ATLANTA — He tapped voter anger to emerge from a primary field full of experienced Republican officeholders. A political outsider, he had a name most voters recognized, a business background fused to a populist message and, given that he was funding his own campaign, a self-avowed freedom from lobbyists and special interests.

Looking back now, it’s no wonder David Perdue was someone Donald Trump wanted to meet.


It was around Memorial Day of 2014 and Perdue was flying high, having advanced to a runoff as one of the top two finishers in Georgia’s GOP Senate primary. When Sam Nunberg, Donald Trump’s top political adviser at the time, called and invited him to New York City, Perdue said yes. Over the course of the year, Trump contributed more than $1 million to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, but it was Perdue’s race that captured his interest — an interest that was less about 2014 than 2016.

In Perdue’s Senate strategy, Trump saw the makings of a White House run of his own. And two years later, Trump has used that blueprint to not only capture the South, but to steal the region away from Ted Cruz on his way to the lead of the GOP primary.

“We knew then Trump was going to run for president, and this was a race we could watch,” said Nunberg, who left Trump’s team in August of last year but is still supporting his candidacy. “In terms of all the themes, the competition, this was the race Mr. Trump followed closely, as did his team, myself and [consultant] Roger [Stone]. It had the most similarities and parallels to what he wanted to do.”

When Perdue arrived at Trump Tower, he and the billionaire mogul hit it off, according to Nunberg and other sources present. Trump peppered Perdue with questions about what it was like to be a candidate, to be a Republican running without the backing of the party’s establishment and to have a long business history suddenly subject to scrutiny.

Perdue’s success — he went on to win the primary run-off and then defeated Democrat Michelle Nunn in November — demonstrated that a candidate could win by recognizing the change in the American South, and then designing a campaign that could capture the region’s fury with the the political system.

In terms of policy, Trump hijacked a top Cruz issue, immigration, through rhetoric so explosive it left no room to Trump’s right. But it went deeper than that: Trump fashioned himself into a brand of “conservative” that was less about specific policies and more about a posture as the anti-government outsider. And in the race for outsider purity, Trump’s total lack of political experience gave him credentials that Cruz — as a sitting senator — simply couldn’t match.

“The basic message of conservatism has been moving from a party that acted on what it stood for to one that finds it much easier to define what it is against,” said Charlie Harper, a Georgia Republican who runs a policy think tank and a blog about Georgia politics. “During this time, an entirely new industry in new media and talk radio emerged where selling a message of being against 'the establishment' has been very profitable and prolific. Anyone that is in or of the political system is now suspect — as is the system itself.”

The South was supposed to be Cruz country, the states holding primaries on March 1 that would serve as a firewall for the Texas senator’s primary campaign. But Trump’s walloping of Cruz in South Carolina two weeks ago, due in part to him winning the evangelicals so critical to Cruz’s success, is likely a harbinger of what’s to come — and evidence that this region, for decades the backbone of the modern Republican Party, is not a monolithic bloc but a place where changing demographics and deep frustrations offer fertile soil for a populist outsider, even a Yankee who lives on Fifth Avenue.

Trump holds double-digit leads in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia, according to the RealClearPolitics' average. His surprise endorsement Sunday night from Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, a tea party favorite and close ally of Cruz, served further notice that many Republican officeholders are starting to see his nomination as inevitable.

"As long as Trump is in the race, Ted Cruz can't grow, and he can't consolidate the evangelicals he needs," said a GOP operative running another candidate's Georgia campaign.

In the run-up to Super Tuesday, Trump is under near constant attack from Marco Rubio — who has been blasting him as a “con man” — and a panicked GOP establishment that is united in its outrage over Trump’s reluctance to disavow white supremacist groups, his myriad betrayals of conservative orthodoxy on policy, refusal to release his tax returns and, above all, his amazing ability thus far to withstand everything his opponents hit him with.

“It seems like he’s Teflon because he’s an outsider,” said Jack Kingston, the GOP establishment-backed congressman Perdue defeated in the July 2014 runoff. “I think politics is the only place in the world where experience is held against you.”

Kingston is now backing Cruz, whose campaign manager, Jeff Roe, was Kingston’s own general consultant during the 2014 Senate race. Two years later, it’s a case of déjà vu with a rival candidate whose outsider mantra means more to voters than his record or ideology. And in Trump’s unique case, his litany of offensive statements and boorish antics again threatens their claim on the conservative electorate.

“It does underscore the absolute hatred of Washington that anyone who’s not part of it has one leg up on anyone who is,” Kingston said. "It’s amazing that a guy like that who has no consistent conservative credentials is being forgiven."

“I had 100 percent voting record with National Right to Life, 100 percent rating with the National Federation of Independent Business and an A+ rating with NRA,” Kingston continued. “On all the standard conservative litmus test ratings, I was totally conservative, but it didn’t matter because I was part of a failed system. People said ‘We gotta shake it up, we’ve got to have something different.'"

Perdue, whose office did not respond to a request for a comment, has not endorsed Trump or any other presidential candidate, but in a video he recorded for a Trump campaign rally last October, he acknowledged that the businessman “has struck a nerve in America.”

Ted Cruz pauses during a primary night rally in South Carolina on Feb. 20, 2016. | AP Photo

For all the parallels between them, there are some obvious differences, too. Trump is far richer, far more famous and far more interested in stoking controversy than Perdue, a smooth-speaking patrician and former Reebok and Dollar General CEO who’s the cousin of former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue. “Perdue ran as an outsider but he did not present himself like Donald Trump,” said Mitch Hunter, a former chief of staff to Rep. Phil Gingrey and now a member of Marco Rubio’s Georgia leadership team. “He did not stoop to the level of Donald Trump.”

Not only has Trump dominated earned media like no candidate ever before, his singular, unapologetic brand of racially charged nativism — from his early calls for deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants and his proposed ban on Muslim immigrants to his refusal just Sunday to distance himself from the Ku Klux Klan — is profoundly polarizing, heightening his appeal to some and repelling many others in a region where socioeconomic strife and racial divisions are still deeply felt.

“Obviously, Mr. Trump is David Perdue on steroids,” Nunberg said. “But a lot of the campaign themes are somewhat similar.”

Perdue’s first television ad in February 2014 caught Trump’s attention. The spot, produced by Fred Davis, dressed four crying babies in onesies with his rivals’ names on them and called them whiners unable to affect change in Washington. "It's hard to believe my opponents have been in office for 63 years," said a jean-jacketed Perdue in the ad. "I've spent my life learning to deal with large, complex situations like I found at Reebok and Dollar General. If these politicians had any understanding of the free enterprise system and knew how to make a difference, wouldn't they have done it already? Help me change the childish behavior up there."

Trump “really liked the ad,” Nunberg said. “Perdue was defining himself as an outsider in contrast to his opponents. It was effective and it showed Mr. Trump the importance of setting the terms of how people see you and your opponents.”

Trump is not only following Perdue’s example of how to win a following, he’s using a very similar approach to defend his own weaknesses — including against attacks on his business record. The cloak of the anti-establishment Washington outsider, Trump observed, also served to insulate Perdue from his opponents’ attacks on his business record. When Perdue was found to have acknowledged in a court deposition that he “spent most of [his] career outsourcing jobs,” he portrayed his opponents as simply misunderstanding the world of business. “This is a part of American business, part of any business,” he said. “Outsourcing is the procurement of products and services to help your business run. People do that all day.”

With the Georgia Chamber of Commerce backing Kingston in the Senate primary, Perdue had to build his own crowds from scratch — something else Trump has emulated. “We wouldn’t go to Republican club lunches because everyone in those rooms was with Kingston,” said Billy Kirkland, Perdue's former campaign manager. “We had to find people who wanted to meet David Perdue and bring new people into the fold. That’s what Trump has done, too. You see the people at his rallies and a lot of them are just regular Joes who haven’t always been involved in politics.”