In one of the most closely watched congressional races in U.S. history, then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler on Jan. 5 lost her Georgia seat by two points in a runoff against the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a defeat that tipped the upper house to Democratic control. But the former businesswoman who grew up on an Illinois farm isn’t through with politics.
She’s organizing a grass-roots organization called Greater Georgia Action, backed by her own millions, that aims to register hundreds of thousands of new GOP voters; just the conservative-leaning folks who, she says, didn’t cast ballots and cost her reelection. Loeffler’s new venture puts her in what should prove a fierce battle for tomorrow’s voters with Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate for governor. Abrams had fantastic success rallying Democratic voters to defeat Loeffler and fellow runoff candidate David Perdue. Minutes after Loeffler unveiled her new initiative in a press release on Monday morning, a spokesperson for Abrams’s group Fair Fight Action fired back: “If Kelly Loeffler wants to spend even more of her own money on losing causes, she is free to do so. And she is free to name her group ‘Unfair Fight.’”
In an interview with Fortune, Loeffler says she’d consider running for office in the future. “I haven’t ruled it out,” she says. “It’s too early to think about it. I won’t be comfortable until we can get the state on a better footing for all candidates. I’ve seen enough of politics to know that a loss doesn’t mean our fight is over. I had to step forward to put what I learned as a candidate into action to grow the conservative movement.”
Where the GOP falls short
Loeffler says she started Greater Georgia to create a platform for voter registration drives. She keeps a small team on staff not just in the weeks and months before elections, but all year round. That relentless consistency, she says, is what the Georgia GOP has lacked and what the Democrats have recently done so well. “David and I ran the largest campaign in scope and scale in the history of Georgia,” Loeffler tells me. “We had a field organization of 1,000 that fanned out across the state and thousands of volunteers.”
But as Senate candidates, she says, she and Perdue had to build that organization in just nine weeks: “While it was a herculean effort, we had to do it on the fly. In the future, the GOP needs to maintain a year-round presence, reaching out to voters.”
By contrast, she notes, the Democrats had an organization with significantly more boots on the ground months before the runoff. “Our $150 million campaign was like a starting a small company,” says Loeffler. “But the status is that the entire operation shuts down after the election. It’s like shutting down a small company where you immediately lose contact with your customers.” Greater Georgia, she says, is meant to keep that contact with voters always in place and expand it going forward. The executive who helped grow Intercontinental Exchange into a $64 billion colossus alongside CEO and husband Jeff Sprecher concludes: “If we don’t shut down, we can grow the rolls of GOP voters organically outside of an election year, on the consistent path.”
The potential for registering GOP voters is enormous, says Loeffler. The proof is that so many who lean Republican appeared so disenchanted with the process that they stayed away during the runoff. “We know that 5 million people voted in the November election, and 4.5 million—500,000 fewer—cast ballots in the runoff,” says Loeffler. “That’s half a million fewer voters. And the majority were Republicans.” The goal of Greater Georgia, she says, is to restore their confidence in elections and bring hundreds of thousands of Georgians who favor a conservative agenda but remained silent on Jan. 5 back to the polls.
Three big goals
Greater Georgia will pursue three main objectives. The first is to register more GOP voters. “Over 2 million people who are eligible to vote in Georgia haven’t registered to vote,” says Loeffler. “We believe that the majority lean right or center-right. They support conservative values, choice in education, low taxes, and smaller government. We see a significant opportunity to register people who will vote Republican in the future.” That’s why she’s establishing a counterpart to Abrams’s organization.
Second, Loeffler wants to reach out to the Black, Latino, and Asian communities, and to women, by promoting the conservative cause in their communities. She notes that Georgia ranks second among all states for the number of Black-owned businesses, a cohort of business owner that, she says, isn’t hearing enough about the GOP pro-growth platform. “We keep saying we want a big tent,” she says. “But the big tent keeps [getting] taken down every two years and has to be rebuilt. We should keep the tent up year-round.”
Third, she wants to restore what she characterizes as voters’ loss of faith in the election process. “Georgia enacted unprecedented changes in voting because of the pandemic,” she says. “So many changes were rapidly pushed through.” She cites surveys showing that 55% of Georgians believe the state needs more election safeguards, and that 75% believe IDs should be required for absentee voting, a rule that didn’t apply in the November and January elections. “Too many Georgians don’t have faith in our elections,” she says. “Some counties mailed out applications for absentee ballots, and some didn’t. We need to restore uniformity and transparency to the election process.”
Despite her wealth and success, Loeffler thinks of herself as voice for Georgians struggling to make a living and get their kids back in school. “I served in Washington as someone who grew up on a farm, who worked the fields, who’d waitressed, who worked for decades building a business,” she says.
On Jan. 5, Georgians rallied to another voice with a message far from Loeffler’s. But Loeffler just left the sidelines and jumped back in the game, and the opponents who caused her loss are taking notice.
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