Republican senate hopefuls gather in Adel » Local News » Valdosta Daily Times

ADEL — In the first of seven scheduled debates across Georgia, Republican primary candidates for Saxby Chambliss’ Senate seat met in Adel Saturday night to debate each other and make their case for why they should receive the nomination.

The seven candidates — Art Gardner, Karen Handel, Paul Broun, David Perdue, Derrick Grayson, Eugene Yu and Jack Kingston—represent a number of backgrounds: an engineer turned lawyer, a former Georgia secretary of state, a doctor who was elected to Congress in 2007, a former CEO of Reebok and Dollar General, a minister, a former Army man whose parents immigrated to the United States when he was young and a Congressional representative with 20 years of experience.

With the debate serving as the first glimpse of what the Republican primary race is going to be like, almost every candidate used their opening statement to agree with each other on several issues.

Each one said that the nation’s debt, spending and budget are spiraling out of control, that Obamacare needs to be repealed and that governmental regulation in general needs to be reduced.

The first question, concerning what each candidate would look for in the next Supreme Court Justice, revealed more agreement, with Kingston, Broun and Yu calling for a strict Constitutionalist, Handel and Perdue seeking a judge who no history of activism, Grayson calling “someone not beholden to either party, a true conservative” and Gardner making the argument that the Court as a whole needs more diversity, not just in ethnicity and gender, but in geography, location and educational background.

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