David Perdue decides against the Georgia Senate a week after filling out the election paperwork

David Perdue decides against the Georgia Senate a week after filling out the election paperwork

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“After much prayer and reflection, Bonnie and I have decided that we will not enter the race for the United States Senate in Georgia in 2022,” Perdue said in an email to supporters on Tuesday, adding that it is “a personal decision, not politics 1. ” He did not explain his decision further.

Perdue promised to do “everything” he could to ensure that the Republican candidate for the race wins the newly elected Senator Raphael Warnock, who said on Tuesday that he is “prepared to defeat any Republican who appears”.

“These two current US liberal senators do not represent the values ​​of most Georgians,” Perdue said in his statement, referring to Warnock and Senator Jon Ossoff, who defeated him and former Senator Kelly Loeffler in the second round of January. .

Loeffler and former MP Doug Collins, who lost to Loeffler and Warnock last year, are considering running again for the Senate.

Last week, Perdue met with former President Donald Trump during a round of golf and dinner, according to The New York Times. Trump intended to take revenge on Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Georgia Republican governor Brian Kemp, who respectively blamed Trump for fomenting the January 6 violent riot on Capitol Hill and challenged his false claims that the election 2020 was defrauded.
David Perdue files the paperwork to run the 2022 US Senate race in Georgia
A person familiar with the Trump-Perdue talks said that it did not affect the former senator’s decision in 2022. But Trump’s war against Republican leaders could hurt the party in the mid-2022 term, just as it did in the Perdue race to the Senate. Last month, Trump publicly pledged to campaign against Kemp in 2022, which could drag Georgia Republicans into the vote.

Florida Senator Rick Scott, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told CNN that he spoke with Perdue on Tuesday morning and is “very disappointed” with his decision.

“He told me it was personal,” said Scott.

A former CEO of Reebok and Dollar General, Perdue won his first Senate race in 2014 and became one of President Donald Trump’s strongest allies in Congress. He rushed to deliver aid during the coronavirus pandemic, including billions to hospitals and the Congressional creation of the Payment Check Protection Program for small business loans, while warning voters that Ossoff was promoting a “socialist agenda”.

But the torrent of Trump attacks against Kemp and the election officials who oversaw his defeat in Georgia carried a potential message to Perdue and Loeffler that they would keep the Senate under Republican control and serve as a brake on President Joe Biden’s administration. Instead, senators joined Trump in opposing the certification of the 2020 elections, driving out some undecided potential voters.

Perdue also faced intense scrutiny about his multimillion-dollar equity transactions during the pandemic. Perdue said his advisers made the transactions and promised that they would no longer negotiate with individual companies. His campaign also suffered a setback after he deliberately mispronounced Vice President Kamala Harris’ name at a rally and for a digital ad showing Ossoff’s enlarged nose, an anti-Semitic trope, which his campaign said was an accident and quickly removed from Facebook.

This story was updated with further developments on Tuesday.

CNN’s Devan Cole, Manu Raju and Jeff Zeleny contributed to this report.

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