Meanwhile, Michelle Nunn easily came out on top in the Democratic nomination with 75 percent to 12 percent for Todd Robinson, 9 for Steen Miles and 4 for Branko Radulovacki.
Ninety minutes after the polls closed, Jack Kingston was actually in first place since rural South Georgia counties reported first. He had 31 percent while Perdue had 29 percent of the vote and Karen Handel had 17 percent.
Perdue has led all of the independent polls released to the public this year, but Kingston and Handel have traded the second-place spot. One of them is expected to get into the runoff. State law requires a runoff between the top two vote getters when no candidate takes a majority.
Vote shares for the rest of the seven candidates include 11 percent for Paul Broun, 10 for Phil Gingrey, Art Gardner and Derrick Grayson 1 percent each.
Broun, a physician in the U.S. House from Athens, and Gingrey, a physician in the House from Marietta, were considered among the most conservative in the race but were each dragged down by a reputation for making controversial comments. They struggled to raise money, although Gingrey converted more than $1 million from his House campaign war chest.
Perdue pumped $2 million of his own money into his campaign which allowed him to air television ads portraying Handel, Kingston, Gingrey and Broun as crying babies as a way to belittle their rhetoric as “career politicians” while he portrayed himself as a political outsider. He notes that people on the street now call him “the baby guy.”
“I think that’s a nerve that we’ve hit around the state,” he said. “People are fed up with what’s going on in Washington.”
As the former CEO of Reebok and Dollar General, Perdue claims his business experience makes him the only candidate capable of getting the U.S. economy on track.
Kingston, a veteran Savannah congressman, and Handel, Georgia’s former secretary of state, have highlighted their experience in office, particularly at confronting Democrats.
Kingston, who was endorsed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argued he cut $3 billion from the Obama administration’s budget, and he trumpeted his efforts to get federal approval for deepening the Savannah River as a job generator. Tuesday, he interrupted campaigning to vote for the deepening bill.
“I am proud to be here and vote for such a deserving project that has been a long-time coming and is so important to the 352,000 Georgians who rely on our ports for their jobs,” he said.
Handel says she, too, fought the administration over the state’s voter-ID law while secretary of state and won. And she said she was also a budget cutter as chairwoman of the Fulton County Commission and a fighter for conservative causes through her stormy episode as an executive at the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure when she tried to end grants to Planned Parenthood over its support of abortion.
“We can talk about all of the conservative solutions we want… but if we go with another go-along-to-get-along politician, we won’t accomplish any more than we have,” she said, telling supporters “I fight like a girl.”
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