return of the deplorables
Conservative voters only care 'who had the biggest gun,' says Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate
Georgia's leading GOP gubernatorial candidate may have just made some Republican enemies.
In an off-the-record conversation with a former candidate, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle said conservative voters didn't "give a sh-t about" the issues during Georgia's recent Republican primary. "This primary felt like it was who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest," Cagle said.
Cagle's closest competitor, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, obtained and released the audio Monday, per The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Kemp tweeted that this is what Cagle "really thinks of conservative voters in Georgia" and immediately drew comparisons to Hillary Clinton's infamous insult for President Trump's voters.
Kemp's campaign previously released a different chunk of the same conversation. In that excerpt, Cagle revealed that he backed an education policy that he said was flawed in a "thousand different ways" just so another Republican gubernatorial candidate wouldn't get funding from a charter school advocacy group, per the Journal-Constitution. Cagle's campaign hasn't responded to the Journal-Constitution's request for comment.
Cagle and Kemp were the top two candidates in Georgia's Republican primary, with Cagle securing 38.9 percent of the vote and Kemp getting 25.6, per The New York Times. With neither getting a majority of the vote, the two candidates will have a run-off for the nomination July 24.