On primary eve in Georgia, former Sen. David Perdue pushed back on comments that fellow gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams made about the Peach State being the “worst state in the country to live.”
Abrams should “go back to where she came from,” said Perdue, a Trump-endorsed GOP candidate, on Monday as he accused the Democrat’s candidacy of being solely rooted in her political ambition to run for president.
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“She said that Georgia is the worst place in the country to live. Hey, she ain’t from here,” Perdue said during an appearance on John Fredericks’s radio show. “Let her go back to where she came from. She doesn’t like it here. The only thing she wants is to be president of the United States. She doesn’t care about the people of Georgia.”
Abrams was born in Wisconsin and lived in Mississippi before moving to Georgia to attend high school and college, where she has resided for years.
Perdue went on to reference comments Abrams made during her 2018 campaign about renewable energy jobs, saying at the time that “people shouldn’t have to go into agriculture or hospitality to make a living in Georgia.”
“When she told black farmers, ‘You don’t need to be on the farm,’ and she told black workers in hospitality and all this, ‘You don’t need to be,’ she is demeaning her own race,” Perdue said of Abrams, who is black. “She should never be considered material for governor of any state, much less our state, where she hates to live.”
Abrams has faced backlash from Republicans for her comments over the weekend despite her attempts to “contextualize” them at the time, arguing that the state was poorly ranked for maternal mortality, among other issues.
“I am tired of hearing about being the best state in the country to do business when we are the worst state in the country to live,” Abrams said, as reported by NBC. “When you’re No. 48 for mental health, when you’re No. 1 for maternal mortality, when you have an incarceration rate that’s on the rise and wages that are on the decline, then you are not the No. 1 place to live in the United States. But we can get there. You see, Georgia is capable of greatness. We just need greatness to be in our governor’s office.”
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Perdue is trailing GOP Gov. Brian Kemp in polling ahead of Tuesday’s primary.
