When two prominent Georgia Republicans decided to run for the same U.S. Senate seat this year, Republicans didn’t expect a kind, gentle contest.But many also didn’t anticipate what the race ultimately became: a bitterly personal, scorched-earth brawl between Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Rep. Doug Collins that has frayed friendships, scrambled delicate political loyalties in Georgia, and split high-profile Washington Republicans, including President Donald Trump himself. Even worse for the Georgia GOP, the infighting has potentially cleared a path for a Democrat to beat them both.The two have attacked each other on every possible front. Loeffler has painted Collins as a self-interested swamp creature who secretly loves liberals and is squishy on the things conservatives care about. Collins has done the exact same thing, adding in a dash of corruption, owing to revelations of Loeffler’s stock sell-offs around private COVID-19 briefings.Collins’ friendships with Democratic lawmakers have been an issue. Loeffler’s ownership of an Andy Warhol print of Mao Zedong has been an issue. Each has sought to outdo each other in professing their love and loyalty to Trump. And each has accused the other of being a secret ally of Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee turned U.S. Senator from Utah, and the sole Republican vote to convict Trump during his impeachment trial.Amid all the intra-party sniping, Collins and Loeffler, and the various deep-pocketed outside groups backing their respective candidacies, have largely ignored the Democrat in the race, Raphael Warnock. That’s left him with months to define himself for voters free from the sort of scorched-earth campaigning on the other side of the aisle. And it’s made Warnock not just a contender but, for some political prognosticators, the outright favorite to win the seat.The GOP has seen many nasty primaries before and considered them a normal, even healthy, part of the process. But the structure of this Georgia contest has changed the usual calculus. Loeffler and Collins aren’t only running against each other: they’re just two of two dozen candidates competing in the so-called “jungle primary,” where the top two finishers, regardless of party, advance to a January runoff election if no candidate cracks 50 percent on Nov. 3.Once upon a time, Republicans thought that both their candidates could be strong enough to nab the top two spots amid a divided Democratic field, ensuring the seat remains in GOP hands no matter what. But Democrats have consolidated around Warnock, a reverend and activist, as their preferred candidate in the race.The effect has been dramatic, according to public polling of the race. Just three months ago, Monmouth University’s poll found Loeffler and Collins neck-and-neck, with Warnock at 9 percent, a distant third. But on Wednesday, Monmouth found a seismic shift: Warnock had jumped to 41 percent, with Loeffler at 21 percent and Collins at 18 percent.It’s universally accepted now that only one Republican will make it into the runoff. And there’s growing concern within the party that whoever does may be too defined by their race-to-the-right bloodbath in the jungle primary to credibly appeal to the political center of this purple state. This may especially be the case for Loeffler, whose heavily self-funded campaign has blanketed airwaves with ads touting her supposedly hard-right politics. Last month, she ran an ad claiming she was more conservative than Attila the Hun, the bloodthirsty fourth century European warchief known less for his conservative ideals and more as the “scourge of all lands,” as a contemporary historian put it.“Loeffler’s ads to win this primary within the special have defined her in a way that will be hard to walk back in two months,” said one Georgia Republican, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the race candidly.“People will remember the Attila the Hun ads,” the Republican continued. “Transitioning to ‘Atlanta businessperson who will help rebuild the economy’ becomes a lot harder, because Collins hasn’t had nearly as much money, he hasn’t defined himself into a corner.”Pro-Kelly Loeffler Super PAC Bankrolled by Her HusbandJason Shepherd, the chairman of the GOP in Cobb County—a bastion of Republican votes in the state—is, like many party officials, publicly neutral on the race, and told The Daily Beast he likes both Loeffler and Collins. “It’s like any kind of inter-party fight, it’s becoming nasty on both sides,” Shepherd said. “There is a lot of time to heal.”Republicans in Washington generally agree with this assessment, and believe that, like in times past, the party will ultimately unify when faced with a binary choice versus a Democrat.For other prominent Georgia Republicans, however, this race has been too brutal for there to be a prospect of healing. Debbie Dooley, who co-founded the Atlanta Tea Party, is an outspoken Collins supporter, and frames the race as a choice between the conservative grassroots, represented by her candidate, and the corrupt Republican elite, represented by Loeffler.Anyone who thinks that there’ll be an easy consolidation in Georgia after Nov. 3, said Dooley, is “smoking crack.”“I’m a lifelong Republican activist since 1976, and I just cannot support Kelly Loeffler. I’ll have the red flu and sit at home if she’s the nominee,” she said. “If you’re voting with lesser of two evils, you’re still voting for evil.”That sort of intense intra-party acrimony has split Georgia Republicans just as Democrats captured enough momentum to give them a shot at their first U.S. Senate victory in the state in 20 years. This week, political forecasters at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics moved both U.S. Senate contests from “lean Republican” to “toss up.”A relative political unknown outside of Georgia, Warnock’s rise in the polls has produced a steady stream of cash and a string of high-profile endorsements, including famous Georgia politicians such as former president Jimmy Carter, the late Rep. John Lewis, and Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic leader in the state house of representatives who narrowly lost a gubernatorial election in 2018.After posting modest fundraising totals for much of the year, the Democratic small-dollar donation engine has revved up for Warnock: in the first two weeks of October alone, he raised $4.6 million dollars, bringing him to nearly $22 million for the cycle, according to federal campaign finance reports.“There’s no doubt Warnock has benefited from raising big bucks, having the luxury of telling his story and having no one lay a glove on him,” said Brian Robinson, a longtime GOP strategist for Georgia politicians. “It has given him an artificially high favorability rating.”What gives some Georgia Republicans hope is that the stakes of the runoff could be so dramatic that all Republicans would have to consolidate behind whichever candidate ends up in the runoff. That’s because control of the Senate could come down to Georgia: if neither party has a clear majority after Nov. 3, Georgia’s two Senate races—both likely to head to runoffs scheduled for January 5—would decide control of the chamber.“Republicans will be motivated to turn back out for either candidate in January because so much is on the line,” said Robinson. “There will be a reset the day after the election. There has to be.” He also warned that the eventual winner should immediately begin redefining themselves to appeal to a broader electorate—a process that “must be accompanied by outside Republican groups beginning to pour molten lava on Warnock and begin to chip away at his favorability ratings,” he said.The outside cavalry will come, even if top GOP groups in Washington have spent the last year torching Collins. But a post-Nov. 3 reset for either candidate could be hard. The Attila ads are one thing. But each has courted support from the fringe: Loeffler was endorsed this month by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a likely congressmember-to-be from Georgia whose violent rhetoric and QAnon flirtations have made her radioactive in GOP circles from Georgia to D.C. The two appeared together at a rally this month by riding onto a suburban lawn in a military-style Humvee.Always a staunch conservative during his time in the U.S. House, Collins, meanwhile, all but celebrated the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month as a win for the anti-abortion cause, and has broadcast his endorsements from open QAnon supporters.The right turn is particularly ironic for Loeffler, whose appointment to the seat by GOP Gov. Brian Kemp in late 2019 was seen as a sign that the party wanted to compete in an increasingly diverse, purple Georgia. The owner of Atlanta’s pro women’s basketball team and a fixture in wealthy, moderate Republican circles, Loeffler was not intended to run as a hard-right fire-breather.Or, as the Collins campaign put it, “she was a quiet little corporate liberal who was fine with flag protests and diversity slogans until she fell behind in her Senate race. Now she’s trying to be Attila the Hun.”What Loeffler did indisputably bring to the table was money. Gobs of it. When Kemp appointed her to the seat, she immediately became the Senate’s wealthiest member. Loeffler initially said she would put as much as $20 million of her own funds into her reelection contest. It turned out that wasn’t enough; as of mid-October, Loeffler had lent her campaign $23 million. Her husband, New York Stock Exchange chairman Jeffrey Sprecher, dumped another $5.5 million into a super PAC devoted solely to her reelection.But their personal fortune, seen as an obvious political asset when Loeffler was appointed to the seat, also became a major liability. In March, The Daily Beast reported that she and Sprecher had sold of millions of dollars in stock in the wake of a closed-door Senate briefing on the coronavirus. The FBI and Senate ethics officials both investigated, but did not determine that she had violated laws barring federal officeholders from trading on non-public information.The scandal nonetheless dogged Loeffler’s campaign, as both Collins and Warnock accused her of profiteering off of the pandemic and resulting economic turmoil. A pro-Collins outside group, Georgia’s Not For Sale, sustained the line of attack throughout the campaign.The Collins-Loeffler blood feud has put their mutual lodestar, Trump, in a tough position. The president has dutifully backed up the new senator who has hugged him tightly and suggested he should win multiple Nobel Peace Prizes. But Trump also has a longstanding affinity for Collins, his chief defender during the House impeachment inquiry.It’s unclear which candidate has an edge among the hardcore GOP base, but if the Monmouth poll released on Wednesday is any indication, it could be Loeffler. Asked which candidate is “more supportive” of the president, respondents said Loeffler, by a nearly three-to-one margin.But many believe that there are quiet Collins supporters who don’t want to publicly broadcast their support for him so as not to run afoul of Kemp and the GOP establishment. “Reticence about getting on the other side of the governor has frozen a lot of fundraising for Collins,” the anonymous Georgia Republican told The Daily Beast.During a Trump rally in Macon, Georgia, two weeks ago, both Collins and Loeffler were present. The president praised them both publicly from the stage—and the reaction was telling, for close observers of the race: Loeffler got enthusiastic applause from the crowd when Trump mentioned her, but Collins got an unmistakable roar from the crowd. Shepherd, the Cobb County GOP chair, said he turned to a friend after hearing the responses. “I said, ‘uh oh,’” he told The Daily Beast.“Boy, am I in a lousy position,” sighed an exasperated Trump at the rally. “I love ‘em both.” But he suggested there could be at least one person who comes out ahead in this nasty feud.“You know who the biggest winner is gonna be? Trump,” he said. “Everybody who votes for both is gonna vote for me.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

It was supposed to be an audacious act of political survival.

Fearing Democrats’ impeachment push would end his career in a southern New Jersey district won by President Donald Trump, Rep. Jeff Van Drew dropped the “D” next to his name and joined the GOP.

But nearly one year and a global pandemic later, Van Drew’s pledge to give his “undying support” to Trump could end up sinking the freshman lawmaker.

Van Drew, like many of his Republican colleagues, now finds himself having to answer for an unpopular president, whose shaky handling of the coronavirus and inflammatory rhetoric has damaged the GOP’s standing nationwide, especially in the suburbs.

Van Drew currently trails in the polls to a well-funded Democratic challenger in Amy Kennedy, a former public school teacher who married into the Kennedy political dynasty. Kennedy is leading Van Drew by five points among registered voters, according to a Monmouth University poll from earlier this month, though it’s within the survey’s margin of error. POLITICO’s election forecasters rate the race as a “toss up.”

Democrats have tried to use Van Drew’s party change and sudden embrace of Trump as a cudgel, branding him as “switcheroo Van Drew” and accusing him of betraying his constituents for his own self interests. In one ad, Democrats even ribbed Van Drew for his taste for flashy suits in a bid to portray him as superficial and inauthentic.

“It felt like he was willing to do or say anything to keep his job,” said Kennedy, who decided to run for office after hearing Van Drew promise his unwavering loyalty to Trump. “There are a lot of people in the district who really respect someone who can be independent-minded, but that’s not what that felt like to them.”

In an interview, Van Drew defended his decision to abandon the Democratic Party, which caught his colleagues off guard and stunned Washington. Van Drew, a dentist who served in the state Legislature for over a decade, noted he was always a conservative-leaning Democrat. But Van Drew argued that the party abandoned its “big tent” principles and was no longer a good fit for him.

Yet despite pledging his fealty to Trump in an Oval Office sit-down, Van Drew now says he is not beholden to any leader — including the president. And Van Drew maintains that voters respect independent-minded politicians, especially in his south Jersey district just outside of Philadelphia, which went for Trump in 2016 but backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

“You vote for the person,” said Van Drew, who won his seat by eight points in 2018. “It’s not your job to vote for me, if you were in my district, because I’m a Republican. It's your job to think about the two candidates and which candidate would do a better job for the district.”

“I didn’t betray anybody,” he added. “When people call me up and they need help, whatever party they are, I help them.”

The match-up between Van Drew and Kennedy — which has become one of the most hotly-contested races in the country — has drawn national attention, with outside resources pouring in. Democrats are not only eager to win back a seat they thought they had already seized in 2018, but also seek revenge for Van Drew’s high-profile defection.

Kennedy, who has notched endorsements from Obama and Joe Biden, has outraised and outspent Van Drew. Kennedy has spent $1.2 million on the airwaves, compared to Van Drew’s $367,000, according to the ad-tracking firm Advertising Analytics. But Van Drew had roughly $600,000 more in the bank than Kennedy as of mid-October, according to the latest FEC reports.

Republicans, meanwhile, have sought to reward Van Drew for joining their ranks while also preventing the GOP from slipping further into the House minority. Since joining the party, Van Drew got a rally from Trump, desirable committee assignments from GOP leaders and a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.

Notably, Van Drew’s campaign message has focused on calls for bipartisanship and putting country over party. He talks more about American exceptionalism on the campaign trail than he does about Trump, though Van Drew confirmed he plans to vote for the president, despite endorsing home-state colleague Sen. Cory. Booker (D-N.J.) in the Democratic presidential primary.

Van Drew has also tried to label his opponent as a liberal Democrat who supports sanctuary cities, open borders and defunding the police.

“I believe the future of the country depends upon not just my election — of course, I’m not an egomaniac — but on the direction that we take,” Van Drew said. “And the direction that my opponent would want to take is significantly different than the direction I would want to take.”

Switching parties has yielded mixed results in the past, so it was always going to be an electoral gamble for Van Drew, strategists say. He risks infuriating the Democrats who backed him in 2018, while there’s no guarantee Republican voters will trust him. And independents might be turned off by his tight embrace of Trump.

Nearly half of registered voters said they were bothered by Van Drew now running for Congress as a Republican, according to the Monmouth University poll.

Crossing the aisle may have looked like a safer bet for Van Drew during the height of impeachment, when there was widespread concern that swing-district Democrats could suffer at the polls because of the party’s efforts to oust the president.

Had he remained in the Democratic Party and maintained his opposition to impeachment, Van Drew would have likely faced a primary challenge from the left. Before he became a Republican, polling commissioned by Van Drew’s campaign showed just 24 percent of Democratic primary voters believed the congressman deserved to be reelected.

But the political landscape has changed vastly since then. Trump’s approval ratings have slumped both nationally and in Van Drew’s district. The sagging economy is further clouding the outlook for Republicans up and down the ballot. The Monmouth University poll has Joe Biden with a narrow, three-point lead over Trump in a “high turnout” election in the district.

“The president’s popularity has gone down. That hurts someone who pledged undying allegiance to Trump,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican operative and former adviser to former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Meanwhile, many frontline Democrats are actually well-positioned heading into November, defying expectations and fueling hopes that their party could actually pad their majority even further. And the election has largely been dominated by the coronavirus — not impeachment.

“No one cares about impeachment anymore. It seems like 10 years ago, not 10 months ago.” DuHaime added.

On the coronavirus, Van Drew has echoed Trump’s rhetoric. He railed against health restrictions dampening the economy, highlighted how Trump overcame the virus, criticized D.C. residents for wearing masks even alone in their cars and called on Washington to “go big” on a stimulus package.

“You know what makes people upset where I am in my district? The people that went out of business, the people that lost everything they own, the people that can’t even keep their homes, the people who work for the casinos,” he said.

Van Drew also said he has worked tirelessly on constituent services during the pandemic, which could help boost him in the race. And GOP strategists say Van Drew will likely once again attract some crossover voters — but it may not be enough.

“He has always won because people transcended party to vote for him. But is that enough in a year where Trump is so dominant on the ballot and affecting how everyone views everything?” DuHaime asked. “Now, just so many people this year are voting party-line to send a message to Trump.”

Glenn Greenwald on Thursday announced that he had resigned from The Intercept—the digital outlet he founded in 2013 with fellow journalists Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, and with funding from First Look Media—claiming “repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity” at the publication. In response, the outlet disputed his claims of censorship and suggested his exit was essentially “a grown man throwing a tantrum.”In a post published to Substack, the long-time reporter claimed that “The final, precipitating cause” of his exit was that “The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression.”He continued: “The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication.”The long-time writer, whose reporting on the NSA’s surveillance operations helped The Guardian win a Pulitzer Prize in 2014, noted that he will publish the allegedly censored article in full on his Substack page.The Intercept’s editor in chief Betsy Klein responded in a scathing statement that “Greenwald’s decision to resign from The Intercept stems from a fundamental disagreement over the role of editors in the production of journalism and the nature of censorship. Glenn demands the absolute right to determine what he will publish. He believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor. Thus the preposterous charge that The Intercept’s editors and reporters, with the lone noble exception of Glenn Greenwald, have betrayed our mission to engage in fearless investigative journalism because we have been seduced by the lure of a Joe Biden presidency. A brief glance at the stories The Intercept has published on Joe Biden will suffice to refute those claims.”She continued: “The narrative he presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies—all of them designed to make him appear a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum. It would take too long to point them all out here, but we intend to correct the record in time. For now, it is important to make clear that our goal in editing his work was to ensure that it would be accurate and fair. While he accuses us of political bias, it was he who was attempting to recycle a political campaign’s—the Trump campaign’s—dubious claims and launder them as journalism.”Klein concluded: “We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be, and we remain proud of much of the work we did with him over the past six years. It is Glenn who has strayed from his original journalism roots, not the Intercept.”Prior to the Trump presidency, Greenwald’s reporting and commentary was influential on the left—especially among civil-liberties and anti-war groups—but since 2016, his frequent Fox News appearances and increasingly Fox-friendly columns have been a source of tension at The Intercept. In recent years, Greenwald’s view of Russian interference in the U.S. election mirrored that of pro-Trump Republicans, leading to an increased presence on Fox News—especially on Tucker Carlson’s primetime program—as a non-conservative skeptic of the scandals that led to President Trump’s impeachment and as a critic of liberal “resistance” politics.“The Intercept published some of the most credulous and false affirmations of maximalist Russiagate madness, and, horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the Hunter Biden archive as ‘Russian disinformation’ by mindlessly and uncritically citing—of all things—a letter by former CIA officials that contained this baseless insinuation,” he wrote in his resignation announcement.Greenwald’s appeared to hint at his criticism of his own outlet over coverage of the Hunter Biden emails during an Oct. 21 appearance on Carlson’s show, in which he insisted that editors at many publications were outright ordering their reporters to lay off the story.“There are newsrooms all throughout New York and Washington, D.C., where top editors are explicitly saying they do not want this story investigated and they are being clear that the reason they don't want to investigate it is because they think even if there is corruption that's exposed here,” Greenwald claimed. “In their view, Trump is worse and therefore it would be malfeasance on the part of the media to report corruption on the part of Biden when Trump is so much more corrupt.”“If what they are saying is, they see their role as journalists not as informing the public to let the public decide which candidate is better and which is worse, they see journalism, the function of it is to defeat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden,” he added.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Ex-Trump adviser ridiculed TV anchor as ‘a television reporter who wants answers that last 30 seconds’

There have been few high-profile Republican politicians more publicly and slavishly devoted to President Trump over the last few years than Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Words like "toady" and "lapdog" have frequently been used to describe the senator's subservience. Apparently that near-total fealty hasn't been enough for Graham to earn a little loyalty in return.The Trumpiest corners of the conservative ecosphere have made it plain in recent weeks that they're ready to abandon Graham — who is locked in a tight re-election race with Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison — even if it means losing his Senate seat. "I don't know why anyone in the great state of South Carolina would ever vote for Lindsey Graham. It's just outrageous," Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said last week."It's about time" for Graham to be defeated, added a writer at the right-wing American Greatness website.Graham has never been particularly popular among hardcore conservatives, but it is still shocking to see them turn on a fellow Republican candidate in a close general election race. For right-wing activists, the senator's problem is that he is only about 97 percent steadfast in serving Trump's wishes, instead of a full 100 percent. Dobbs, for example, pointed out that Graham — in his role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee — had failed to pursue evidence of the fake "Obamagate" scandal that Trump has tried — and failed — to get going. It's the same reason Trump has talked about getting rid of FBI Director Christopher Wray after the election."He's done absolutely nothing to investigate Obamagate except to tell everyone, 'Stay tuned,' time and time again. Stay tuned," Dobbs said. "Senator Graham needs to be tuned out in South Carolina."The rhetoric could endanger Graham's campaign: If even a small portion of South Carolina conservatives decide to withhold their support, he could lose his seat. Trump could possibly discourage the attacks on Graham if he wanted to, but so far, he hasn't. One has to wonder if the president had Graham in mind last week when he told GOP donors there were some Republican senators he just couldn't support for re-election."There are a couple senators I can't really get involved in," Trump reportedly said. "I just can't do it. You lose your soul if you do. I can't help some of them. I don't want to help some of them."Trump's worried about his soul? This is the same man who endorsed Roy Moore for the Senate back in 2017 while Moore was under a cloud of allegations of pursuing relationships with teen girls when he was in his 30s. More recently, Trump endorsed QAnon conspiracy devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene, calling her a "future Republican star." It's difficult to determine the boundaries of Trump's conscience.But Trump's silence on Graham — and his willingness to savage other GOP candidates of dubious loyalty, like Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) — suggests the president either doesn't understand or doesn't care how important a GOP-controlled Senate might be to governing in his own possible second term in office.Republicans in the Senate have already saved Trump from conviction on impeachment charges; the president presumably liked having that security blanket. If Trump should win re-election and Democrats take the Senate, though, he will probably face more investigations and scrutiny of both his personal affairs and his operation of government. His biggest achievement, stacking the judiciary with conservative judges, would probably come to a halt. Trump wouldn't be totally powerless in such a scenario — he could speed up the pace of deregulation and continue to misuse the Justice Department — but his life would probably be a lot more difficult.Other presidents have recognized that their power depends on their relationships with the House and Senate, of course, which is why they usually grin and bear it when taking criticism from elected members of their party. Usually, they see the bigger picture of exercising power effectively, and they know not to take it personally if a senator or member of congress expresses a bit of independence. But Trump has shown little regard for the legislative branch of government, and there isn't evidence he cares about much beyond his own ego and well-being.Thus, it seems Lindsey Graham is being left to twist in the wind. And Republicans are in greater danger of losing their Senate majority.It's hard to feel sorry for Graham. Any reasonable observer has seen that for Trump, loyalty is a one-way street. Yet Graham gave it, and demanded it of others. "To every Republican, if you don't stand behind this president, we're not going to stand behind you," Graham told a South Carolina crowd last year. Which raises the question: Who is standing behind Lindsey Graham now?Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com How to make an election crisis 64 things President Trump has said about women Republicans are on the verge of a spectacular upside-down achievement