MEMO: After Intraparty Battle, Loeffler In Worse Position Than Ever to Face Warnock

TO: Interested Parties

FROM: Alex Floyd, spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia

DATE: November 17, 2020

RE: After Intraparty Battle, Loeffler In Worse Position Than Ever to Face Warnock

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After “political mega-donor” Senator Kelly Loeffler ended her brutal intraparty battle two weeks ago in second place behind first-place finisher Reverend Raphael Warnock, the unelected senator still remains in a worse position than ever ahead of the January 5th runoff.

Trailing in the polls and underwater with voters, Loeffler has failed to connect with Georgians while making a “scorched-earth shift to the far right” over the past few months in her flailing campaign. Almost nothing has gone right for the unelected political donor, facing negative headlines over her coronavirus stock trading and “minefield” of ethics issues along with a botched roll-out of a health care plan that top policy experts revealed would not cover pre-existing conditions.

Now, saddled with a fractured and divided party along with toxic baggage from her intraparty civil war that forced her “as far to the right as humanly possible,” Loeffler is in a lose-lose position less than two months out from runoff day in battleground Georgia.

Here are the key facts on the state of the race:

• Loeffler’s millions in spending still leave her trailing Warnock in the polls and in fundraising. After spending millions on ads over the past nine months, poll after poll still shows Loeffler trailing Warnock by nearly double-digit margins, while Warnock’s campaign has repeatedly outraised Loeffler every quarter he’s been in the race — a clear sign of grassroots enthusiasm allowing him to overcome Loeffler’s personal fortune.

• Months of GOP infighting and her “race to the right” have taken a toll on Loeffler’s image. Loeffler begins her runoff campaign with less than a third of Georgians approving of her job performance and less than 20% job approval with independents. This comes after her “bruising intraparty battle” with Collins that led to a “scorched-earth shift to the far right” that included Loeffler accepting support from “bigoted” conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene (an endorsement that even Republicans admitted is “devastating to her” in the runoff) while staking out toxic, ultra-conservative terrain on every issue she could find.

• After dodging on health care for months, Loeffler still has no real answers for Georgians on a top issue. Desperate to change the narrative after her vote to allow the Trump administration to continue backing a lawsuit to completely overturn the health care law, Loeffler recently tried to roll out a health care “plan” after refusing to talk about the issue for months. Instead, experts trashed her so-called plan, calling it a “sham” that would “allow insurers to block coverage for pre-existing conditions.”

• Loeffler has been unable to put months of negative headlines from her stock trading scandal behind her. After she was caught dumping stocks and investing companies poised to profit from the pandemic, Loeffler has been on the defensive as she fails to answer critical questions about her “unseemly” trades. To this date, she still refuses to follow “The Isakson Standard” of putting her assets in a blind trust.

• Loeffler continues to define herself as an out-of-touch wealthy insider rather than a senator for Georgians. Less than a week out from Election Day, reporting revealed that Loeffler might have potentially benefited from the GOP’s tax giveaways that allowed her to write off her secretive private jet. These kinds of wealthy insider scandals have marked Loeffler’s candidacy since day one when she tried to buy her seat outright, and continue to define her image to voters across the state.

• Loeffler remains a “walking conflict of interest” in Washington. Before she even arrived in the Senate, Loeffler received a “lucrative parting gift” from her and her husband’s company ICE — a pattern of Washington swampiness that has continued during her time in office. Loeffler has served on a committee that’s “an overseer of the overseers of the company that made her rich” and continues to own millions worth of shares in ICE despite the company’s extensive record of lobbying the Senate.

• In the midst of a crisis, Loeffler is still stalling on coronavirus relief. Even while her own family collected millions in federal subsidies, Loeffler has allowed Mitch McConnell to stall needed coronavirus relief while claiming for months that she was “not seeing a big need” to extend now-expired emergency unemployment benefits with millions out of work. Instead, she has attacked needed aid as “government dependency” while Georgians struggle to pay bills and keep a roof over their heads. 

• Political experts have noticed all of these vulnerabilities and shifted the race away from Loeffler in the past few weeks. From her weak polling to her “battle royale” with Collins to her consistent negative headlines, political experts have been taking note of Loeffler’s weaknesses for months, with both Inside Elections and Sabato’s Crystal Ball moving the race toward Democrats in the days before the November election, following a ratings change in Warnock’s favor from Cook Political Report earlier last month.

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