Conservatives have Georgia on their minds.
With Republican Rep. Jack Kingston’s announcement this week that he will run for Senate, the state is on track to have three open House seats and an open Senate race in 2014. The unusual confluence of races without an incumbent has movement conservatives dreaming of consolidating power in the Southern state next year.
“There are some opportunities in other states but not quite like Georgia,” said Russ Walker, who runs the super PAC for FreedomWorks, a tea-party-aligned group.
At the top of the conservatives’ wish list is replacing retiring Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who has publicly flirted with raising taxes as part of a grand budget accord with Democrats, with an unrepentant hard-liner.
Already, three sitting Republican members of Georgia’s House delegation have jumped into the race to replace Chambliss—Kingston and Reps. Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun. Their entrances, in turn, have translated into three open House seats.
“There’s no doubt that Georgia represents a great opportunity for conservatives, both in the House and the Senate,” said Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action, the political arm affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
All three congressman running for the Senate seat regularly rank on scorecards as more conservative than the average House Republican. Broun scored a 96-percent rating from Heritage Action, for example, and was one of only three House Republicans last year to receive a 100-percent rating from the Club for Growth, the conservative antitax group. Gingrey is often not far behind, scoring 85 percent from Heritage and 89 percent from the Club.
via Tea Party Hopes for a Peachy 2014 in Georgia – NationalJournal.com.
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