Can a Repentant, Regretful Republican Thrive as a Dem?
Geoff Duncan isn’t just running for governor of Georgia as a Democrat. He’s testing how wide the party’s ‘big tent’ can stretch.
Homerville, Georgia
GEOFF DUNCAN, THE FORMER REPUBLICAN lieutenant governor of Georgia, keeps repeating a three-word phrase that most politicians go their whole careers without uttering: “I was wrong.”
He was wrong, he says, about guns and the National Rifle Association, whose “A” rating he once celebrated. He was wrong about abortion and about standing by Gov. Brian Kemp as he signed a six-week ban of the procedure into law. And he was wrong to oppose Medicaid expansion in his home state.
“I’m willing to say ‘I’m sorry I got a few things wrong,’ and be very transparent and very vulnerable about that,” Duncan told me last week.
At a time when politics seems like a playground for the egocentric, self-assured, and unapologetic, Duncan is placing a huge bet that vulnerability can resonate with voters. He has switched parties to run as a Democrat in the race for Georgia governor. And he is banking his career on the notion that Democrats will not just reward him for his past criticisms of Donald Trump but find his pleas for redemption to be endearing and his ideological conversions to be sincere.
It’s not just the governor’s race at stake, either. Whether Duncan can effectively win over Democrats will provide one of the clearest illustrations to date as to how forgiving or rigid the party’s voters remain in the second Trump era. Or, as Duncan put it to me: “My campaign, my election is going to be a great gauge on the Democratic party and their desire to win.”
Over the course of several days in Georgia, I had a front-row seat to see how this gambit was playing out.