“Do you really know what you’re getting with David Perdue?” asked Congressman Jack Kingston in a debate Sunday night for the Georgia Senate Primary.
For Kingston, that’s his strongest argument against a candidate that has worked to paint the eleven-term congressman — now running for Senate — as an ineffective Washington insider that is part of the problem with Congress.
Without an incumbent, the Republican Senate runoff election for Georgia has heated up quickly as voters head to the polls next week.
The close race has gotten ugly as both campaigns have spent millions in negative advertisements to gain an edge.
The latest InsiderAdvantage/FOX 5 poll showed Kingston and Perdue statistically tied in the race.
Perdue made an early splash in the race, backed by millions of his own money spent on campaign ads painting Kingston and his colleagues in Congress as a bunch of crying babies that couldn’t fix the problems in Washington.
Perdue won the May 20 Republican primary but failed to get the 50 percent majority which would have allowed him to avoid a runoff election. Kingston came in second, beating Secretary of State Karen Handel, who was endorsed by Sarah Palin.
Handel and other Republican Georgia conservatives who ran filed their support behind Kingston in the runoff election.
During the debate, Kingston warned voters that the last time they elected an outsider, they got President Obama.
Kingston has won the endorsement of the Chamber of Commerce, which have already spent $2.3 million on the race.
Perdue, the former CEO of Dollar General, has largely self-funded his campaign, which has led to attacks against him for being a wealthy elite.
Kingston used that to his advantage in the debate.
Perdue is currently undergoing a 10-day bus tour across the state of Georgia in a final effort to put him over the top, attacking Kingston as a career politician.