The New Yorker: “Though Cowan is not among them, there are at least five candidates vying to take on Greene this fall—including three Democrats, one of whom will almost certainly lose in November. Among this latter group is Marcus Flowers, a Black, cowboy-hat-wearing Army veteran and former military contractor in his forties who reported narrowly outraising Greene in the fourth quarter of 2021. Nearly sixty thousand dollars came in, he told me, the day after Greene spoke to a gathering of white nationalists. (Russia had just invaded Ukraine; at one point the assembled reportedly chanted “Putin! Putin!” Greene recently described Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his government as “corrupt.”) Flowers also did very well, he said, the day after he was tossed from an “America First” rally that was held by Greene and Matt Gaetz, in Dalton, last summer. (Flowers brought a cameraman and his own security in preparation for this rewarding eventuality.) He has amassed three hundred thousand followers on Twitter. During Biden’s State of the Union address, he tweeted, “Marjorie Taylor Greene will not be able to heckle President Biden at the next State of the Union, because I will have taken her job.” The tweet was liked more than a hundred and fifty thousand times. Beneath it, Flowers called for donations. “That’s how to capitalize on a moment!” a Democratic strategist commented.
How many of those donors reside in the Fourteenth? The “vast majority” of Flowers’s contributors live outside of it, he acknowledged, adding, “It’s a poor district.” (The majority of the district’s residents earn far below the national median income.) Recent Democratic Party history is littered with candidates who amassed national followings and fund-raising dollars without a realistic shot at winning. In the Fourteenth, Flowers has company: Holly McCormack, a thirty-seven-year-old insurance agent, has nearly two hundred thousand followers on Twitter, where she has described Greene as “Putin’s agent.” She and Flowers also make concerted local appeals emphasizing that, in contrast with Greene, they have Army ties, blue-collar backgrounds, and a real connection to the district. (McCormack, whose campaign did not respond to multiple interview requests, has said that she “grew up an Army brat.” Flowers has declined to offer many specifics about his work as a defense contractor, citing nondisclosure agreements.) One of them may very well receive more votes than any Democrat in the district’s history—and many fewer votes than the Republican candidate, whomever that may be.
The strongest Republican in the field, apart from Greene, is likely Jennifer Strahan, a health-care executive who describes herself as “all the conservative without any of the crazy.” (The Georgia-based conservative pundit Erick Erickson has called her “Marjorie with a brain.”) She lives near Atlanta, in a part of Cobb County that was brought into the Fourteenth by redistricting, so she did not vote in Greene’s 2020 race—but she assured me that she would have “written in someone” on the Republican side. She voted for Trump, but, when I spoke to her, in early March, she conceded, somewhat reluctantly, that he did indeed lose to Biden. She declined to connect Trump to the violent insurrection that took place at the Capitol on January 6th. “I wasn’t there,” she said. “I can’t speak to the specifics of things. Any time we have violence and vandalism in any form, by anyone, it should be condemned.” When I asked whether she would criticize Trump, she said, “I don’t think it would bring value to what I’m trying to accomplish right now.” She added, “I have a lot of respect for Trump’s Administration, what he was able to accomplish,” and pointed, specifically, to lowering of taxes, moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, steadfastly opposing abortion, and creating Operation Warp Speed.”