Gov. Sonny Perdue (R)

Sonny Perdue, the first Republican governor of Georgia since Reconstruction, grew up on his family’s farm in Bonaire in central Georgia. He was a high school football quarterback and earned a veterinary degree at the University of Georgia, where he was a walk-on football player. He served in the Air Force from 1971 to 1974, practiced as a veterinarian for two years in North Carolina, then returned to Georgia and started a fertilizer and grain business and a trucking firm near Warner Robins. In 1990, he was elected to the state Senate as a Democrat, was easily re-elected and then became majority leader in 1994 and Senate president pro tem in 1997. The following year, he announced that he was switching parties and running for re-election as a Republican. He was stripped of his leadership posts and staff, but was returned to the Legislature with 70% of the vote. In December 2001, after his Senate district was hacked up in redistricting, he resigned and announced his candidacy for governor.

In 2002, Perdue challenged Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes, elected in 1998 by 52%-44% over businessman Guy Millner. Barnes had pushed through an ambitious program that included creation of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority to serve 20 counties in metro Atlanta and also passage of an education-reform plan that required annual testing and held teachers accountable for results, with bonuses for some and adverse consequences for others; it also ended tenure for newly hired teachers. In January 2001, Barnes persuaded the Legislature to replace the Confederate battle flag that had been chosen as the state flag in 1956; the state seal occupied most of the new design, and the Confederate flag was reduced to just one of five small flags that had once flown over the state capital. Although Barnes accomplished a lot, he had, one by one, antagonized key groups—Confederate-battle-flag lovers, the Georgia Association of Educators, and opponents of the Northern Arc highway he wanted to build north of Atlanta.

Perdue capitalized on that disillusionment with Barnes and called for dismantling the Office of Education Accountability and relying less on yearly tests. He attacked Barnes for the Democrats’ highly partisan redistricting of state legislative and U.S. House seats. Touting his roots in central Georgia, he employed a rural strategy. “We’re trying to capture the basic voting instincts of the non-metro voter,” he said. He also promised a referendum on the state flag. His battle plan worked in tandem with the program of state Republican Chairman Ralph Reed to build Republican organizations and volunteer corps not just in heavily Republican metro Atlanta counties, but also in 70 target counties outside the metro area. With a big turnout and solid majorities outside metro Atlanta, Perdue won the August primary with 51% of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff.

Barnes still had a positive job approval and outspent Perdue $19 million to $3 million. But he was put on the defensive when the Georgia Association of Educators refused to endorse anyone for governor and endorsed Republican Kathy Cox, another opponent of the Barnes education reform, for school superintendent. Barnes also put a hold on the Northern Arc. Still, it was a shock on election night when Perdue beat him 51%-46%. Barnes led narrowly in metro Atlanta, 49%-48%, but Perdue won the rest of the state 55%-43%—just 2% below George W. Bush’s 2000 showing there. Key to Perdue’s victory was his rural strategy. Barnes carried only 41 of the 159 counties, down from 118 in 1998, and most of the counties he won were either central city or very small and rural. Also key for Perdue was increased turnout, which was up 13% statewide and 15% in metro Atlanta. It was up far more in the heavily Republican fast-growing counties, which gave him a 116,000-vote margin, more than his statewide margin of 104,000 votes.

It turned out to be a Republican victory up and down the line. Within a week of the election, four Democratic state senators switched parties, giving Republicans a 30-26 margin in the Senate. Still, once in office, Perdue was forced to cut some $1.7 billion of projected spending and pushed the Legislature to raise the cigarette tax. With help from former President Jimmy Carter, he proposed a new design for the state flag, with a red, white and blue background similar to the first Confederate flag, but wholly unlike the familiar battle flag. Perdue’s design and Barnes’s 2001 flag were put on the March 2004 ballot, and voters approved the Carter-Perdue flag 73%-27%. In 2004, Perdue proposed no tax increases, cut spending, and gave teachers a 2% pay increase and tax deductions for purchases of school supplies.

In 2004, as President Bush was carrying the state with 58% of the vote, Republicans raised their majority in the state Senate to 34-22 and transformed a 77-102 deficit in the state House to a 99-80-1 majority. The new Republican-controlled Legislature helped Perdue get his legislation passed. In February, he signed a medical-malpractice bill that capped pain-and-suffering awards and punished frivolous lawsuits. A month later, he signed a bill requiring a 24-hour waiting period for women seeking an abortion and parental notification for minors, measures long blocked by majority Democrats. In May, he signed two bills strengthening ethics rules. He also signed a modest tax deduction for teachers. But he angered some black legislators when he signed a bill requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification at the polls.

As Perdue came up for re-election in 2006, he attended to those who had put him in office. He made plans to dedicate 72% of the state’s new revenues to education and to further increase teacher salaries by 4%. He called for funding broadband Internet access in rural areas and for spending $234 million on road and highway improvements in all of Georgia’s counties. In March 2006, he announced that South Korean automaker Kia planned to build a manufacturing plant in West Point, which helped cushion the blow of impending Ford and GM auto-plant closings in Atlanta. Perdue also signed into law one of the nation’s toughest immigration laws, a wide-ranging measure so restrictive it drew criticism from President Vicente Fox of Mexico.

Perdue kicked off his re-election campaign in May with a 20-stop tour across the state. He was attacked from the right by a little-known “Southern nationalist” challenger, still angry over the Confederate-flag compromise. Perdue ignored him and won the primary with 88%. Democrats had a far more contentious primary, which featured Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor and Secretary of State Cathy Cox, both from southern Georgia. Taylor won 52%-44% but spent more than $4 million, depleting his resources for the general election against Perdue, who had raised more than $10 million by July.

Ethics issues played a role in the campaign. Perdue was dogged by questions surrounding a Florida land purchase from a developer whom he had appointed to the state economic development board. And Taylor claimed Perdue had used the governor’s office to enrich himself. “He made more money in four years as Gov. Perdue than he made in 54 years as Sonny Perdue,” he said in one debate. Perdue dismissed Taylor’s attacks as “wild allegations.” In one television ad, Perdue reminded voters of Taylor’s role in the bitter Democratic primary by turning to his wife Mary and observing that it would be nice “if we could go the whole campaign without those negative ads like they had in the Democratic primary.” Perdue beat Taylor 58%-38%, winning by 2-to-1 margins across much of north Georgia and again winning big majorities in the heavily Republican, fast-growing counties in the Atlanta metro area. Taylor won mainly in counties that were majority black or had high percentages of African-American voters; he also won Clarke County, home to the University of Georgia.

Perdue’s victory celebration was short-lived. In April 2007, he vetoed the state’s mid-session budget, which included a $142 million property-tax cut and had been passed unanimously by the Legislature amid fights over spending priorities. The Republican-controlled House overrode the veto by an overwhelming margin. Perdue later “rescinded” his veto without restoring the tax rebate. The lawmakers’ budget gave Perdue much of what he wanted, including $18 million to promote fishing tourism in Georgia, $81 million to shore up the PeachCare health-insurance program for children, and $1 billion in schools construction. Perdue maintained that the tax rebate would hurt funding for adult literacy, state prosecutors and hazardous-waste cleanup. “I believe politics got in the way of doing the right thing,” he said.

Lawmakers privately grumbled that Perdue, after being keenly engaged in legislative matters in his first term, seemed conspicuously absent in his second. One of Perdue’s harshest critics was his former friend and ally Republican House Speaker Glenn Richardson, who said the governor was “acting like a child” and was just “wrong, wrong, wrong.”

The next year saw no improvement in the governor’s fractious relationship with the Legislature. The House began the session by voting to override 12 of Perdue’s vetoes, and the Legislature pushed for additional tax cuts, including elimination of the state’s car-tag tax and further reductions in property taxes. Perdue complained there would have to be draconian cuts in government programs, particularly education. He grudgingly signed a $332 million midyear spending plan. He did get $100 million more in education spending and also managed to use his veto pen to cut several spending earmarks for individual lawmakers. But he also aggravated state Republicans by leaving town for a trip to China during the last week of the legislative session.

Some of the governor’s fears about draining the state treasury were borne out in early 2009, when revenues dipped sharply as the economy worsened, leaving a projected budget deficit of over $2 billion. Seemingly resigned to the Legislature’s desire for tax cuts, he signed a bill continuing homeowner tax rebates while worrying out loud that the consequence would be damaging cutbacks in education, health-care and public-safety programs. The governor also was the subject of several news stories about his personal finances. A 2009 story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said that unlike previous Georgia governors, Perdue had declined to put his business affairs into a blind trust and that he had continued to buy and sell real estate and operate his grain-and-fertilizer business while running the state government. In 2006, the governor reported a net worth of $6 million, an increase of more than 30% during his first term in office. But by early 2009, he was also $21 million in debt, having borrowed money with two agriculture business partners just as the economy soured. The newspaper noted that a farm credit bank based in Perry, Ga., had given them the loan with favorable terms, requiring only 19% in collateral.

As his second term wore on, Perdue seemed happier on the national stage, where he tried to help lead disheartened Republicans in setting out a new agenda. He was elected by his peers around the country to head the Republican Governors Association after Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts left the post to campaign for president in 2007. Perdue began holding meetings in Atlanta with a small group of governors to write new policy positions on energy, conservation, education and health care.