Georgia Republican Jake Evans said during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday that receiving former President Donald Trump’s endorsement this past week was “game-changing” for his congressional campaign.
Evans, who is in the final weeks of a tough Republican primary battle in Georgia’s Sixth District, spoke about picking up the highly sought-after endorsement from the former president and how he anticipates it will impact his race.
“It’s game-changing, obviously, and we are deeply honored to have President Trump’s endorsement,” Evans said. “I’ve been running a bold, unafraid America First campaign since I announced, which was last July.”
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Evans, who received the endorsement from Trump on Thursday, said he met that day with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida ahead of the former president making his announcement.
“We had a great meeting, and I talked about how I will be an unafraid fighter for him if he chooses to run in 2024 again for president, which I’m hopeful he does,” Evans said. “And my race, it’s an R plus 20 district, so this is a very, very big deal, and it’s something I’m not going to take for granted, and I’m going to work harder every day to make sure that I’m not the one on his loss record, and I’m another win for him and his agenda.”
Thank you President Trump for your endorsement!
I will fight for YOU and the America First Agenda. Together, we will DEFEAT Biden, FIRE Pelosi and SAVE America! pic.twitter.com/DkWsdB55yb
— Jake Evans (@JakeEvansGA) May 6, 2022
Trump has invested heavily in Georgia in terms of endorsements. Several of his preferred candidates, such as former Sen. David Perdue, former state Rep. Vernon Jones, and Rep. Jody Hice, align with Trump’s goal to unseat Gov. Brian Kemp and Kemp’s allies, whom Trump says are to blame for Republican losses in Georgia in 2020.
Evans, an attorney, does not appear to be a direct part of Trump’s mission to unseat Kemp, but Evans does have experience with election integrity, having done legal work on pre-2020 cases in Pennsylvania, including one high-profile case on mail-in balloting that made its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court before ultimately getting struck down.
Evans said his extensive background on the issue may have resonated well with the former president, who has been highly vocal about his grievances with Georgia’s 2020 election process.
President Donald Trump speaks during a rally in support of Republican incumbent Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue ahead of the Senate runoffs, in Dalton, Georgia, January 4, 2021. (SANDY HUFFAKER/AFP via Getty Images)
“So in 2020, what the Democrats did was they tried to use COVID as a pretext to erode away our electoral protections,” Evans explained. “And so what they did is they targeted the key swing states, one of which was Pennsylvania, and in Pennsylvania, they filed upwards of 20 cases all throughout the state in order to try to erode away our election laws and electoral protections. I represented the Pennsylvania House in all of these cases at the trial court level. … So I fought for President Trump’s interests. And I think that’s one of the reasons why he ultimately gave me the nod is he knew in the hardest of times when folks were going after attorneys bar licenses and Republican lawyers were hiding under rocks, I was fighting on the front lines for him for election integrity, which needs to still be a mainstream issue.”
Evans is one of two frontrunners in the Republican primary gunning for the open seat in the newly redrawn Sixth District. The district is situated in the north Atlanta Metro area and is currently held by Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA), but it was significantly reddened during redistricting, which prompted McBath to jump into the Seventh District race instead.
Now Evans, along with physician and military veteran Rich McCormick, are two of the top contenders who could flip the seat red in the general election now that it leans more toward Republicans.
The two have set themselves apart as the biggest fundraisers in the race and seem to have the most high-profile backers. While Evans nabbed the endorsement of Trump, McCormick is boasting support from the well-funded Club for Growth, a conservative group that promotes limited government and rarely splits with Trump on candidates.
Evans, who has also been endorsed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, explained that the Sixth District has a “signficant legacy,” having once been represented by Gingrich, the late Sen. Johnny Isakson, and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
Gingrich “launched the Republican revolution in the ’90s with the Contract with America from this district,” Evans noted, referencing Gingrich’s ten-point plan he had compiled ahead of a massive red wave in the 1994 midterms.
Evans said that while the newly redrawn district is suburban and the most affluent district in Georgia, “the most important thing is we’re going to flip it from blue to red, and we’ve got to get unafraid America First fighters in Congress winning these seats one by one, so that we can reinvigorate what we had under the Trump era.”
Write to Ashley Oliver at aoliver@breitbart.com. Follow her on Twitter at @asholiver.