This is the second part of a series on Georgia’s concurrent Senate races. Part I examined the history of concurrent Senate races in the United States, dug through complicated Georgia election laws and the odds of a January runoff for one or both seats, and profiled Jon Ossoff and David Perdue, two leading contenders for a full term. Part II will examine the candidacies of former Mayor Teresa Tomlinson and Sarah Riggs Amico, and contains a short write-up of the candidates for the special election to fill former Sen. Johnny Isakson’s seat.
Tomlinson: A Rare Two-Term Mayor for Columbus
“Columbus,” Teresa Tomlinson told the HPR, “likes to throw out its mayors.”
She was not kidding. In 2014, Tomlinson, a Democrat, became the first mayor of Columbus to win reelection in a contested race since 1971, triumphing over opponent Colin Martin with over 62% of the vote. At a time when mayoral experience is being championed on the national stage — and with the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, fresh off winning the Iowa caucuses — Tomlinson, Columbus’s first female mayor, makes a compelling case for promotion to federal office.
In the final three years of her administration, Columbus was rated one of the top 50 Best-Run Cities in America, topping out at 24th place in 2017, based on the city’s “operating efficiency,” a measure of the quality of city services measured against the city’s total budget.
Alva James-Johnson, a former reporter for the Columbus (Georgia) Ledger-Enquirer who covered Tomlinson, told the HPR she especially credits the former mayor for leading the city’s 2012 pension reforms, a move which the city projects to save Columbus taxpayers $39 million over the 10-year period from 2013-2023.
Crime rates and violent crime rates declined overall during Tomlinson’s eight-year tenure, though crime remains higher than the state or national average. While in office, the former mayor oversaw Columbus’s Rapid Resolution Initiative, which seeks to address overcrowding in jails by expediting certain more straightforward criminal cases moving to trial.
Tomlinson said she is proudest of how she managed Columbus’ transition to a majority-minority community. In an election in which the three leading Democratic candidates (and the Republican candidate) are white, Tomlinson believes she can be an effective messenger on matters of race. As mayor, she was the recipient of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity’s MLK Jr. Unity Award in recognition of her work expanding the city’s “The Dream Lives” MLK festival and for programs sponsored by the Mayor’s Commission on Unity, Prosperity and Diversity.
However, Tomlinson’s record is not without criticism. In 2013, Tomlinson held a public meeting to muster public approval to demolish Columbus’ aging Booker T. Washington public housing project. While the need to replace the facility was clear, the solution that Tomlinson backed, partially relocating the complex to the predominantly African American Liberty District, met backlash from black leaders in Columbus who had other plans for the neighborhood.
James-Johnson covered that meeting and the Liberty District housing project for the Ledger-Enquirer. She told the HPR that she recalls that Tomlinson came across to some like she was pitting the public housing project occupants against the black leaders who opposed relocation. James-Johnson, who otherwise views Tomlinson as a “savvy” and sometimes “visionary” politician, felt that her approach to the public housing project was a “misstep” in her administration. The relocation plan was later scuttled, and the Booker T. Washington housing project was renovated and replaced by a new public housing project known as Columbus Commons.
James-Johnson noted that Tomlinson enjoyed strong support from Columbus’ African-American community throughout her tenure, but that some of that was lost due to her championing of the Liberty District project. In a 2013 article entitled “Is Mayor Teresa Tomlinson losing black support?” James-Johnson interviewed a number of black leaders who expressed doubt in Tomlinson’s leadership based on her handling of the case.
In an emailed statement to the HPR, Tomlinson’s campaign’s Communications Director Nicole Henderson noted that plans to renovate the Liberty District had existed since 2003, long predating Tomlinson’s mayoralty, and that in her reelection, Tomlinson carried three African-American majority precincts with over 80% of the vote, and several others with over 70%, “defying the suggestion that Mayor Tomlinson was racially divisive.”
Tomlinson also came into conflict with several city officials over budgetary disputes. She and the city of Columbus were sued in 2014 by four city officials, including the city sheriff, over Tomlinson’s proposed budget cuts, which the officials denounced as “illegal.” The lawsuit was later dropped, as Tomlinson reached a compromise with the City Council on the affected budgets, presenting some of the first balanced city budgets in 16 years. Per Henderson, “the lawsuit claims were legally and politically rejected and Mayor Tomlinson … [was] vindicated by the court and the voters of Columbus.”
Tomlinson sits a bit behind Jon Ossoff in fundraising, having taken in $612,000 in 2020’s first quarter with $436,000 cash on hand. She has been endorsed by a slew of national, state, and local figures and organizations, including former Senator Max Cleland, D-Ga., former Governor Roy Barnes, D-Ga., Martin Luther King III, baseball player and Georgian Hank Aaron, and the National Organization for Women.
If elected, Tomlinson would become the first elected female senator in Georgia’s history. In a year that featured prominent debates over whether female candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Kamala Harris were “electable” as the Democratic nominee for President, Tomlinson views her gender as an electoral advantage, pointing to Perdue’s comparatively weak numbers with women and believing that she is in a position to capitalize.
Per Tomlinson, “if we could run a formidable woman from outside of metro Atlanta, David Perdue cannot win this race.”
Amico: A Romney Donor Turned Abrams Running Mate Fights for the Runoff
Sarah Riggs Amico is a character rare in 2020 electoral politics: a candidate newer to the political scene than Jon Ossoff. After a 17-year career working for and later owning her family business, Amico’s first brush with electoral politics came in 2018, when she was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor of Georgia on a ticket with Stacey Abrams.
As a businesswoman-turned-politician, Amico’s bio seems more at home in a Republican primary than a Democratic one. Indeed, as a donor to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign who was then endorsed by former President Barack Obama in 2018, she is somewhat new to the party. She draws a contrast with Republicans in her support for and from organized labor groups, five of whom have endorsed her campaign. No other candidate has received a labor group’s endorsement.
“My story,” she told the HPR, “is about somebody who fought to save the kind of jobs that politicians go on TV and talk about, but they have absolutely no experience creating.”
Amico’s ties to organized labor were shaped during her time as the executive chairperson of Jack Cooper, her family’s trucking business, one of only two unionized car haulers in the United States. Her family purchased the company near the peak of the Great Recession in 2008, and took on a series of acquisitions which grew the company from 150 employees to nearly 3,000, with what she characterizes as strong union protections. Amico cited free daycare at Jack Cooper’s headquarters in Kennesaw, Georgia, paid family leave for men and women, and the company’s absorption of 100% of employees’ (and their families’) health insurance premiums as evidence of her family’s support for working people and unions. But that support came at a price: Jack Cooper filed for bankruptcy in 2019, citing the company’s “unsustainable” labor costs when competing with nonunionized companies.
Amico told the HPR she recalled being recruited to run for lieutenant governor in 2017 following her participation in a nonpartisan pro-democracy group of Harvard graduates (Amico is a graduate of the Business School). “We were in a planning meeting in the late summer of 2017, and someone said, ‘What you really need is someone from this group to run for office.’ And literally every head at the table turned and looked at me.”
Amico ran alongside Stacey Abrams in that lieutenant gubernatorial election, and she is quick to note that because the governor and lieutenant governor of Georgia are nominated and elected separately, the two nominees don’t always run together, but she and Abrams chose to do so. “Stacey and I were perfectly complementary,” she said. “Our signs literally said Abrams/Amico.”
Indeed, all three candidates touted their closeness to Abrams in their interviews: No name came up more frequently. Abrams has not endorsed in this race, but as her running mate, Amico worked with Abrams closer than most. “Talked to her yesterday,” she told the HPR. Amico said she does not think it odd for her to run without Abrams’ endorsement, citing her former running mate’s friendship with another candidate, and says she thinks it is important for voters to get to know her as her own person.
In her HPR interview, Amico walked a tightrope, both casting herself as the political outsider of the candidates and arguing that her political experience, as the only candidate to have run in a statewide race, sets her apart. “There’s no one else in this race who’s run statewide, who got over 1.8 million votes. Teresa has been mayor twice, that’s maybe 15,000 votes an election …To beat David Perdue, we’re going to need someone who can go up the statewide election curve really quickly, and this isn’t my first rodeo.”
Amico has a heavy lift to make it into the runoff. She has struggled to raise money in this cycle, posting just $133,000 in the first quarter of 2020, with $472,000 on hand. The most recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll for the Democratic primary for Perdue’s seat, taken on March 16, pegged Jon Ossoff as the Democratic frontrunner at 31%, with Teresa Tomlinson and Sarah Riggs Amico trailing at 16% and 15%, respectively. Ossoff has been helped by strong name recognition from his House race just three years ago, and it remains to be seen if Amico or one of the four other candidates can close that gap before the June primary, or the August runoff if they advance.
But Amico, for one, sees a silver lining in the AJC poll. She argues that Ossoff, having spent nearly $30 million in his 2017 special election, ought to be polling far higher compared to his lesser-known competitors.“He hasn’t yet cracked a third of the Democratic primary electorate,” she tells the HPR. “I ran for office for the first time in 2018, had a million and a half dollars to run statewide, and I’m in the hunt.”
The Special Election: A Brief Primer
Sen. Kelly Loeffler, the appointed Republican incumbent, was nominated in December 2019 by Gov. Brian Kemp, R-Ga., to fill retiring Sen. Isakson’s seat. Political analysts viewed her selection, over the president’s preference of Rep. Doug Collins, as an acknowledgement by Kemp of the flight of Georgia’s suburban women to the Democrats in Stacey Abrams’s 2018 gubernatorial race, and of Republicans’ desire to nominate a candidate who could appeal to that demographic.
However, a few months into Loeffler’s term, she appears to be in dire political straits, having resigned her membership in an agriculture subcommittee over stock trades she made after attending an all-senators’ briefing on the coronavirus, which contained privileged information. While she has not been convicted of any wrongdoing, her colleague, North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, is currently being investigated by the FBI for extremely similar acts.
For her actions in connection with the stock trading scandal, she has faced criticism from right and left, with a spokesman for Collins, now the likeliest Republican to hold the seat next year, saying in an interview with the AJC, “The only reason there is a Sen. Loeffler is because of money, and now money is her kryptonite.”
Doug Collins, former state legislator and military chaplain, drew state and national attention during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings, where as ranking member he became the president’s most vocal defender on the committee, decrying the impeachment hearings as a sham and alleging in a tweet that “Democrats are more concerned about the clock and calendar than facts and fairness.”
Collins had more than $2.2 million on hand at the close of the first quarter, while Loeffler, who has pledged to spend heavily from her personal fortune for this seat, had just over $6.1 million. Polling since March for the all-party November 3 election has consistently shown Collins pacing the field and advancing to a runoff, with between 19% and 36% of the total vote.
On the Democratic side, the two leading contenders are Raphael Warnock and Matt Lieberman, neither of whom have held elective office before. Warnock, a reverend who for the past 14 years has preached from Martin Luther King Jr.’s old pulpit, leads Lieberman in both fundraising and endorsements, having picked up the endorsements of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Stacey Abrams, John Lewis, and national figures like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Sherrod Brown. He had approximately $1.2 million on hand at the close of the first quarter.
However, Warnock is also concluding a messy divorce process in which his wife accused him of running over her foot slowly with his car during an argument. (Warnock denies the allegation, there were no signs of injury to his wife’s foot, and he has not been charged with a crime.) The divorce could prove potential distraction for him as he frames a campaign around social justice and providing families with affordable health care.
Meanwhile, Lieberman, who has led Warnock in seven of the last eight primary polls released (though six of those eight were by Republican partisan organizations), is known largely as the son of former independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. The younger Lieberman is a teacher running on a grab bag of Democratic priorities (universal background checks for gun purchases, abortion access, expanding the Affordable Care Act), but his campaign has struggled to gain traction, with just $309,000 on hand at the end of the first quarter, and fewer than 1,000 followers on his official campaign Twitter account.
Plenty of Time For Things to Change
The modal outcome in historically red Georgia at this moment in May looks like reelection for David Perdue and the elevation of Doug Collins to the Senate over the flailing Loeffler. But Democratic chances in Georgia have strengthened every week for the past two months, and with eight major candidates, two seats, and the potential for four elections, the Peach State’s Senate seats are approaching a jump-ball status for 2020.
Image 1 Source: Flickr/John Brighenti
Image 2 Source: Courtesy of Teresa Tomlinson for Senate
Image 3 Source: Courtesy of Sarah for Georgia