For decades, Loeffler has straddled two worlds – the rural heartland of her youth and Atlanta’s corporate elite.
She’s been a high-powered corporate executive, the co-owner of a professional sports team, and now is likely the wealthiest member of Congress. But Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler started her working life as a 10-year-old “walking beans” on her family’s Illinois farm.
When Loeffler was young, soybean farmers like her parents would hire young people in the summer to walk through the fields with hoes, hand-weeding acre upon acre.
Mechanization has since made walking beans a relic of the past, but back in the 1970s and 80s it was an important but grueling job that allowed farmers to cut back on chemical herbicides.
The pay was measly and the work horrible, recalled Shelley Anne Marquis, one of Loeffler’s lifelong friends who still lives near the Central Illinois farm. “I mean bugs, and hot, and you’d start super early in the morning to avoid the heat, and be done by noon, and be all wet from the dew on the beans. Not a glorious job at all,” Marquis said.
“That’s where she started, in a bean field. And she would punch a clock just like I would,” Marquis said of Loeffler, now an incumbent senator in Georgia, whose runoff race on Jan. 5 is one of two in the state that will determine control of the U.S. Senate for at least the next two years.
In an interview with National Review, Loeffler, 50, said that growing up on her family’s farm in the rural Midwest taught her the importance of self-reliance and personal responsibility.
“There was a cadence to our daily lives and to our lives each year that revolved around Catechism on Saturday, Church on Sunday, school during the week, work every single day,” said Loeffler, a lifelong Catholic. “Life centered around our family and our work.”
Friends from her youth said Loeffler’s upbringing helped form her character and fuel her ambition. Her story is one of work ethic, family, and faith, said Howard Heatherwick, a longtime friend of the family’s. “Her core values are centered around those things,” he said.
Loeffler never intended to stay on the farm. In 1988, the seniors at Olympia High School were asked to submit a “prophesy” of where life would take them in 15 years. Several of her classmates predicted they would be teachers, hairstylists, dentists or police officers. Loeffler’s prophecy: “Be on L.A. Law or a partner in a financial firm.”
She never did appear on L.A. Law. But in the 32 years since that prophecy, Loeffler has had a highly successful career in the global investment field and as an executive at The Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE, the Fortune 500 firm that is the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. Loeffler’s husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, is the company’s CEO.
In August, Forbes estimated the couple’s net worth at over $800 million, likely making Loeffler Congress’s richest member. It’s a point her opponents on the left repeatedly hammer to paint her as money-grubbing, primarily self-interested, and out of touch with average Georgians.
Meanwhile, some critics on the populist right have questioned Loeffler’s commitment to their cause, pointing to past contributions she and her husband made to more moderate Republicans, including Mitt Romney, and her affiliation with the woke WNBA – Loeffler is a co-owner of the league’s Atlanta Dream – which has a history of partnering with and promoting leftwing groups and causes. Some have expressed concerns that Loeffler is using her wealth to try to buy the Senate seat.
Loeffler, who was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp in 2019 to fill the seat that opened when Sen. Johnny Isakson retired for health reasons, has tried to assure Republican skeptics that she’s on their side, aligning herself closely with President Donald Trump. In September, her campaign released an ad calling her “more conservative than Attila the Hun.”
And she’s tried to counter the narrative that she’s rich and out of touch. During an early December debate with her opponent, Democrat Raphael Warnock, Loeffler repeatedly brought up her rural roots, noting she was raised on a farm and waitressed her way through college.
“I know what it means to live paycheck to paycheck,” she said. “I’ve done it.”
Loeffler’s friends from her youth paint a picture of a woman raised by parents who instilled a strong work ethic, and a friend who was driven to succeed in everything she was involved in, from academics to sports to civics.
But as involved as she was on the farm, at her school, in the community, and in sports and clubs, she also stood out because of the vision she had for a future beyond her small town.
“She had bigger dreams,” Marquis said. “I always admired that. Wow, she really does have something more than a local future.”
Rural Roots
The Loeffler family’s farm is located just outside of Stanford, a small Central Illinois village of roughly 600 people near Bloomington. The farm was founded by Kelly Loeffler’s grandfather, Alfred, who moved to the area in the 1930s from Missouri, Heatherwick said.
Despite having few resources and only an eighth-grade education, Alfred Loeffler was able to borrow some money to buy and grow a farm for his family.
Alfred Loeffler’s son, Donald, and Donald’s wife Lynda – Kelly’s dad and mom – eventually took over the farm, expanded it, and added a trucking business. They hired out their trucks to local farmers to haul grain to elevators or to the Illinois River, where it would be shipped down the Mississippi to St. Louis or New Orleans, and then sent internationally.
“They grew that business from nothing,” Heatherwick said.
Heatherwick said the Loeffler kids were raised in a decidedly middleclass household. “It wasn’t poor. It wasn’t rich,” he said, though reports indicate it was one of the larger farms in the area.
He didn’t recall the Loefflers being an especially political family, but they lived and modeled their conservative values.
“They were working so hard, they probably didn’t have time to dedicate to be on the Republican committee or run for office or do those kinds of things because they were trying to build that business,” Heatherwick said.
As a kid, Loeffler participated in an amateur musical club. The local newspaper, The Bloomington Pantagraph, reported in 1980 that she played piano at a Christmas program at a local nursing home.
She was also involved in the local 4H, where her mom was a leader. The McLean County Fair is the biggest 4H fair in the nation, and participating in it was always one of the highlights of the year. Loeffler showed cattle, and according to the local paper, she also participated in food, photography, arts and crafts, and clothing competitions over the years.
“Everything we did in the summer was gearing up for that,” Marquis said.
In high school, Loeffler – who is 5-foot-11-inches tall – played basketball, and ran cross country and track. She also was involved in a variety of clubs, including the yearbook club, German club, the National Honors Society, band and student council, Marquis said.
When she turned 15, Loeffler also began working outside the farm, bussing and waiting tables at restaurants around Bloomington. Marquis said Loeffler liked to save money for her future and to pursue outside interests.
Sarah Baltz, another childhood friend, said that by the time Loeffler was in high school her family was probably better off than most families in the area, but “nobody was showy.” Loeffler’s parents and her brother’s family have received more than $3 million in farm subsidies since 1995, according to an online database.
“These are farmers,” Baltz said. “Nobody’s really keeping track. Kelly was never, ever a show-boater. Her personality, she got along with everybody.”
Loeffler developed an interest in business when she was a kid watching her parents run the farm.
“I grew up from my earliest memory watching my grandmother write the corn, soybean and cattle prices down on the Formica countertop in pencil so that when my dad and grandfather came in for their baloney sandwich and coffee at lunch, they could see where the prices were,” Loeffler said. “And that was really my first ticker tape of looking at the prices.”
When she was in high school, she said, her mom bought her a copy of Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal.” Business was “just something that got in my blood,” Loeffler said.
After high school, Loeffler studied international business at the University of Illinois. When she graduated from college, she became the first person in her family to do so. Her friends recall her traveling abroad for her studies, the only person they knew who did that.
“I think that she just imagined things, just bigger,” Baltz said.
Climbing the Corporate Ladder
After college, Loeffler worked for four years as an account manager with Toyota before enrolling in an MBA program at DePaul University in Chicago. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, she worked in equity research and investor relations with the global banking and investment firms Citibank, William Blair, and The Crossroads Group.
In 2002, she headed to Atlanta to join the International Exchange, still a relatively small company at the time, said Chuck Vice, ICE’s former chief operating officer and president. Loeffler built the company’s investor relations team, wrote the company’s proxy materials and marketing materials, and developed its website.
“She took the ball and ran with it,” Vice said. “It wasn’t as if she came in and said ‘I can build an investor relations team. Here’s the budget that I need, and I need to go hire four people.’ She thinks the opposite of that. It’s like, ‘OK, how much can I do with the fewest amount of resources.’”
ICE went public in 2005. It was Loeffler’s job to understand the business inside and out, and to be a conduit to investors and analysts. She had to understand what investors thought about the company, what they were worried about, and what they didn’t understand. “And being a financial derivatives business, there were a lot of things people didn’t understand,” Vice said.
A few years back, when ICE decided to spin off a crypto-currency business, Loeffler was tapped to lead it because of her deep knowledge of the company and her understanding of industry regulations. The company became known as Bakkt, and Loeffler was the initial CEO.
Loeffler stepped down from Bakkt after she was appointed to the Senate. Although Loeffler had flirted with a run for U.S. Senate in 2014, Vice said he was initially surprised when she did go into politics, “because it’s such a brutal thing.”
“I’m not sure why anybody would do it,” Vice said. “She’s one of the most genuine people that I know and have ever met. It just didn’t seem like somebody who would weather politics well. But she’s extremely tough, and she’s kind of figured out how that works pretty quickly.”
“I think she’s always been looking for bigger opportunities,” he said.
Loeffler said she decided to take the plunge into national politics after her business career highlighted for her the impact of governmental policies and regulations on business formation, job creation, the country’s competitiveness internationally, “and how Washington really did not put that on the forefront of policy.”
“I wanted to go fight for free enterprise, for America’s continued leadership on a world stage,” Loeffler said. “There are people in America who don’t understand how important our free enterprise system is to lifting everyone up. And those that want to attack America, our history, are really putting their futures and future generations in jeopardy.”
Between Two Worlds
For decades, Loeffler has straddled two worlds – the rural heartland of her youth and Atlanta’s corporate elite.
When he tapped her for the Senate last year, Kemp hoped Loffler could similarly bridge two strands of Georgia’s Republican politics – the more moderate and business-focused wing in the state’s rapidly growing suburbs, and Trump’s more populist, and sometimes conspiratorial, base. Since the November election, Loeffler has had to contend with Georgia attorney L. Lin Wood, who continues to float the conspiracy theory that Dominion voting machines tied to communist foreign governments switched votes from Trump to Biden. He also has urged pro-Trump voters to boycott the January races.
While Vice may be glad Loeffler is in the race, she’s had to work hard to win over the Republican right, edging out Trump-endorsed U.S. Rep. Doug Collins in a crowded 19-candidate field in November to earn a spot in January’s run-off. Collins has since endorsed Loeffler.
Loeffler has pitched herself as a conservative businesswoman and a political outsider who is staunchly pro-life, pro-Second Amendment and a supporter of Trump’s border wall. Over the summer she criticized the Black Lives Matter movement for promoting “violence and destruction across the country,” leading her Atlanta Dream players to openly oppose her candidacy.
After November’s election, in a nod to their support for Trump, Loeffler and Sen. David Perdue, the Republican running in the second run-off race, called on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to resign, deeming his handling of the election to be an “embarrassment.”
She’s supported Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results. During her December debate with Warnock, Loeffler refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the election, saying “the president has every right to every legal recourse, and that’s what’s taking place.”
Despite all of that, Debbie Dooley remains unconvinced. The founder of the Atlanta Tea Party and a co-founder of the national Tea Party movement who identifies as a “Trumpist” Republican, Dooley doesn’t intend to vote for Loeffler in January.
She said she thinks Loeffler, who vowed to spend $20 million of her own money on the race, is trying to buy the Senate seat. She believes Loeffler has too many conflicts of interest because of her husband’s position as the head of ICE (the company has contributed over $21 million to a political action committee supporting Loeffler’s bid. The hedge fund Citadel has contributed $6 million more, according to campaign finance records). And Dooley looks suspiciously at Loeffler’s connection with the WNBA, which has partnered with liberal groups, including Planned Parenthood.
“I don’t trust her. I don’t trust that she is the person she is pretending to be now,” said Dooley, who was a strong backer of Collins. “In the past she was more of a moderate, like a Romney Republican.”
Because Republicans only need to win one of the two races to keep control of the Senate, Dooley’s personal calculus is to support Perdue in his race, but not Loeffler, whose seat will be on the ballot again in two years. Dooley believes Warnock is so liberal that if he wins he’d be easy to beat in 2022 with a candidate more favorable to Georgia’s hard-right conservatives.
“If we elect her, if she turns into a Romney Republican like her past indicates she is, we will never be able to defeat her,” Dooley said of Loeffler.
Dooley said she would only support Loeffler if she takes “that final plunge into Trumpism” and vows to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory when the House and Senate meet on Jan. 6 to ratify the election results.
Loeffler said she remains a strong supporter of Trump’s, although she did not donate to his 2016 campaign. She said she is “going to continue to fight for the president, because he’s fought for us.” Trump, she noted, has campaigned for her and Perdue, and has urged Georgians to vote to keep the two senators in office.
She contends that anyone who questions her conservative bona fides doesn’t really know her. She’s been active in Republican politics for a decade, and has worked to get conservatives elected across Georgia, she said. She claims to have a “100 percent Trump voting record.”
“All you have to do is look at my voting record, my legislative achievements and my focus in this my first year in the Senate, and I think it’s pretty obvious that not only am I one of the most conservative members of the Senate, but looking ahead, the things I want to work on are strongly conservative,” Loeffler said.
Dooley knows her strategy is a gamble, and she insists she’s not trying to convince anyone else to vote against Loeffler. In fact, she believes the “overwhelming majority” of Trump-style Republicans will vote for Loeffler.
A recent poll that showed both Loeffler and Perdue with three-point leads over their Democratic opponents found little evidence that a large number of Georgia voters will split their tickets.
Dooley does worry that many conservatives won’t vote at all, because they believe the election will be rigged or they want to punish the Republican establishment for not doing enough to back Trump.
“There is tremendous anger,” she said. “I mean, just like on a scale of one to ten, an eleven.”
Loeffler acknowledged she still has concerns about the integrity of the state’s election in November. She said she and Perdue have made investments to help ensure January’s election results can be trusted. The most important thing, she said, is for Republicans to go vote.
“I feel really good about our message. I feel really good about our ground game,” she said. “We’ve got a couple more weeks left and we’re going to work every day until we get it done.”