WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump so far hasn't been able to head off a drawn-out Republican brawl for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia that pits two candidates he's praised against each other and triggered jitters within the party about potentially losing the seat in November.
The conflict's been brewing since Georgia's GOP Gov. Brian Kemp chose businesswoman Kelly Loeffler in December to temporarily fill an open Senate seat, despite lobbying from the president to pick four-term GOP Rep. Doug Collins, who's now waging a primary fight.
Collins last week rejected Trump's attempt to lure him away from challenging Loeffler by floating the idea of making him a candidate to become the next U.S. spy chief. Hours after Trump made the surprise announcement, Collins said no. "I'm running a Senate race down here in Georgia," he said.
Collins has been an ardent Trump backer since the 2016 primaries and as the top Judiciary Committee Republican was prominently one of the president's most vocal defenders during the House impeachment inquiry. Though Loeffler is new in the Capitol, she quickly picked up a Twitter habit that she's used to praise Trump and bash his critics.
The concern for Republicans is that a bitter fight between Republican candidates provides an opening for Democrats. The Georgia race is crucial to the GOP's bid to keep the Senate majority it has held since 2015. Republicans will be defending 23 seats in November, compared with 12 for Democrats. A net pickup of four seats by Democrats would guarantee them the majority.
The Georgia contest isn't a typical Republican primary that chooses a nominee to run against a Democrat. Instead, multiple candidates from both parties will compete in a wide-open "jungle primary" on Nov. 3. It's to fill the last two years of the term of Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson, who resigned for health reasons.
If no candidate wins a majority, a runoff election between the top two vote-getters will be set for Jan. 5. While Republicans hold a statewide edge in voting, some in the party worry a Loeffler-Collins battle could divide GOP voters and make it easier for a Democrat to win.
Republicans have quickly taken sides.
Collins, who has represented northeastern Georgia in the House since 2013, is a well-known fixture on Fox News and other conservative outlets. He's backed by high-profile conservatives including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who won the state's 2008 presidential primary, American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp, Fox News host Sean Hannity, and conservative radio host Mark Levin. Collins has been invited to speak this week at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference run by Schlapp outside Washington. Loeffler isn't on the lineup.
Collins and his allies have launched broadsides against Loeffler as politically untested and anything but a Trump Republican, flagging her past support for Utah's GOP Sen. Mitt Romney. They've even questioned her depiction as a hunter in a posed ad with a shotgun over one shoulder, mocking her expensive outfit and saying she doesn't have a Georgia hunting license.
"Sending an untried and untested candidate against the Democrats could very well be a disaster. Doug is anything but untried and untested," said Dan McLagan, a campaign spokesman for Collins.
Loeffler, as the incumbent, has support from the National Republican Senatorial Committee controlled by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The committee's policy is to blacklist any political companies that work for candidates challenging a GOP incumbent.
That has upset the Collins campaign, which accused the NRSC of trying to shut down competition.
"Collins is everything Georgians hate about Washington," NRSC Executive Director Kevin McLaughlin responded. "He is a swamp creature that claims to be conservative." McLaughlin added, "Now, having made an emotional, ill-informed and selfish decision, he finds himself at a crossroads."
Loeffler also is working to build support among conservatives. Along with the support of Georgia's governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, she is backed by conservative Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, as well as the fiscally conservative Club for Growth, which is running a $3 million ad campaign against Collins.
Trump has tried to walk down the middle. He praised Loeffler and Collins early this month for supporting him during his impeachment, and suggested he'd find a way to make both of them happy.
"Something's going to happen that's going to be very good. I don't know. I haven't figured it out yet," Trump said at a Feb. 6 White House event. His attempt to do so Thursday by saying Collins is under consideration for the job of director of national intelligence fell flat.
After the news of Trump's remarks that he was considering Collins for the intelligence job, Kemp's press secretary, Cody Hall, tweeted a thinly veiled taunt.
Kemp's appointment of Loeffler was an unusual bit of defiance from a Republican office-holder.
But Loeffler is viewed as more likely to halt the erosion of GOP support from women in the Atlanta suburbs, said Mark Rountree, a Georgia-based Republican political consultant not tied to either the Loeffler or Collins campaign.
Loeffler owns the WNBA's Atlanta team and is married to Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, parent firm of the New York Stock Exchange. She's also served as chief communications and marketing officer for Intercontinental Exchange, which operates global commodity and financial products marketplaces, and later was CEO of Bakkt, an ICE unit that trades Bitcoin futures.
In the Senate she's now a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, which has jurisdiction over some aspects of Intercontinental Exchange businesses, prompting some Collins' backers to raise questions about possible conflicts of interest.
"She's got to define herself to voters and she's got to do it quickly, because he's trying to define her first," said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta.
Loeffler has pledged $20 million of her own fortune for her campaign. Her main objective now is to show that money isn't the only reason why she got the job. She's spending $2.6 million on ads to introduce herself to Georgians.
"I've only been in Washington a few weeks, and it's even worse than you thought," she says in one spot. "I've spent my life in business, not politics. Grew up on our family farm, working in the fields, showing cattle."
There's no up-to-date polling on a head-to-head contest between the two Republicans. A University of Georgia poll released last week found that Loeffler's favorability rating had climbed almost even with Collins's, with about one-third of the voters viewing them both favorably. Her favorability rating in the same poll in January was 12 percentage points behind Collins.
Georgia's other senator, Republican David Perdue, will also be on the November ballot, seeking a second term. Trump won the state by 5 percentage points in 2016.
State Democrats appear to be coalescing behind a single candidate. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has endorsed Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor at Atlanta's historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. Two other Democrats, Matt Lieberman and former U.S. Attorney Ed Tarver, have also announced Senate campaigns.
Gillespie of Emory University said that having two Republican candidates for one Senate seat, in a nonpartisan primary, "guarantees that a Republican can't win in a walk, not on the first ballot."