Burt Jones is, in Fact, Bitter
But before delving into the podcast, perhaps it would be useful to revisit the mood of the Gold Dome before we had heard of the group Georgians for Integrity, back when the 2025 college football season was underway and Dawgs and Jackets still had hopes for their seasons.
Popular sentiment was that Burt Jones was inevitable.
With all due respect to Brad Raffensperger and Chris Carr, there was no one in that race who could have seriously taken Jones on themselves. Jones had the Trump endorsement. He had a leadership PAC that allowed him to accept unlimited contributions that his opponents did not enjoy, not to mention that while the legislature was in session Jones could take those uncapped checks while his opponents were required to stop fundraising altogether. Compounding the unequal, systemic fundraising advantage, the Georgia GOP had dispensed with the illusion of not picking favorites and openly despised Raffensperger and Carr.
And truly Jones operated the LG’s office like he was inevitably going to be the next Governor, going so far as to adjourn Sine Die early in 2025 while House members continued to feverishly work on their bills prior to the looming and traditional midnight deadline.
I mention all of this because I believe it shows evidence of Jones’s mindset that he had come to believe that he was as close as possible to sailing into the GOP nomination for Governor and may have even come to feel like he was entitled to the spot.
I mean, who adjourns Sine Die early if not an overconfident, self-entitled ego?
It turned out to be an objectively bruising campaign once Rick Jackson entered the race, with Jackson taking the nomination away from Jones like a father taking the car keys from a teenaged boy with big plans for Saturday night.
“But I was going to take Jenny to the lake to ‘look at the stars!'”
So back to the Politically Georgia Podcast…
Jones spent much of the interview insisting that he was neither bitter nor bothered by the campaign while providing considerable evidence to the contrary. The clearest example came when he was asked whether he would endorse Rick Jackson.
“I’ll sit down and talk to him,” Jones said. “I mean, look, I’m not bitter. You know, life goes on.”
Less than 30 seconds later, he was asked the much easier question of whether he would at least vote for Jackson.
“You know, we’ll see.”
Greg Bluestein pointed out the obvious: Jones is not going to vote for Keisha Lance Bottoms. Yet he still could not bring himself to say that he would support the Republican nominee. Instead, he returned to his complaints about Jackson dragging the campaign into the gutter, alienating Republican activists and portraying the party’s accomplishments as corrupt. Jones repeatedly talked about the need for Republican unity, but when given the simplest possible opportunity to demonstrate it, he refused.
He also admitted that he has neither congratulated Jackson nor spoken with him since the election. Asked why he had not endorsed the nominee, Jones said, “I haven’t been asked,” and added, “Nobody’s reached out. Maybe they don’t want it. I don’t know.”
Look, this is how campaigns work: the loser calls the winner. The burden was not on Jackson to comfort Jones after defeating him, Jones was supposed to make the concession call, congratulate the nominee and begin the process of putting the party back together. Instead, he is presenting himself as the wounded party patiently waiting for Jackson to make the first move. That explanation rings hollow and demonstrates a striking lack of basic political grace.
Jones then volunteered that Chris Carr had already been supporting Jackson and suggested that the two were working together during the campaign. It was another reminder that Jones is not simply waiting to be included but that he is still checking the scorecard, circling names, and making notes in the margins.
The scorecard apparently includes the entire political consulting profession, including the people Jones hired to run his own campaign. He called the race a consultant’s dream and said he does not have “much use for any of them,” arguing that consultants encourage negative campaigns because they collect commissions from every television ad and mail piece.
“They don’t really care who wins the race,” Jones said. “They know they’re going to get their commission one way or the other.”
That is a remarkable complaint from a candidate whose campaign spent tens of millions of dollars and produced plenty of negative advertising of its own. Jones may have intended the criticism for Jackson’s team, but he did not limit it that way. By saying he has little use for “any” political consultants, he also indicted the professionals he hired, paid and presumably trusted to help make him governor. Whether he intended to or not, the answer shifted responsibility for the campaign’s ugliness from the candidates who approved the attacks to the consultants who produced them.
Jones was equally dismissive of House Republicans who complained that he used his position as lieutenant governor to bottle up their legislation. He brushed those concerns aside by noting that some of the members were still getting other bills passed, as though success on one issue made it impossible for him to use another as leverage.
Jones was entitled to dispute the accusation. What he did instead was question the motives of the people making it.
“People are always concerned about their own self-interest, quite frankly,” Jones said, adding that “everybody wants to make sure they’re on a winning team.”
It was a direct swipe at the House members who criticized him and later lined up behind Jackson. Their objections could not possibly have been legitimate, in Jones’s telling. They were merely self interested politicians who saw which way the wind was blowing and abandoned him.
Jones followed the same pattern when discussing Jackson’s entry into the race, saying “I really didn’t think much of it, to be honest with you.” He then spent several minutes explaining exactly how much he had thought about it. Jackson, he complained, was “trashing me, trashing my family, trashing basically everything that I had done.” The attacks were “vicious,” they “really felt personal,” and they portrayed him like “Pablo Escobar.”
Jones also insisted, “I can take the attacks. They don’t bother me.” He then catalogued attacks on his father, sister, wife, children and family business. When reminded that his own campaign went negative, he replied, “We didn’t start.” Apparently, the gubernatorial version of “he started it” remains available even after recess has ended.
Even when asked what he might have done differently, Jones mostly concluded that he should have done a better job telling voters about all the excellent work he was already doing. Which when added to the total of his comments today sounds less like a campaign postmortem than a request for a recount of the compliments. The campaign was sound, the candidate was deserving and the voters simply failed to appreciate him because everyone else stacked the deck. A deck he helped manufacturer, by the way.
Jones performed the same routine when the conversation turned to Kemp’s endorsement. He said he appreciated it, then immediately noted that “probably if I’d gotten it a couple days before, it might be a different story.” Later, he said it “would have been a lot more helpful had it come sooner,” because early voting was already complete.
Asked directly whether that frustrated him, Jones replied, “No, no, I’m not frustrated.”
Of course not. He was merely explaining, in some detail, how the governor’s delay may have cost him the election. It was resentment with the edges sanded down for public consumption: praise Kemp, deny frustration and then make certain everyone understands that the endorsement arrived too late to save him.
According to Jones, Jones lost because Jackson spent too much money, anonymous groups ran vicious ads, consultants were greedy, House members were self-interested, Republican voters stayed home and Brian Kemp waited too long to endorse him. The one person who apparently bears little responsibility for the Burt Jones campaign is Burt Jones.
Even when asked what Jackson could do to earn his endorsement, Jones could not identify a specific step. Instead, he returned to how unfairly he had been treated, recounting that five Democratic senators contacted him on Election Day to say, “The one person who doesn’t deserve the attacks that they’ve been under is you.”
It was a question about moving forward, and Jones used it to call character witnesses for his grievance. Rather than explain what reconciliation might look like, he reminded listeners that even Democrats believed he had been wronged. Jackson’s task, apparently, is not simply to ask for Jones’s support. He must first acknowledge Jones’s suffering.
Burt Jones is entitled to be disappointed, angry and even wounded by the campaign, but the contradictions he displayed do neither him nor the party any good. The interview made clear that he is still caught between insisting he has moved on and repeatedly demonstrating that he has not. That tension does more than undermine his own credibility; it makes it harder for Republicans to present a coherent, unified front at a moment when they say unity matters most.
Do the right thing, Burt. Pick up the phone and make that call you should have made weeks ago.
