NR traveled to Loeffler’s three campaign stops in Atlanta’s suburbs on Tuesday. Here’s what we saw.
Atlanta — Amy Olla didn’t vote for Georgia senator Kelly Loeffler in November. But she wishes she had.
A grandmother from Woodstock, Ga., Olla had planned to cast her ballot for Loeffler, but instead voted for another Republican, Representative Doug Collins, thinking that, because Collins was better known in the state, he might have a better chance of winning January’s runoff election.
There were 20 candidates on the November ballot, including six Republicans.
“People knew who he was. He’d been in government,” Olla said of Collins. “We wanted her.”
On Tuesday morning, Olla was wearing her pink MAGA hat and waiting with her 14-year-old granddaughter for Loeffler to arrive at a campaign rally near her home.
To Olla, Loeffler isn’t a compromise candidate or a generic Republican to vote for to keep Democrat Raphael Warnock from winning one of Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats in January.
“I’m excited for Kelly,” Olla said. “There’s a lot of things we like about her. I really feel she’ll be good for us. She’s not a politician. She doesn’t need to have lobbyists’ money in her pocket. She can get out there and do her job without being bribed.”
Winning support from people like Olla is critical to Loeffler, a wealthy Atlanta businesswoman who is still a relative newcomer to Georgia’s political landscape.
Loeffler wasn’t well known to most voters when Governor Brian Kemp appointed her to the Senate last December to fill the seat vacated by Johnny Isakson, who stepped down for health reasons. In interviews, Loeffler can appear stiff and overly rehearsed. During an early December debate, she almost mechanically referred to her opponent as “radical liberal Raphael Warnock” 13 times. There are online parodies suggesting that she might be a robot.
Like Collins, Loeffler has been an outspoken ally of President Trump since being appointed. And like most of her Senate Republican colleagues, she hasn’t explicitly endorsed the president’s repeated claim that the election was stolen — but she hasn’t ruled it out either.
She believes some of what Trump complains of occurred in her own state. Days after the election, she joined Senator David Perdue in calling for Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to step down over his alleged “failure to deliver honest and transparent elections.”
Many of Loeffler’s most devoted supporters have embraced the president’s more sweeping claims of fraud. And some have even considered heeding the advice of Trump ally Lin Wood, an Atlanta-based attorney, who has urged Republicans to stay home on Election Day unless Perdue and Loeffler do more to support the president’s efforts to overturn the election.
Olla said that at one point, she considered staying home rather than participate in a potentially rigged election. “And then I said, no, I’m going to get out there,” she said. “I think everything will work itself out. I really think Trump is going to pull it off, personally. I think he is.”
Stan Fitzgerald, a former New Jersey police officer who recently retired to Cobb County, also embraced Wood’s stolen-election narrative but thought that potential fraud made it more important to turn out for Republicans.
“I think there was a lot of cheating and Trump actually won, but I don’t think there’s any chance of it being overturned. So we need to make sure we hold the Senate,” Fitzgerald said.
Fitzgerald said he believes there will be less opportunity to cheat in January because there will be more people watching.
“I’m still worried about it,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s definitely going to be stolen.”
Loeffler has ridden out the post-election turmoil campaigning in Georgia and introducing herself to voters. Since she emerged in November as one of the two finalists, along with Warnock, for the runoff on January 5, she has held about 75 political rallies across the state, according to her campaign staff.
“I love being out across Georgia. That’s the best part of the job,” Loeffler said after a rally with about 100 people on Tuesday afternoon in a shady park in Newnan, Ga., a small city southwest of Atlanta.
National Review traveled to Loeffler’s three campaign stops Tuesday in Atlanta’s outer-ring suburbs and exurbs to get a sense of her campaign style and the enthusiasm of her supporters.
While she comes across as more natural in person, she sticks to her stump speech during rallies. “I have a question for you,” Loeffler says at the beginning of each speech. “Are you ready to keep fighting for President Trump and show America that Georgia is a red state?”
She lays out what is at stake if Democrats take over the Senate: higher taxes, open borders, defunded police departments, the Green New Deal. And it’s not just radical ideas, “It’s a radical candidate like my opponent, radical liberal Raphael Warnock,” who she says doesn’t support police officers or the military, and who refuses to denounce socialism.
She condemns cancel culture, fake news, and the thought police. She supports reforming health-care and also covering pre-existing conditions. She’s pro-life and pro-school choice. “This is about our kids. This is about future generations,” she says.
Like President Donald Trump, she’ll tell you she’s a businesswoman, not a politician. She doesn’t talk much about herself, her history growing up on a farm or rising through corporate America.
Loeffler talks quickly, sometimes stepping on possible applause lines. She’s usually done in ten minutes, and then takes pictures with supporters in the crowd.
“This is the battle of our lifetime right now,” Loeffler told a crowd of about 40 people gathered in the Republican headquarters in Paulding County on Tuesday afternoon. “It’s happening in Georgia. I could not be more proud that it’s happening in Georgia.”
Supporters at her events said they like Loeffler because she is an outsider, like Trump, and because they believe she shares their values.
“The fact that she was not involved in politics makes her more marketable,” Fitzgerald, the former policeman, said. “You want people that are outsiders. A lot of people, they talk badly against her because she is (wealthy). So is Trump, and they all support him.”
He said he supports Loeffler in part because of her “positions on the police, and protecting us from the radical left agenda.”
Navy veteran David Altwies, 70, said he likes that Loeffler is pro-life and supports the Second Amendment, but most importantly, “I’m for getting rid of the swamp.”
“She’s a Republican. She’s a conservative. She’s got the same values in life that I’ve got,” Altwies said. “If she doesn’t get caught up in the swamp, then I’ll be a happy camper.”