EXCLUSIVE — Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones is reinforcing his MAGA bona fides as the Trump-backed candidate in the battleground state’s gubernatorial race after another entry into the crowded GOP primary by billionaire Rick Jackson.
Despite the president’s blessing and his front-runner status in the polls to replace term-limited Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), Jones must now fend off not one but two conservatives also aligned with the GOP base, Attorney General Chris Carr and Jackson, in the latest test for Trump’s endorsement power.
“These guys are all trying to act like, and they’re trying to put themselves out there as, a Trump-endorsed candidate,” Jones told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “They’re trying to put a camouflage up.”
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, is also in the mix for the Republican primary on May 19.
Jones is all in on Trump’s recent FBI raid of Georgia’s largest elections office in Fulton County over the 2020 election, which has reopened divisive political wounds in the Peach State. Then a state senator, Jones was one of 16 fake Trump electors who sought to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia. And in a new ad campaign worth “several million dollars,” the gubernatorial hopeful uses Trump’s own words to remind GOP voters that he is the president’s preferred candidate.
Jones said Jackson’s entry into the race last week and the healthcare executive’s willingness to spend upwards of $40 million in personal money would not alter his own strategy, adding that the ad campaign was put together prior to Jackson’s launch.
“Iron sharpens iron, so competition never has bothered me,” Jones said. “It doesn’t change the fact that I’m the only Trump-endorsed candidate in the race.”
But one area where Jones stopped short of echoing Trump was in the president’s controversial call to “nationalize” voting in more than a dozen states, even as the lieutenant governor welcomes federal intervention in Fulton County. Jones neither embraced nor rebuffed the suggestion, which Republicans in Congress have largely condemned as unconstitutional or ill-advised because Democrats could one day seize on the would-be expanded federal government’s authority.
“I think we all want the same thing: We want to make it easier for folks to vote and make it harder to cheat,” Jones said of Trump’s rhetoric. “And that’s just plain and simple.”
To crack down on what the president insists is fraud occurring by local election officials in states across the country, Trump has suggested Republicans should “take over the voting.” The White House maintained that the president was expressing support for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, a Republican bill requiring photo ID and proof of citizenship for voting that Democrats say would purge millions of citizens from voter rolls for lack of documentation, such as a U.S. passport or birth certificate.
In the weeks leading up to the FBI’s raid on Fulton County election offices, officials revealed state regulations were violated in 2020 because of more than 100 unsigned receipts from ballot tabulation machines verifying the accuracy of 315,000 ballots.
Jones views the federal government’s involvement as an inevitable escalation that came at long last and held no reservations about alienating swing voters in a state that will remain in the national spotlight from Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D-GA) reelection bid.
“I don’t know what else the feds were left to do except go in there and take control of it,” Jones said. “It’s unfortunate when you have these things that they continue to percolate, continue to stay in headlines, because procedures weren’t followed, or there was admission that ‘we did mess up.’”
TRUMP RAID REOPENS 2020 FAULT LINES IN GEORGIA GOVERNOR AND SENATE RACES
As secretary of state, Raffensperger’s office oversees Georgia elections. In similar past efforts to dispel conspiracies of mass fraud in state elections, Raffensperger downplayed the unsigned receipts from ballot machines as a “clerical error” from Fulton County officials that “does not erase valid, legal votes.”
The Democratic side of the gubernatorial ticket is just as crowded and includes front-runner and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, former Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, and former DeKalb County Executive Mike Thurmond.