COVINGTON, Ga. — Five Republican candidates visited Covington Feb. 8 to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 presidential election and how they plan to flip votes from blue to red in the upcoming general election.
The Republicans included District 114 State House candidate Wendell McNeal, District 10 U.S. House candidate Mitchell Swan, Georgia governor candidate Jonathan Garcia, Secretary of State candidate T.J. Hudson and U.S. Senate candidate Kelvin King.
The Newton County Republican Women’s Club hosted the candidate forum at Covington Municipal Airport and drew a crowd of around 20 to hear each candidate talk about their platform and answer two questions from the audience each.
Lynn Vogle of the Newton County Republican Women’s Club said she finds events like these important for connecting voters directly with candidates.
“There’s lots of people who have a message they want to get out,” Vogle said. “We try to get a lot of people from city government, city clerks, mayors, county supervisors, state house of assembly people because we find we have very lively discussions when we mix all the levels of government at one meeting.”
Wendell McNeal of Morgan County, who is running to succeed Dave Belton in the newly drawn state House District 114, said that these types of gatherings are important to him because he wants to know the issues the people of Newton County prioritize.
“I want to be the person Newton County comes to when they’ve got issues,” McNeal said. “I want to run towards a problem, not away from the problem.”
McNeal, who spoke last, centered his speech around his life experiences rather than mounting into conversation about his platform’s issues like other candidates at the forum.
A victim of a car crash head injury at a young age, McNeal said that “I think life experiences are important because you can’t do the job if you don’t have the tools in your toolbox and be able to understand and relate to people.
“I came from Gordon, Ga., and I was able to grow from that and end up being a national delegate who nominated the president and vice president," he said, referring to his service as a 10th Congressional District delegate to the 2020 Republican National Convention.
"Everybody should live their dream — I think that’s so important — and I’ve always had a dream of being a leader.”
King, a Cobb County resident, said that his identity as a Black conservative politician puts him in position to flip votes from U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who narrowly defeated incumbent Kelly Loeffler in the January 2021 special election runoff.
“Democrats don’t like a voice like mine because I can articulate the right message and I can win an argument,” he said.
King acknowledged the need to address the COVID-19 pandemic but criticized the way it was handled by the federal government during President Joe Biden’s time in office.
“COVID is real, I know it’s real, but COVID is not why we’re in the situation that we’re in today,” King said. “It’s the government response to the policy that was put in place around COVID, and the Democrats exploited this terrible situation for our economy.”
Other candidates chose not to discuss COVID-19, with the exception of Swan who cast doubt on the legitimacy of FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines.
Swan, a 30-year Marine Corps veteran and a Good Hope resident, said he is running because of his concern for declining “integrity” in the U.S. government.
The candidate also drew comparisons between the current COVID-19 pandemic and New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city in 2005, as well as New York before and after the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001.
“There's going to be the world before COVID and the world after COVID,” Swan said. “This is the hill we plant our flag on if we want to have any liberties left at all.”
Garcia, who calls himself a constitutionalist and is a former night shift carpet worker, proposed a “constitutional reset” on systems of government.
“We don’t have to go through a whole Revolutionary War again,” Garcia said. “We have the Constitution and Bill of Rights to assert our God-given rights united as Americans, and not leaving anybody out.”
Hudson, a former probate and magistrate judge in Treutlen County, said his experience in overseeing election administration sets him apart from other candidates.
“Georgia has never had a secretary of state who has election experience,” Hudson said. “I’ve done elections across the entire state from paper ballots to the system we have now.”
Hudson said he had doubts about the results of the 2020 presidential election and claimed that mail-in ballots swung the election in Georgia in favor of Biden.
No proof of this assertion — made by several prominent members of the Republican Party — has been found despite the state counting ballots three times, including once by hand. The certified totals showed that former President Donald Trump lost to Biden in the 2020 presidential election by 11,789 out of almost 5 million votes cast.
King, like many of the candidates, stressed that his campaign wrested on the belief that the Republican Party needs to regain a voice in state and federal government.
“Our freedoms are being encroached upon,” King said.
“Our ability to disagree is being taken away from us. Disagreement is essentially democracy. I don’t have to agree with everything y’all agree with. I can have my own desires and likes and that’s OK because it’s America — we have freedom of thought.”
