With Both Seats at Risk, Georgia Republicans Say Loeffler “Should Consider Dropping Out”

Georgia Republicans “Nervous As Hell” About Loeffler

After weeks of bad headlines for unelected “political mega-donor” Senator Kelly Loeffler, Georgia Republicans are now openly floating the idea that she “should consider dropping out” because of the risk she poses to both GOP-held seats. McClatchy reports that Georgia Republicans are anxious that Loeffler will “be a drag on the rest of the GOP ticket,” including Senator David Perdue, who is entangled in his own stock trading scandal. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution details the “challenging picture for Loeffler” as the “slow-burning controversy” continues to dominate the Georgia political landscape. 

“Senator Loeffler has dominated the headlines, but both seats are at risk because of both her and Senator Perdue’s scandals,” said DSCC spokesperson Helen Kalla. “Let’s be clear: the problem will not disappear if Loeffler goes away. The corruption, self-dealing, and cowardice is an enduring issue for Georgia Republicans. Come November, voters will hold the Republicans who put their self-interest ahead of Georgia accountable.”

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

McClatchy: Loeffler’s campaign hoped for a reset. But senator’s stocks came under new scrutiny

By Francesca Chambers

Key Points: 

• Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s campaign was seeking a reset after a rocky first few months in the Republican’s tenure as a Georgia senator. Instead, an FBI investigation of a fellow senator suddenly placed Loeffler’s own stock sales front and center again.

• Even before that development, several high-placed Republicans had told McClatchy that they were concerned that Loeffler’s stock sales had become too much of a distraction and she should consider dropping out of the special election for the Senate seat she currently holds.

• Former Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a Republican who represented the Columbus area until 2017, said Republican Party officials should consider having a “kitchen table” discussion with Loeffler about her candidacy.

• That sentiment among those Republicans grew stronger after federal authorities executed a search warrant and seized a phone of North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr in an investigation about stocks the Republican sold following a January coronavirus briefing that Loeffler also attended. The law enforcement action put new pressure on Loeffler to address her own stock sales and assess her volatile political situation.

• “This doesn’t need to spread like something in poison ivy and start getting on other people,” Westmoreland said in a recent interview. “Is this going to interfere with our congressional races, where we’re trying to win a couple of seats back, or is this going to interfere with the presidential election of President Trump? Is it going to interfere with Sen. David Perdue’s election?”

• A person close to Trump who had previously expressed anxiety about Loeffler “endangering our Senate majority,” told McClatchy on Thursday that the new attention to her stock sales were even more worrisome.

• A Georgia Republican strategist familiar with the race told McClatchy that down-ballot candidates in the state are “nervous as hell” that Loeffler’s stock sales will be an election issue that will spill over into their races.

• Trey Hood, a pollster and professor of political science at the University of Georgia, said the stock sales have defined Loeffler in a way that will be hard for her to shake off.

• “Most normal people are not selling millions of dollars in stock,” he said, “or know what a blind trust is. People are connecting some dots here, and they’re not really good dots.”

Read the full report here. 

Atlanta Journal Constitution: ‘Kryptonite?’ Loeffler’s wealth drives campaign, but threatens it, too

By Greg Bluestein

Key Points:

• U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s immense wealth is at once her greatest political asset and biggest liability. And nothing exemplifies that tension quite like the uproar over the newly appointed Republican’s stock transactions.

• Loeffler has tried to distinguish her situation from that of U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican facing calls to resign after FBI agents seized his cellphone as part of an investigation into whether he dumped stocks using private information about the coronavirus pandemic.

• Even as she maintains that the FBI hasn’t issued a similar search warrant, she is still dogged by questions about her advisers’ purchase and sale of millions of dollars worth of stocks as the pandemic worsened. And while she insisted they did no wrong, she said late Thursday that she handed over documents to federal investigators.

• “The governor made a decision that a woman could definitely help him and the other Republicans on the ticket in the suburbs. I understand his thinking,” Westmoreland said. “But I don’t know that I could find a suburban woman in a year that could relate to having her husband buy her a private plane to take her to the office.”

• With scant public polling, the damage to her campaign is still uncertain. But recent internal Republican surveys paint a challenging picture for Loeffler.

• But the disclosure that her advisers sold off large quantities of stocks in the weeks after she attended a Jan. 24 senators-only briefing on the coronavirus has triggered a slow-burning controversy that’s roiled her campaign.

Read the full report here. 

###