In 2013, Georgia’s senior senator, Saxby Chambliss, introduced that he wouldn’t stand for re-election the following yr. In David Perdue’s telling, he drove to see his cousin and tried to persuade him to run. “Well, he told me he didn’t feel led to do so, but then he said I should consider running,” Mr. Perdue later recalled in an interview.
When Mr. Perdue determined to run, he recruited prime aides from his cousin’s marketing campaign workers. “David’s team was Sonny’s team,” mentioned Jack Kingston, a longtime Republican congressman who additionally sought the vacant seat. Sonny Perdue, he mentioned, was “very instrumental” in his cousin’s marketing campaign.
For all that, David Perdue branded himself “the outsider”— the person with the real-world enterprise savvy wanted to impact change. The Republican main was crowded with well-known and seasoned politicians, and Mr. Perdue attacked them for his or her seasoning, portraying them in adverts as ineffectual, mewling infants.
“We had been hoping that we may discover an Achilles heel — he’s lazy, he’s going to say one thing silly,” Mr. Kingston mentioned of the marketing campaign. “We found him to be pretty disciplined and hard-working. I have to give him good marks.”
After defeating Mr. Kingston in a main runoff, Mr. Perdue went on to face Ms. Nunn, an govt at a nonprofit whose father, Sam Nunn, was a former Democratic senator from Georgia. Though each candidates benefited from well-known household names, Ms. Nunn thought she would possibly achieve the higher hand by specializing in the unfavorable results of Mr. Perdue’s embrace of globalism.
A month earlier than the election, a transcript surfaced of a nine-year-old deposition in which Mr. Perdue mentioned he had spent “most of my career” outsourcing. Questioned by reporters, Mr. Perdue replied that he was “proud” of that report. “This is a part of American business, part of any business,” he mentioned. “Outsourcing is the procurement of products and services to help your business run. People do that all day.”
Ms. Nunn pressed the purpose in her adverts and on the talk stage. But she was the underdog, and 2014 proved to be a nasty yr for Democrats, burdened by an absence of enthusiasm for President Barack Obama and his signature laws, the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Perdue blasted Mr. Obama’s dealing with of the Ebola virus disaster, and vowed to repeal Obamacare. He virtually waltzed to victory.
