ATLANTA – Three Georgia Democrats with vastly different professional and political backgrounds are competing for their party’s nomination to challenge incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. David Perdue’s bid for a second term.
Democratic voters will choose in Tuesday’s Senate primary between businesswoman Sarah Riggs Amico, investigative journalist Jon Ossoff and former Columbus Mayor Teresa Tomlinson. The winner will take on Perdue in November.
Tomlinson is the only one of the three who has held elective office, serving two terms as mayor of Columbus from 2011 until the beginning of last year. In that role, she doubled as the city’s public safety director.
After entering office saddled with double-digit unemployment and depleted reserves brought on by the Great Recession, Tomlinson overhauled the city’s budget, including its employee pension system, which was 96% funded by the time her second term ended.
“When you haven’t been in government, you can have all sorts of ideas,” she said. “When you have been in government, you understand how to actually get things done. That’s the real-world experience I bring to the table.”
Both Amico and Ossoff have run for public office but come up short. Amico won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor two years ago but lost to Republican Geoff Duncan.
Ossoff ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. House seat in a special election in 2017.
Amico has spent her career in the business world. The graduate of Harvard University’s MBA program has served as the owner of Jack Cooper Transport & Logistics, an auto hauling company, for the last decade and its executive chair since 2014.
After the company filed for bankruptcy protection last summer, she said she restructured its operations without cutting employees’ pay or health benefits by building a coalition of Teamsters, customers and lenders.
“In politics, a lot of folks don’t work with people who disagree with them,” Amico said. “In business, you can’t do that. … There’s a tremendous pragmatic streak about having to deliver results and being able to bring folks together to do a job people are counting on you to do.”
Ossoff is the CEO of Insight TWI, a media company that produces investigative documentaries. It’s a skill he said the U.S. Senate could use.
“I expose corruption for a living. We’ve exposed sexual slavery, high-level political corruption and corporate corruption,” he said. “Our political system is corrupt. This is a time to elect people whose experience and careers demonstrate rooting out and destroying corruption.”
As is typical in party primaries, the candidates generally agree on the key issues, from the coronavirus pandemic and the push for policing reform to their approaches on health care, immigration and climate change.
All three roundly criticize President Donald Trump’s handling of the U.S. response to COVID-19.
Amico characterized the president as “slow, sluggish and ineffective” in handling the coronavirus outbreak.
“This is what happens when you fire your pandemic response team and systemically undermine science,” she said.
Tomlinson said Trump’s failure goes beyond politics and is rooted in his philosophy.
“He doesn’t have a full and robust understanding of a centralized federal government and his role in running it,” Tomlinson said. “He turned it over to the states, sometimes to the mayors.”
Vying with COVID-19 for the nation’s attention is the death of George Floyd, a black man, in Minneapolis at the hands of a white police officer charged with murder and the subsequent mass protests in cities across the country.
Ossoff is running campaign ads denouncing Trump’s threatening response to the demonstrators and calling for federal criminal justice reform. He and Amico have commended the peaceful protesters and urged Americans to stand with their calls for racial justice.
“The pervasive, systematic racism in our criminal justice system must end,” Ossoff said. “We cannot move on once the cameras move on.”
With the country’s attention riveted on coronavirus and the nationwide wave of protests of police brutality during the last two weeks, health care, immigration and climate change have been pushed to the back burner. But all three issues were front and center during the state-by-state Democratic presidential primary contests waged last winter and will be on voters’ minds going forward.
All three Democratic Senate candidates support expanding Medicaid coverage to more uninsured Georgians, ending coverage denials based on pre-existing conditions and adding a public option to the private coverages offered through the Affordable Care Act.
“Health care is a human right,” Amico said. “People shouldn’t be sick because they’re poor or poor because they’re sick.”
Amico said immigration is personal to her because she is married to a naturalized American citizen. All three Democratic Senate candidates have criticized Perdue for introducing legislation into the Senate that would base immigration decisions more on an applicant’s education and skills and less on family ties.
“Our policies need to reflect our country’s values,” she said. “Pulling apart families fleeing violent poverty is as un-American and I can imagine.”
The Democrats do differ on another issue: support for the Green New Deal, a legislative package that aims to address climate change with job-creating clean energy investments.
Tomlinson and Amico are all-in on the Green New Deal, Amico calling it one of her top priorities.
But Ossoff said he’s not ready to sign up until the initiative is fully fleshed out.
“I support an ambitious infrastructure program that will create jobs,” he said. “[But] I’m not going to endorse a two-page resolution proposing a sweeping overhaul of our entire economy and society until I understand the impact on Georgia. … The details matter.”
Tomlinson said skeptics of the Green New Deal don’t understand what it’s about.
“It’s nothing more than a set of principles,” she said. “We have an opportunity to create millions of new jobs. … I don’t know who would be opposed to that.”
Ossoff has been the leading campaign fund-raiser in the race, and a poll released last week showed him with a huge lead. But he has taken heat on the campaign trail for losing to Republican Karen Handel by a narrow margin three years ago in a special election for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District seat in Atlanta’s northern suburbs.
Held in a non-election year that made it essentially the only game in town, the contest drew a huge field of candidates and attracted so much money from across the country that it became the most expensive House race in history.
Ossoff dismisses the criticism as ignoring the odds stacked against him.
“I ran against 17 opponents when no one knew my name, and they had to send the president, vice president and speaker of the House to stop me,” he said.
Amico has been characterized by opponents as a “recovering Republican” and concedes she is not a lifelong Democrat. But she offset that questioning of her loyalty by pointing to her showing in 2018, when she rolled up more than 1.8 million votes in a close race against Duncan, a record for a Georgia Democrat running for lieutenant governor.
“There’s only one party fighting for working families, economic justice, to protect our right to vote and secure our election … and that is the Democratic Party,” she said.
Tomlinson’s candidacy might appear to be at a disadvantage because – unlike Amico and Ossoff – she does not live in metro Atlanta, the core of Democratic voting strength in Georgia. But she said gains Democrats have posted in the metro region in recent elections haven’t been enough to put the party over the top.
“Democrats aren’t going to win statewide depending on Atlanta alone,” she said. “There are large populations of Democrats who feel disenfranchised because the party only runs metro-Atlanta candidates for statewide seats.”
Tomlinson, who lived in DeKalb County for 28 years and practiced law in Atlanta before moving to Columbus, said she can attract a blend of support from both Atlanta and from outside of the metro region.
Four other candidates in the race have neither raised much campaign money or gained meaningful traction in the polls. But their presence on the ballot likely will make it difficult for any of the three major hopefuls to capture the 50%-plus-one-vote winning margin needed to avoid a runoff.
If no one captures a majority on Tuesday, the top two vote-getters would face off in a runoff Aug. 11 for the right to face Perdue.
AT A GLANCE
SARAH RIGGS AMICO
Age: 40
Lives: Marietta
Experience: Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2018; Owner, Jack Cooper Transport & Logistics (2010-present); executive chair at Jack Cooper (2014-2020)
Education: Bachelor’s degree, Washington and Lee University; MBA, Harvard University
Family: Husband, Andrea; two daughters
JON OSSOFF
Age: 33
Lives: Atlanta
Experience: CEO, Insight TWI, media company that produces investigative documentaries (2013-present); national security aide to U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Stone Mountain (2007-2012)
Education: Bachelor’s degree, Georgetown University; Master’s degree, London School of Economics
Family: Wife, Alisha
TERESA TOMLINSON
Age: 55
Lives: Columbus
Experience: Partner, Hall Booth Smith, P.C.; mayor of Columbus (2011-2019), executive director, MidTown Inc., (2006-2010); partner, Pope, McGlamry, Kilpatrick, Morrison and Norwood, P.C. (16 years)
Education: Bachelor’s degree, Sweet Briar College; Law degree, Emory University
Family: Husband, Trip