atlanta’s northern suburbs are also casting a wide net for donations.
Dr. Rich McCormick, who narrowly lost to Bourdeaux in 2020, raised roughly two-thirds of his cash from beyond Georgia. And the leading GOP contenders to challenge McBath collected about 15% of their contributions from donors who don’t live in the state.
That pales in comparison with U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose far-right views and history of support for the QAnon ideology have made her a pariah to many and a hero to others. Only about 8% of the itemized donations she’s received have come from Georgians.
‘VOTE THEIR HEART’
The spending underscores a dramatic shift in course for state GOP candidates.
In statewide races earlier this decade, for instance, Republican candidates for higher office raised the vast majority of their money in Georgia and blasted Democrats for taking out-ofstate cash, particularly from the “left coast.”
Then-Gov. Nathan Deal derided his Democratic opponent Jason Carter as a “limousine liberal” in 2014 after a fundraising cycle when he attracted 10% of his donations from California. And Brian Kemp pummeled Stacey Abrams as a radical liberal bankrolled by lefty fat cats from California and New York every chance he got.
But Republicans also saw how Abrams could mobilize a small-dollar army funded mostly by non-Georgians in a way that had never been done before in the state. And in the 2020 cycle, Republican candidates raced to level the playing field.
By this stage in the 2020 cycle, for instance, U.S. Sen David Perdue had collected about 45% of his itemized campaign donations from outside the state. An AJC analysis found that about t$20 million of the $27 million raised by the Georgia GOP ahead of the November 2020 vote came from beyond Georgia.
And during the January runoffs, Republicans launched a 50-state strategy to collect contributions from all corners of the country.
Now, the Georgia campaigns send multiple emails a week to a vast list of potential GOP donors across the nation reacting to the newest developments in Washington or the latest scourge in conservative media. Campaigns target Fox News watchers and Trump supporters in Iowa and Kansas with digital ads.
Walker has courted donors with pricey fundraisers, including one in Texas that was canceled after its organizer was revealed to feature a swastika as her social media profile picture. He’s set to join sports icons at Trump’s estate in Florida in December for a gala that will cost attendees at least $1,000.
Harold Brierley of Dallas was impressed enough by a conversation with Saddler that he decided immediately to write him a check. He said he came away with the impression that Saddler, a former Trump administration official, could work with Democrats.
“We need people willing to vote their heart and their conscience rather than just along party lines,” Brierley said. “We’ve got to start solving problems around this country.”
The courtship of donors such as Brierley might undercut Republican arguments that non-Georgians are trying to influence the state’s elections. But Dent suggested that GOP candidates will be willing to live with those consequences.
“As long as Georgia has races of national importance, out-ofstate money will continue to flow in and it won’t matter to anyone,” Dent said. “Besides, what does one bad AJC story matter compared to what a candidate can say with $100 million of out-of-state money?”
“When you’re in a gun fight, you don’t care where your ammo was manufactured, only that it works. Same, increasingly, goes for campaigns on both sides of the aisle.”
– JOHN WATSON, FORMER CHAIRMAN OF THE GEORGIA GOP