The start of the 2018 legislative session saw a bit of a lull in the governor’s race, as fundraising takes a required pause and candidates gather themselves for the May 22nd primary. In the past week though we’ve seen the first wave of advertising from some of the top GOP contenders, and unsurprisingly those ad buys have come from the candidates not currently in office.
Clay Tippins, the political newcomer who has made that fact the centerpiece of his campaign, was the first to strike with a $250,000 purchase in the Albany, Columbus and Macon media markets during the Super Bowl. Tippins has a lot of work to do to get his face out in front of voters with very little name recognition compared to his rivals with long histories in public office.
It’s easy to see the message here – Tippins is running as a veteran and businessman untainted by that ‘career politician’ stench. Note the caricatures of his opponents in the GOP primary floundering in the pool in what seems to be a recurring theme between Tippins and his doppelganger in the competition – former state Senator Hunter Hill.
Hill and Tippins are running campaigns with nearly identical messaging – Atlanta veterans and businessmen who are ‘political outsiders,’ not members of the establishment and certainly not career politicians. Apparently both candidates had the same idea for their maiden ad-campaigns of the season as well.
Hill’s ad features him running a military obstacle course as opposed to swimming – he was in the army and not the navy after all – but the messaging is the same and so are the images of his main opponents, an Italian-suited Casey Cagle chief among them, floundering in the mud.
The ‘political outsider’ messaging is always a popular one when it comes to primaries – and it should be considering David Perdue’s surprising U.S. Senate win in 2014 and then Donald Trump’s even more surprising Presidential campaign two years later. But with two similar candidates with similar backgrounds running on similar messaging butting heads, will that outsider message be able to take root?
