Long before there was a mighty Republican machine running Georgia, there were a handful of brash conservatives plotting to lift their tiny, financially struggling party so they could end more than a century of Democratic dominance.
Among the chief architects was Newt Gingrich, a West Georgia College assistant professor who ran for Congress three times in a blue-collar district — twice against an entrenched Talmadge Democratic incumbent — before finally winning.
Gingrich traveled West and North Georgia during the 1970s and ’80s, preaching the Republican gospel and maintaining that the GOP had to choose between remaining a silent, permanent minority or aggressively taking the fight to Democrats.
He chose confrontation and played the role of provocateur, unwilling to accept second place.
While Gingrich soared and crashed in Washington — helping produce the Republican Revolution in 1994 before resigning four years later under pressure from colleagues — his legacy remains in Georgia.
The careers of many of those now in charge — such as Gov. Nathan Deal — or who led the state House and Senate takeovers in the 2000s — were aided and inspired by Gingrich.
“There is no question that he played a huge role in the Republican Party that exists today, ” said Rusty Paul, a lobbyist who served as chairman of the state GOP from 1995 to 1999 and is now mayor of Sandy Springs.
The “us-against-them” tactics and language Gingrich used in Congress and taught to candidates became standard in the statehouse, helping the GOP build distinctions with the Democratic majority that helped build a base for its takeover.
And he helped raise money for a party and candidates often short of cash. For much of the past decade, the state GOP has maintained a huge fundraising advantage over the Democrats, and Paul remembers Gingrich helping to bring headliners such as Ronald Reagan and conservative hero Jack Kemp in to build party coffers from the late 1970s through the 1990s.
Former U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Savannah, calls Gingrich an “indispensable early trailblazer” for Georgia Republicans. Kingston remembers his college days, when Gingrich came to the University of Georgia to recruit students to get involved in GOP politics.
“I think he inspired bravery and activism in a lot of us who would have kind of come up and been happy perpetually in the minority,” Kingston said.
But others say Georgians paid a price for the tactics Gingrich and his followers used.
“In the long run, I am not sure it’s best for the state or the nation to have confrontational politics, ” said George Hooks, a former dean of the Georgia Senate and a Democrat. “Now, I agree with him (Gingrich) on many issues. But he would find a way to attack on every single front. It was not the style of the Republicans in this state until his appearance on the scene.”
Speak like Newt
Still others say credit belongs to others besides Gingrich for the Republicans’ Georgia dominance.
Though many Gingrich tactics were used by the state GOP in the early 1990s to confront Democrats in Atlanta, there were other Republican leaders who were not trained by Gingrich who helped lead the party.
When Gingrich began his rise in politics in the early 1970s, Georgia was the bluest of blue states. Jimmy Carter was governor; Herman Talmadge, the former segregationist governor, was in his second decade in the U.S. Senate; and barely 10 percent of the General Assembly was Republican.
Gingrich was controversial from the start, running for Congress only a few years out of graduate school and almost immediately accusing his opponent, 12-term Congressman Jack Flynt of corruption and ineptitude.
He narrowly lost twice to Flynt, but when the Democrat retired, Gingrich finally won election in 1978.
Gingrich spent the next decade in Congress characterizing Democrats as champions of the “corrupt liberal welfare state” and building the hardball language and tactics for which he would become famous.
He went after Georgia Democrats, too. At the 1989 state GOP convention in Cobb County, he described House Speaker Tom Murphy and state leaders this way: “They are not good ol’ boys. They are pleasant people who behind the scenes are thugs.”
Along the way, he recruited and inspired young conservatives, many who wound up running for office in Georgia.
He developed and, through GOPAC, taught candidates how to “speak like Newt” by using words such as “liberal” and “corrupt” to describe Democrats and their policies. Tape recordings of GOPAC’s strategy were made available to candidates throughout the country. Paul remembers listening to them during drives to and from work.
Confronting Democrats
Gingrich also recruited Democrats to switch parties. Among them was Deal, a conservative Democrat from Gainesville.
Deal had been a mild-mannered state Senate leader in Atlanta.
He was elected to Congress in 1992, and after the 1994 elections, with Republicans suddenly in the majority, he switched parties.
Two years later, Deal was at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, lambasting the president who led his former party, Bill Clinton, for his “liberal” policies.
Deal, who was first elected governor in 2010, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2012 that Gingrich deserves a lot of credit for the party’s Georgia dominance.
“When I changed, I was the first Republican member from the 9th (Congressional) District of Georgia at least since Reconstruction,” he said. “… By the time I left (Congress), we did not have a single Democrat in the House or Senate that represented any portion of the 9th Congressional District.”
Gingrich rankled some feathers in the GOP by pushing his candidates to run the party and injecting himself into local politics.
By the 1990s, the young Republican minority in the state Capitol was turning up the heat on Democrats led by Murphy.
The most common confrontational tactic involved putting amendments on bills to stake out Republican positions. The point wasn’t necessarily to change or pass legislation: It was to show the differences between the two parties in the most stark way and get Democrats on the record on issues that would later be used against them in the next election.
For instance, for years Democrats had written the state budget and easily passed their spending plans at the end of each session. But Republicans tried to put amendments onto the budget to cut out some of the programs Democrats favored.
State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, was famous for trying to pass amendments ending affirmative action and other amendments that staked out positions calling for tax cuts or pushing social issues. When Democrats voted against the amendments, their positions were recorded and they wound up on scorecards being portrayed as tax-and-spend, welfare-loving, social liberals.
While Republicans didn’t take over the state in the 1990s — they took a severe beating in 1998 — they gained legislative seats and began winning some statewide races.
In 2002, Sonny Perdue, a party switcher who became the first Republican governor since Reconstruction, and Eric Johnson helped lead a GOP takeover of the state Senate. Two years later, Republicans won the state House and today they hold all statewide elected offices.
Johnson was among those trained in the tactics of Gingrich and others who blazed the trail for the Republican takeover.
“It was all about defining the differences between us and them and aggressively targeting seats, ” he said. “… We had been shown the hill and how to take it.”
A version of this story first appeared during Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign.
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