Republicans have had almost unchallenged success in state races in Georgia for more than a decade, but the party has enough internal issues that the four men running to lead the state party said the task is protecting those office holders during a candidate forum Monday.
The event, hosted by Gwinnett Republican Women, featured the four candidates for the Chairman of the Republican Party pointing out what they see as a path to continued dominance for the party that has had almost 15 years of one victory after another at the state’s ballot boxes.
Issues like a dwindling active membership, financial woes and a push by Democrats in places that only a few years ago were considered safe for GOP candidates drew warnings that Georgia’s status as a red state is not safe.
Alex Johnson, Michael McNeely, Michael Welsh and John Watson want to lead the party, and one will be selected to do so next month at the party convention in Augusta. Only a couple of weeks after that convention, the party will face its most crucial election test in a few years.
Democrat John Ossoff will face Karen Handel in the race for Georgia’s 6th District seat in Congress on June 20. That race, however, could pale in comparison to the one for Georgia’s governor’s seat, which will be decided in less than 18 months.
McNeely, currently the Georgia GOP first vice chairman, would become the first black leader in the state Republican Party’s history. He has served as the Georgia Black Republican Council Chairman, and his campaign literature stresses his ability to expand the appeal of the Republican Party to new voters.
He has risen through the ranks at a time when the party has had its best success in the ballot box, but he could be a little too closely associated with the leadership that put the party’s gains on precarious ground.
GOP veteran B.J. Van Gundy moderated the forum and put McNeely on the spot with that issue.
“I was very candid about how I felt,” McNeely said, insisting he raised the issue with GOP insiders. “There is not a lot of power and authority there,” he said of the No. 2 spot.
Van Gundy actually put each of the candidates on the spot with a couple of difficult questions that the moderator said came “from what people are saying behind your back.”
He asked Welsh to defend his perceived lack of experience and the suggestion he would expect small donors to carry too much of the burden of rebuilding the party’s coffers.
Watson was asked about his career working for candidates rather than the party itself and about his career as a lobbyist that could create conflicts of interest if he led the GOP.
The audience seemed to accept Welsh response that he had plenty of experience for the job. Watson pointed out that he has experience getting candidates elected, and that has benefitted the party as a whole.
The only real crowd reaction of the night came when Alex Johnson, who has run for the post twice before, was asked to condemn what Van Gundy described as an attack Web site that has gone after the other candidates. The site once was anonymous, but Van Gundy said its operator had been exposed as being close to Johnson.
Johnson hedged a bit on his response, and that brought groans from the audience. “If anything on that Web site is factually inaccurate, I will condemn it,” he said.
Georgia’s two most populous GOP strongholds, Cobb and Gwinnett counties, are in danger of swinging back to becoming competitive, if not back into Democratic hands.
McNeely pointed out that is because the face of those counties is changing. “Georgia is changing fundamentally,” he said. “We have to have the capacity to adapt to those changes.”
Johnson focused on getting Georgia GOP voters to becoming more active in party affairs. He pointed out that more than 2 million people in the state voted from President Donald Trump in the fall, but only a fraction of those are active in the party.
