Derek Dooley, the former football coach turned political newcomer, is asking Georgia Republicans to hand him a U.S. Senate nomination despite not casting a ballot for nearly twenty years. Dooley skipped the 2016 election, sat out 2020, and only started voting again in 2022 — when he backed Governor Brian Kemp for reelection. He pulled the lever for Trump in 2024. Now he wants to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in what could be one of the most consequential Senate races in the country.
The May 19 Republican primary pits Dooley against two sitting congressmen — Mike Collins and Buddy Carter — both of whom carry closer ties to Trump's MAGA brand. Kemp has thrown his weight behind Dooley, calling him the outsider the race needs.
Dooley's entire candidacy rests on a single premise: Washington needs fewer politicians and more people who've actually lived in the real world. It's a familiar argument, and one that has worked before — including for the man currently sitting in the Oval Office.
At an Atlanta Young Republicans event where Kemp appeared alongside him on stage, Dooley leaned into the message:
If you're not vigilant in exercising that right, things can go pretty sideways in our country.
That's a line that works better as a general principle than as an explanation for why a grown man didn't vote during two of the most consequential elections in modern American history. Trump was on the ballot in 2016 and 2020. Dooley was nowhere near the polls.
To his credit, Dooley doesn't try to spin the absence into something noble. He says he got interested in politics during the Biden presidency — a period that radicalized plenty of previously apolitical Americans into engagement. Fair enough. But "I woke up when things got bad" is a harder sell when you're asking voters to promote you to the United States Senate, not the local school board.
According to AP News, Governor Kemp has known Dooley for over fifty years — their families go back together. The endorsement is personal, but it's also strategic. Kemp explained his reasoning plainly:
I was looking for a political outsider, and it just happened to be a guy that I've known for, you know, 50-plus years.
A Kemp-linked group went further last fall, funding an advertisement that blamed Collins and Carter for the government shutdown — lumping two Republican congressmen in with Ossoff. That's an aggressive play, and it tells you everything about how Kemp's orbit views this race: Collins and Carter are liabilities, and Dooley is the clean slate.
Republican strategist Jason Shepherd laid out the electoral math behind this thinking:
Republicans are going to face an uphill battle, but Dooley doesn't bring the baggage that other candidates could possibly bring and can speak not only to voters on the right and Republicans, but the voters in the center who will make the decision. Jon Ossoff has a voting record that Dooley can run on and pick apart. Dooley does not.
That last line cuts both ways, but Shepherd's point is clear: in a general election against Ossoff, a candidate with no political record is harder to attack than one with a congressional voting history full of compromises and tough votes.
Dooley's opponents aren't letting the outsider narrative go unchallenged. Collins' spokesperson dismissed him as "a washed-up lawyer and failed coach." Carter's spokesperson, Harley Adsit, called him the "ultimate insider." The Democratic Party of Georgia piled on, too — senior communications adviser Devon Cruz described Dooley as someone with "access to the Governor's political machine."
The "insider" label is an interesting attack. Dooley's entire brand is the opposite, but when your chief patron is the sitting governor and his allied groups are funding your advertising, the word "outsider" starts to stretch. Courtlyn Cook, chair of the Glynn County Republicans in southeast Georgia, put it sharply:
Completely siloing yourself with the old, establishment governor is not a way to say you're an outsider.
Cook also flagged what may be Dooley's biggest liability in a Republican primary: Kemp and Trump have not always gotten along, and in a base election, that history matters. Collins and Carter have positioned themselves closer to Trump's movement — the anti-establishment energy that dominates the nation's capital right now. A candidate running on the Kemp brand has to thread a needle that may not have an eye.
On substance, Dooley is running a recognizably conservative campaign. He's praised the Trump administration's capture of Nicolás Maduro, who was ousted as Venezuela's president by the U.S. military in January. He's blamed illegal immigrants for reducing the number of available homes for American citizens. He wants to boost workforce training, cut government regulation to reduce home prices, and has promised legislation to prevent lawmakers from using taxpayer money to send campaign-related materials — a direct shot at Collins, whose spokesperson said such mailings were approved by the House Communications Standards Commission.
Dooley has also gone after Ossoff on border enforcement, economic policy, and the senator's support for transgender athletes in women's sports — standard but effective lines of attack in a Georgia general election.
In my 30-plus years professional career, it's never been about me in anything I was doing. It's about people.
That's the kind of line that sounds good on the stump. Whether it survives the scrutiny of a primary where both opponents have actual legislative records and voting histories is the question.
Republican strategist Brian Robinson offered the most honest assessment of where this race stands:
It's a well-worn path. The saliency of that message probably depends on the mood of the country and the cycle that we're in. I don't think we know just yet if that outsider message is what people are looking for.
That's the core tension. The outsider pitch worked spectacularly in 2016. It worked again in 2024. But those campaigns were built around a singular political talent who rewrote every rule in the book. Derek Dooley is not that figure. He's a former football coach who was fired by the University of Tennessee for a losing record, worked as a lawyer, bounced around assistant coaching jobs at colleges and professional teams, and stepped away from the sidelines after the 2023 season.
The Georgia primary electorate will decide whether "outsider" means "fresh perspective" or "unprepared." Canton voter Vanessa Artigas, 53, is leaning toward Dooley's way:
I think we need to get career politicians out and get the voice of the people in.
But 19-year-old University of West Georgia student Timothy Jackson is going the other direction — toward Collins, with Carter as a backup:
Both of them have been in Congress and so they know what it takes. Dooley is going to be hard because he's never been in that position before.
Two voters, two perfectly reasonable readings of the same race. The difference between them will determine who faces Jon Ossoff — and whether Georgia Republicans enter the general election with a blank canvas or a battle-tested legislator.
May 19 will answer the question. But a party that just watched an outsider reshape the entire federal government shouldn't dismiss the model. The question isn't whether outsiders can win. It's whether this particular outsider earned the right to try, after sitting on the sidelines for two decades while the country he now wants to serve was fighting for its direction.
