On Tuesday, businessman David Perdue narrowly won the runoff for the GOP Senate nomination in Georgia. He'll go on to face Democrat Michelle Nunn in the general, in one of the 9 key races that could determine control of the Senate this year. There were few apparent policy differences between Perdue and his opponent Rep. Jack Kingston. Yet the race featured a bizarre escalating ad war in which each contender was repeatedly compared to a crying baby, as Slate's Dave Weigel and ABC's Chris Good point out:
Georgia’s GOP Senate primary featured 5 separate ads comparing candidates to crying babies
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
1) Perdue premiered the baby strategy in his first TV ad in February, which depicted all 4 of his GOP opponents as crying children:
2) Kingston responded by depicting Perdue as a baby smearing cake all over his face while destroying Georgia jobs:
3) Perdue responded by depicting Kingston as a baby chewing on a pair of glasses, with a diaper helpfully labeled “Jack”:
4) A Perdue ad in the runoff toned things down a bit, airing a mere 2 seconds of baby footage:
5) So in a failed, last-gasp attempt to stop Perdue, the US Chamber of Commerce decided to... compare him to a baby:
On Tuesday, Perdue edged out Kingston in the runoff, winning 50.9 percent of the vote. Then, in a very un-baby-like move, Kingston almost immediately endorsed Perdue for the general election, saying Republicans needed to unite to defeat Michelle Nunn:
I called @Perduesenate to congratulate him and offer my support for his campaign in the General Election.
— Jack Kingston (@JackKingston4GA) July 23, 2014 Perdue’s ads were made by Fred Davis, a GOP consultant known for unusual ad choices. (In 2010, Davis became infamous for what became known as the “demon sheep” ad.)
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