It’s been a month since billionaire Rick Jackson unexpectedly entered the Republican primary for governor in Georgia.
He’s quickly shaken things up.
Jackson, a health care executive, is pumping millions of dollars of his own money into an already crowded race and aggressively courting supporters of Donald Trump — even though the president has backed a different candidate.
Prior to Jackson’s late entrance, the May 19 primary had seemed to be shaping up as a three-way race among Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is the Trump-endorsed front-runner, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and state Attorney General Chris Carr.
But after launching his campaign in early February with a pledge to spend at least $50 million, Jackson has vastly outspent his opponents on the airwaves and has rapidly seen dividends in some early public polling. He’s even leading in some of them, though most of those surveys also show a plurality of voters undecided.
It’s all scrambled the contest to succeed term-limited Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in the battleground state into a slugfest for MAGA voters as Jackson attempts to paint himself in the mold of Trump against a field of better-known rivals and maintain his early jolt of momentum.
“You can’t get into the race promising to spend $50 million and not see a significant impact, which is exactly what has happened,” said Katie Frost, an Atlanta-based Republican political strategist not currently working with any of the campaigns. “This effort means he thought there was an opening.”
Another X-factor in the race is that the primary would head to a runoff between the top two vote-getters if no one gets 50% of the vote — an outcome that is likelier now that it’s a four-way race.
Since Jackson’s Feb. 3 campaign announcement, he has spent nearly $16 million on ads, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact — almost six times as much as Jones and nearly twice the amount of the next closest spender in the race. An outside group called Georgians for Integrity, which has spent nearly $9 million over the same time span, has been running attack ads targeting only Jones for month.
During that period, Jones’ campaign has spent $2.7 million on ads, according to AdImpact, with a Jones-aligned outside group spending another $900,000. The Raffensperger campaign spent $12,000 on ads over the same time period, while Carr’s campaign dropped only $1,500.
Jackson’s ads have mostly leaned into introducing himself to voters, while also making overt comparisons between himself and Trump.
The spots with the most money behind them mostly feature him talking about his experience in his youth in the foster care system, after having fled abusive parents before becoming a business owner. He so draws on Trump’s background as a political outsider and businessman, while also taking a veiled jab at the experienced statewide officials he’s running against.
“Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything, and like you, I’m sick of career politicians,” Jackson says in one TV ad. In another, Jackson casts himself as “the straight-talking, Trump-supporting self-made outsider” who “tells it like it is.”
Another ad — part of a much smaller buy — rips into Raffensperger, who as Georgia’s secretary of state rejected Trump’s plea to overturn the 2020 election results after Joe Biden won, accuses him of having “turned on his own kind” and invokes the word “Judas.”
Unlike Jackson’s other ads, which ran almost entirely in Georgia markets, this spot also ran in media markets in Washington, D.C., and West Palm Beach, Florida, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home is located.
It’s part of a broader strategy, GOP operatives said, to flatter Trump while also not crossing him by going after his preferred candidate in Jones. At his campaign launch event, Jackson even descended to the stage in a glass elevator, drawing comparisons to Trump’s escalator entrance to announce his 2016 presidential bid.
“He clearly is trying to get the attention of the Trump administration and the president himself,” Frost said.
In an interview, Carr said Jackson’s entrance was more of an issue for Jones than him.
“It hasn’t changed things for me,” Carr said, “but it’s been disruptive and devastating to the lieutenant governor, because they are fighting for the same voter. The lieutenant governor’s whole pitch was, ’I’m going to have the most money and I’m going to have one endorsement, and that’s all I need.’ Well, that was a flawed argument.”
Jackson declined an interview request, but campaign spokesperson Mike Schrimpf further leaned into comparisons between Jackson and Trump.
“I think Republican primary voters were eager for a businessman and an outsider to enter the race, and Rick Jackson, like President Trump, is a businessman outsider,” he said. “This is their response to that message of being an outsider and fighting,” he added, referring to Jackson’s dent in recent polling.
Schrimpf declined to say whether the campaign’s strategy was to split Trump-aligned Republican voters in Georgia to force a runoff with Jones, noting only that, “that is not how I would think about it — the strategy is to appeal to all Republican primary voters.”
Jones declined to be interviewed, but campaign spokesperson Kayla Lott highlighted Trump’s endorsement, which the president doubled down on last month during a visit to a Georgia steel plant. Jones’ own ads have focused almost entirely on Trump’s endorsement.
“Trump-endorsed Lt. Governor Burt Jones is the only common-sense conservative in this race fighting for the issues Georgians care about,” Lott said in a statement. “Georgians have a clear choice — a Trump-endorsed proven workhorse with a record of results, or a bunch of Never-Trump RINOs pretending to be something they’re not.”
Despite Jackson’s early momentum, Georgia Republicans emphasized that it’s too early in the race to draw any lasting conclusions and that the state’s runoff system has produced unexpected results in recent election cycles.
For example, in the run-up to the Republican gubernatorial primary election in 2018, Kemp trailed his competitors in many major polls. But he managed to advance to the runoff, which he won with the help of a Trump endorsement and a secret recording that sank his opponent.
And Trump’s endorsements and big spending by self-funders haven’t always guaranteed victories in Georgia — a fact cited by both Carr and Raffensperger.
In 2022, former Sen. David Perdue, who partly self-funded his campaign, lost his gubernatorial primary challenge to Kemp, while Rep. Jody Hice failed to defeat Raffensperger in the secretary of state primary. Both Perdue and Hice were backed by Trump.
“We’ve had people that have had a lot of money. We’ve had people with a Trump endorsement — and they didn’t win,” Carr said in an interview, referring to both Jackson and Jones in the current race.
Carr said that “self-funders have a terrible win-loss record in the state of Georgia” and that he remained optimistic about his chances of advancing to a runoff. He added that Jackson has “totally cut the legs out from Lt Gov. Jones in this race.”
Raffensperger also said there will “probably” be a runoff. Asked about the attack ad from Jackson, Raffensperger said that “some of the folks in this race are just obsessed with the past, and I’m solely focused on Georgia’s future.”
