Tea party vs. establishment in Georgia House race

A truck-driving Macon businesswoman and a former sheriff’s deputy with a history of crossing party lines are trying to oust Republican Austin Scott from his three-term seat in Congress as Georgia’s 8th district U.S. representative.

It’s the second time that Republican Angela Hicks, owner of Stuff It Mobile Storage, has crossed paths with Scott in the sprawling district that runs south from central Georgia to the Florida border.

Hicks originally ran for the seat in 2010 against then-incumbent Democrat Jim Marshall, but ended her campaign when Scott entered the race after abandoning his gubernatorial run.

“I like to say his ocean liner swamped our little canoe,” Hicks said of Scott, who had strong support from the state party leadership.

This time around, she won’t be nearly as deferential or diplomatic towards Scott.

For James Neal Harris, a retired Bibb County deputy sheriff turned process-serving, bounty-hunting private investigator, the race is an opportunity to show voters what it means to be a self-described “lifelong registered Democrat, but not a staunch Democrat.”

And for Scott, the strong favorite to retain his seat, he’ll have to show he can withstand a growing anti-incumbent sentiment and the possible downstream electoral drag of a Donald Trump or Ted Cruz GOP presidential nomination.

Since the district was redrawn to favor Republicans following the 2010 Census, it would be very difficult for Harris to pull off a victory in the November election, said David Wasserman, U.S. House Editor at The Cook Political Report.

The real race, Wasserman said, will be between Scott and Hicks in the Republican primary May 24; the winner will face the long-shot Harris in the November general election.

Scott has more than $643,000 on hand for the campaign, according to Opensecrets.org, a website of the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research center that tracks campaign spending. More than $312,000 came from political action committees. Another $191,000 came in large contributions, mostly from business interests.

His war chest includes donations of $10,000 each from the Independent Contractor Exchange Group, American Crystal Sugar and the National Community Pharmacists Association. Northrup Grumman gave Scott $9,000 and Koch Industries and Coca-Cola Co. provided $7,500 apiece.

No campaign fundraising figures were available for Hicks or Harris.

“If the people give me the privilege to serve again,” Scott said, “I’m going to continue to do my job, with regard to constituent services locally, as the only Republican (from Georgia) on the Armed Services Committee in the House or the Senate, and I’m going to do my job to support agriculture and our farmers and our agricultural economy.”

Hicks doesn’t consider herself part of the Republican Party’s tea-party faction: “I really hate to lump me to them or them to me,” she said.

But her disdain of establishment Republicans echoes familiar tea-party refrains. On her website, she paints Republican Party leaders in Congress with a broad, unflattering brush stroke.

“Mr. Scott, you and John Boehner and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell had six years to fight for us, instead you fought us, you fought common sense, you fought our futures,” Hicks’ website reads, referring to the former speaker of the House, the current speaker and the majority leader in the Senate.

She said she’s confident that disgruntled GOP primary voters will heed her call for change and and “send a leader, a freedom defender and, yes, a truck driver to Washington.”

Hicks pilots a six-wheel, 21-foot rollback truck as she delivers storage containers to business and residential customers around the Macon area.

Scott, who was unopposed in the last two elections, needed only to see Hicks’ aggressive roadside billboards to realize she means business.

With a self-funded campaign, Hicks has put up several dozen billboards throughout the district attacking Scott’s conservative bona fides and casting him as an establishment Republican who votes the party line – even when it goes against conservative principles.

One Hicks billboard that got Scott’s attention says he received a “D-plus” grade from NumbersUSA, an organization that wants to slow U.S. immigration. Scott actually has a career grade of A-minus from the organization and a B-plus grade since 2013.

Hicks said the D-plus came from the website InsideGov.com, which lists lawmaker scores from a variety of special interest groups. The site incorrectly lists Scott’s NumbersUSA score as 64, resulting in the D-plus grade from Hicks.

Don’t expect Scott to start a billboard war.

“It’s just not who I am,” he said this week. “She’s got the right to say what she chooses. I think people locally are more interested in making sure that we take care of national security and that we take care of Robins Air Force Base and things like the A-10 (fighter jet) that matter so much for Moody (Air Force Base).”

Final house passage of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act included two amendments offered by Scott. One ensures that “sufficient workload is directed to military depots,” like Robins, according to a Scott press release.

And the other helped small pharmacies to participate in the TRICARE prescription drug benefit program. The measure related to military depots made it into the final legislation signed by President Barack Obama in November 2015, but the pharmacy amendment did not.

The NDAA also continued funding for the fleet of A-10 combat jets at Moody, which Scott fought for despite resistance from both parties.

“The chairman of the Armed Services Committee was against me. The president was against me. And in the end, the A-10 is still flying,” Scott said. “And in the president’s budget this year, he agreed to maintain it. So that’s a big win for the district that I’m directly responsible for.”

Hicks said it was Scott’s votes on Trade Promotion Authority and the $1.1 trillion 2015 Omnibus spending bill that angered her the most and prompted her to run against him.

“I thought those votes didn’t represent the men and women of the 8th District, and I couldn’t stay silent anymore,” Hicks said.

Obama angered many Democrats when he sought congressional approval to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Asia-Pacific free trade deal involving 12 countries.

But with votes from Scott and 190 other congressional Republicans, the president secured House passage of the Trade Promotion Authority – a fast-track bill that would help the pact move faster through Congress.

In a press release at the time, Scott defended his vote.

“Free trade opens new markets to America’s agricultural and industrial producers and allows our economy to expand, which means more jobs right here at home in Georgia’s Eighth Congressional District,” Scott wrote after the vote.

Other Republicans, however, opposed the Trade Promotion Authority because it allowed the president negotiate a trade agreement and get a congressional vote on the measure within a certain time period with no amendments allowed and limited congressional debate.

Scott again defended his vote this week.

“I don’t have any problem at all with allowing the (trade) negotiations to go forward as long as those negotiations are made public to the American citizens prior to any vote on final approval of it. Which is exactly what that vote did,” Scott said.

Hicks said she also was distressed over Scott’s vote for the $1.1 trillion Omnibus spending bill that Republican leaders negotiated with Democrats.

Hicks said the bill was “included everything on Obama’s Christmas wish list,” including funding for Syrian refugee resettlement and continued funding for Planned Parenthood when many Republicans were trying to defund the group.

Amid the rancor between Hicks and Scott, Democrat Harris will have the difficult task of trying to raise his public image while no one is paying much attention.

Harris ran for the 8th District congressional seat in 2006 as a Republican. He got 18 percent of the vote in the GOP runoff against former U.S. Rep. Mac Collins, who garnered 82 percent of the vote.

A self-proclaimed “lifelong registered Democrat,” Harris said he ran as a Republican to help former Rep. Jim Marshall, the incumbent “blue dog” Democratic representative at the time.

Harris said part of his rationale was to force Collins to spend money on the primary race, so that he’d have less to use against Marshall in the general election. Marshall went on to narrowly defeat Collins 51 percent to 49 percent.

“I wasn’t going to run against the guy I wanted to stay in (office) because I knew Jim Marshall. I know him personally,” Harris explained. “I know there’s a lot of people who aren’t going to understand that and that’s why whenever I go into a meeting, I automatically explain that first.”

But a July 1, 2004, story in the Jones County News reported that Harris also ran that year as a Republican for the Jones County Board of Commissioners.

The same paper later reported, however, on Oct. 28, 2004, that Harris and three other commission candidates “did not have to qualify as representing any political party,” because it was unclear whether the commission chair – the position they were vying for – would be a full-time position.

Harris said he doesn’t remember whether he ran as a Republican or not in that race. “That was a long time ago,” he said.

But after years of working behind the scenes on many campaigns, Harris said he isn’t averse to helping or taking his support across party lines.

“I don’t see a Democrat or a Republican,” he said. “I don’t vote party. I vote person. We’re all in the same boat, hopefully going down the same river, hopefully going the same way.”

He said he decided to run against Scott after one of Scott’s staffers hung up the phone on him after denying his request for assistance with a problem.

In spite of his long odds and short money, Harris said he expects to win in November.

This story was originally published March 31, 2016 at 4:44 PM with the headline "Tea party vs. establishment in Georgia House race."