The Georgia Republican faces a real contest, despite the conventional wisdom.
The Georgia Republican faces a real contest, despite the conventional wisdom.
M arjorie Taylor Greene has been a political and moral embarrassment for Republicans ever since she won a primary in the summer of 2020 in Georgia’s 14th congressional district. The conventional wisdom is that Greene’s deep-red district loves her antics, making her politically invulnerable.
But the conventional wisdom is wrong, or at least premature. Greene is still a freshman, and she won her seat as a largely unknown figure in a contested primary two years ago that went to a runoff. Her appeal as a right-wing celebrity who barely does the job of a congresswoman is still unproven. Since 2020, her district has been redrawn in ways that make her position more tenuous. And she has attracted three primary challengers. The strongest and most prominent of those, Jennifer Strahan, can mount a serious threat to Greene so long as her campaign is adequately funded. This is a race worth watching, and Strahan is a candidate worth watching.
The Troubled Incumbent
There are many well-known reasons why Greene has been a gift to media liberals and progressives and a constant headache for Republicans and conservatives:
- Prior to winning the nomination in 2020, she was a vocal promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and complained about an “Islamic invasion into our government.” She promoted a 9/11 conspiracy theory and a theory that Seth Rich was assassinated by MS-13 gang members under the direction of the Obama administration, leading Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise to brand her comments “appalling” and “disgusting,” respectively.
- By November 2020, Texas congressman Dan Crenshaw was telling her to quit with the conspiratorial approach: “You’re a member of Congress now, Marjorie. Start acting like one.” His advice would be ignored.
- In January, Greene was denounced by the Republican Jewish Coalition for a 2018 Facebook post speculating that the Rothschilds used a laser beam from space to start wildfires in California in some sort of profit-making scheme. She drew criticism as well for “a 2019 incident in which she harassed a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, saying the survivor was paid by George Soros, as well as a 2018 Facebook post in which she agreed that the Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas shootings were ‘staged.’” In 2019, she argued that Nancy Pelosi should be executed for treason.
- Following the unearthing of that battery of recent pre-campaign remarks, Mitch McConnell denounced Greene for “loony lies” and called her a “cancer” on the party. National Review editorialized that “the GOP should act under its own power, just as it did with former representative Steve King,” to deny her committee assignments, and that she ought to be removed in the next primary in 2022.
- Threatened with losing her committee assignments, Greene scurried for cover. She denounced QAnon, repudiated the notion that school shootings were faked, and dismissed things she said or wrote between 2017 and 2019 (other than the line about Pelosi) as ancient history: “I never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today, during my campaign. These were words of the past. These things do not represent me.” House Republicans declined to sanction a brand-new member for things she said before entering electoral politics, but the House as a whole, voting mostly along party lines, stripped her of committee assignments.
- Within a week of that sanction, Greene was back to her conspiratorial ways, promoting the theory that the January 6 rioters were not Trump supporters.
- In May, McConnell and McCarthy felt compelled yet again to denounce Greene for comparing Covid restrictions to the Holocaust. Ben Shapiro called her comments “demented nonsense.” Crenshaw took her to task for using the same “stupid and insulting” analogies as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats. Greene once again had to retreat, apologizing a few weeks later after a visit to the Holocaust Museum.
- In early November, Greene referred to the January 6 defendants as “political prisoners” held in a “prisoner of war” camp (after a visit to check in on how they were being treated). In a YouTube interview later in the month, she said, “All those innocent people that were there in Washington, D.C. that day, they were set up.” In a speech on Sunday, she said of January 6: “The Democrats call it an insurrection, but I think we can start calling it a Fed-surrection.”
- Did Greene learn something new from visiting a jail? Yes, she came away praising the “common ground” she could find with Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam: “The Nation of Islam sees the use and benefit of Ivermectin and is very angry that our media, Democrats, and Dr Fauci have attacked the drug and refuse to save people’s lives by not promoting it and shunning the use of it. . . . The Nation of Islam is also strongly against the #COVID19 vaccines. . . . Louis Farrakhan says that forcing the vaccine is a ‘declaration of war.’”
Plenty of politicians say incendiary things or go too far now and then, but Greene’s record is so extensive and outlandish — combined with her refusal to learn from her mistakes even after issuing apologies —that she is unlikely to ever be able to serve as a normal, functioning member of Congress rather than an isolated one-woman storm of counterproductive controversy. Georgia Republicans statewide worry aloud about her influence on the party, which lost three statewide races in the 2020 election cycle, the first time in two decades that Georgia Republicans have lost anything statewide.
With no committees to work on — virtually the only place members of the House minority can do anything besides vote — Greene has had to resort to stunts to get attention, like getting herself repeatedly suspended from Twitter for attacking the efficacy of vaccines (just this weekend, she was using breakthrough infections to compare the Covid vaccine unfavorably to the polio vaccine) or getting repeatedly fined for violating the House’s mask mandate. Her repeated shouting matches with various House Democrats give them the clickbait and fundraising headlines they want.
Yet Greene also finds time for incessant friendly fire against fellow Republicans, such as calling South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace “the trash in the GOP Conference.” Even when trying to make a positive point about the diversity of the Right, she steps in it: At a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix on Sunday, she bragged that “I see white people, black people, brown people, yellow people . . .”
Speaking of spending the weekend in Phoenix, Greene hasn’t used her extra free time from having no committee assignments to build a strong profile in constituent service or spend a lot of time in her district mingling with the voters in northwest Georgia. Good luck to anyone trying to get past her security detail to ask her a question.
The New York Times and CNN have both found self-identified Republican voters in Georgia’s 14th district who are unhappy with Greene’s public profile as a bomb-throwing celebrity of the far right. Of course, mainstream media outlets can always dig up some quotes of that sort, but a primary will test that thesis among Republicans who want an actual Republican representative who does the job and doesn’t need a continual cleanup operation.
Greene is also, to put it bluntly, a poseur. Her public image as an ideological warrior belies the fact that she only really got into politics in 2017 after filing for divorce (which she later withdrew) while reportedly having an affair, going through a church phase, and becoming fanatical about CrossFit. A textbook example of a district-hunting carpetbagger, she parachuted herself into the district where she thought she had the best chance of winning. Raised northwest of Atlanta in Forsyth County, she originally planned to run for Congress from Georgia’s seventh district, then announced herself as a candidate in Georgia’s sixth, where she actually lived. Only after testing those swing-district waters did she buy a house in Georgia’s 14th. The multimillionaire Greene loaned her 2020 campaign $900,000, half of which she ended up using to self-fund to the campaign. For a talented and dedicated public servant, these would be trifles; for an anti-establishment populist who brands everyone else as an inauthentic sellout, they are real liabilities.
After claiming (in ignorance of federal law) that it violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) to ask her about her vaccination status, she now proudly declares, “I’m not vaccinated. And they’re going to have a hell of a time if they want to hold me down and give me a vaccine.” Yet according to her own disclosures, Greene owns stock in three of the major vaccine manufacturers: AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson. She also blasts Big Tech while cashing in tens of thousands of dollars in stock in Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon.
The New District
In order to understand why Greene may be vulnerable to a primary challenge, it is useful to consider both how she won her last primary, and how her district is changing. A major reason why Greene ran in Georgia’s 14th district is that it was a safe Republican district in which the incumbent, Tom Graves, was retiring, creating a crowded open-seat free-for-all.
Looking at the 2019 American Community Survey data from the Census Bureau, Georgia’s 14th district has the state’s lowest percentage of high-school graduates (81.8 percent) and is tied for the lowest percentage of college graduates (18.4 percent, tied with Georgia’s second district). Yet it ranks above four other districts in its median household income of $56,150, above three others in its mean household income of $69,645, and above eight others in the rate of families who dipped below the poverty line at some point in 2019 (8.5 percent, less than half the rate in Georgia’s second district).
The district is not as rural as some of the districts in the south of Georgia, which are larger and more sparsely populated, but it is your textbook Trumpy district: no major cities, few very rich people, few educated professionals, few very poor people, lots of folks without college degrees who are either self-employed and successful or working-class and struggling. That was a typical profile for a House district in Abraham Lincoln’s America, but it is a gradually vanishing breed today.
In the primary on June 9, 2020, Greene got 43,892 votes, 40.3 percent of the primary vote, representing less than 6 percent of the population of Georgia’s 14th. It was a nine-way race, so Greene went to a runoff against neurosurgeon John Cowan, who got 22,862 votes. In the runoff on July 14, Cowan added more than 10,000 votes to his column; Greene got 79 fewer votes. The rest of the primary electorate stayed home in the runoff. With only a month to campaign, that was not enough for Cowan to come close (Greene beat him handily, 57 percent to 43 percent), but the outcome reflects the fact that Greene depended heavily on her locked-in supporters, and had no appeal to the voters who preferred any of the other eight candidates.
Because Greene has since become such a polarizing national figure, the 32,000 voters who voted in her original primary but stayed home in the runoff will be an important audience. They may be more engaged this time around, if Strahan has the resources to reach them.
Then there is the new shape of Greene’s district. Georgia’s 14th district is wedged in the northwest corner of Georgia, bordering Tennessee to the north and Alabama to the west. Most of the district is closer to Chattanooga than to Atlanta, and lies just west of the end of the Appalachians. This was the ground once contested between William Tecumseh Sherman and Joe Johnston in the summer of 1864 on the way to Atlanta.
A map of Georgia in 2020 shows Georgia’s 14th district as a fairly compact district with a Cook Political Report rating of R+28 (a 28-point Republican advantage), wedged between two solid Republican districts (Andrew Clyde’s ninth district, which is R+30, and Drew Ferguson’s third district, which is R+16), spilling around a fourth Republican district (Barry Loudermilk’s eleventh district, which is R+12). The only neighboring Democratic-held district is David Scott’s majority-black 13th district south of Atlanta, which is D+23. There was some talk of splitting Greene’s district, but redrawing her into a competitive district would have been prohibitively difficult.
At first glance, it would appear that the new map, passed by both houses of the Georgia legislature and fated to become law unless Republican governor Brian Kemp vetoes it, is not dramatically different in Greene’s corner of the state:
That appearance is deceptive. Focus in on how the district has changed. Here is the old district:
Here is the new map:
The new map strips Greene’s district of Haralson County (86.5 percent Trump in 2020) and the remaining part of Pickens County (82.2 percent Trump) in exchange for part of densely populated Cobb County in suburban Atlanta (56.3 percent Biden). That is not enough change in the composition of the district to make it competitive in a general election, but it is important for a few reasons.
Greene is picking up portions of Cobb County that were previously divided between Loudermilk’s Republican eleventh district and Scott’s Democratic 13th district. The obvious partisan aim of the new map is to improve Republican prospects in Georgia’s sixth (currently a D+1 district held by Democrat Lucy McBath) and Georgia’s seventh (currently an R+2 district held by Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux), pushing McBath into Bordeaux’s district. But a key side effect is weakening Greene.
In the 2020 primary, Greene drew a disproportionate share of her support from Haralson and Pickens counties. Losing them weakens her. By contrast, the new district adds 78,000 new voters, and while many of those are not likely to be primary voters, there could be enough to swing a competitive race. Educated, affluent Cobb very unfavorable turf for Greene. Moreover, Georgia has open primaries, so the county’s Democratic voters can choose to cross over into the Republican primary if they are focused on getting rid of Greene and realistic about their own party’s prospects in the district.
Is Greene worried? She blasted the new lines when they were publicized, writing: “This year’s redistricting by the Georgia GOP will prove to be a fool’s errand that was led by power obsessed state legislators.” Adding new Cobb County territory is bad news for Greene in another way: It adds the home of Jennifer Strahan.
The Citizen Challenger
Strahan is a well-spoken 35-year-old political novice, a mother, entrepreneur, and business executive who runs her own national health-care advisory firm. She is a self-described “born-again Christian” who attends Atlanta West Pentecostal Church. She has no political experience, but then, neither did Greene this time two years ago. Here is her introductory video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyjLxxTObIM&feature=emb_title
Strahan describes herself as a “no-nonsense conservative.” She is not running as an anti-Trump Republican; like Randy Feenstra, who ousted Steve King in 2020, she embraces Trump’s policies, and trains her fire entirely on Greene’s own faults.
As Strahan sums up her reason for challenging Greene:
I am running because our district is not being represented. Our current representative is not on a single committee and has said repeatedly she does not want them back. She spends more time outside of the district than in it. My goal is to bring results back to Georgia, work with my colleagues, and fight President Biden’s disastrous agenda. Right now, the only thing my opponent brings to the table is a ‘no’ vote. I want to serve this district — not become a social media celebrity.
Unsurprisingly, given Greene’s dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds and her ill-chosen Holocaust analogies, Jewish groups have been early out of the gate to hear Strahan’s message. Jewish Insider published a favorable profile, and Strahan has put out a detailed statement of support for Israel. But Jewish voters are not a decisive bloc in a Republican primary in northwest Georgia.
More important will be convincing voters who simply want more work and less drama from their representative. Greene flew under the radar two years ago, and some of her supporters did not expect what they got. Strahan offers them a chance to rethink what the district needs. Republican primary voters have repeatedly proven that they were willing to reject extreme or intemperate candidates when they were given the opportunity to unite behind a single, credible alternative choice. That is how King, Kris Kobach, Roy Moore, Corey Stewart, Kelli Ward, Joe Arpaio, Chris McDaniel, and Paul Nehlen all lost high-profile primary fights.
Strahan’s main challenge is fundraising. Greene has raised $6.3 million so far; Marcus Flowers, her doomed Democratic opponent, has used Greene’s negative appeal to Democratic partisans to raise $3.3 million that Democrats could better spend elsewhere. Strahan, who entered the race in September, has raised only $56,000. Conservative donors looking to make a positive impact on the party this cycle could make a real difference by giving Strahan a foothold.
There is one force that could yet bail out Greene: the Democrats and their go-to election lawyer, Marc Elias. Elias has publicly threatened to file a lawsuit as soon as Kemp approves the new maps. Professional Democrats have profited handsomely from having Greene as a foil, and would hate to lose her; Elias is nothing if not a reliable pursuer of his clients’ partisan interests. Some local Democratic voters have expressed outrage at being moved into Greene’s district, and they could be clients for an Elias lawsuit. A successful challenge to the new maps might bail Greene out of trouble.
Still, winning a court challenge to congressional maps is not easy. For now, Marjorie Taylor Greene will have to defend her record — such as it is — to the voters of her new district. And Jennifer Strahan will give them another choice.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Marjorie Taylor Greene is divorced. It has been updated to reflect that she filed for divorce, but withdrew it.