http://www.myajc.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/georgia-primary-stops-anti-establishment-movement-/nrTw4/Georgia primary stops anti-establishment movement in its tracks By Greg Bluestein and James Salzer -
Posted: 12:00 a.m. Saturday, May 28, 2016
One incumbent is seen as the very embodiment of Georgia’s Republican Party establishment. Another defended the Ku Klux Klan.
A third was arrested on charges of drunken driving in the middle of the day, a gun on his hip and four teenagers in the car. A fourth, a House banking chairman, is currently trying to settle a lawsuit that followed the 2012 failure of a bank where he was a director.
The fifth was a wealthy, unpolitician challenger taking on a Republican incumbent who had voted for a huge tax hike.
The four incumbents won their primaries handily on Tuesday. The rich guy got clobbered.
A Donald Trump-style anti-incumbent insurgency at the polls? Not in Georgia on Tuesday.
“I have not seen the Trump throw-out-the-bums effect people were talking about,” said state Sen. Butch Miller, R-Gainesville. “If you were going to see it, it would have been in the primaries.”
The folks who won last time, and the time before, won again Tuesday.
“What we saw primary night was a very traditional outcome,” said Brian Robinson, a spokesman for a big business political action committee and former communications director for Gov. Nathan Deal. “The candidates that won ran on the same issues they ran on in 2010, 2012 and 2014.”
A Congress cakewalk
Congress is roundly criticized by Georgians, as it is by voters throughout the nation. But all Georgia congressmen, and U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., one of the legends of the state’s modern Republican Party, steamrolled opposition in their path.
“The more experience the better,” Gabriel Gonzales of Atlanta said in explaining his support for Isakson. “He knows what he’s doing. Or else you get someone who isn’t prepared at all.”
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