While all of Washington was focused on former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony about his conversations with President Donald Trump, Republicans in Georgia’s 6th congressional district were focusing on something closer to home.
More than a dozen volunteers phone-banking in a local Fulton County Republican office Thursday morning took a quick break to watch the opening statements of the testimony before getting back to the phones.
“Comey made it very clear that President Trump never asked him to stop the investigation,” Janelle Jones, vice president of membership for the Atlanta Young Republicans, told CNN. “Once I heard that, I was like, ‘Back to get-out-the-vote calls and I’m good to go.'”
The hotly contested congressional race has become somewhat of a testing ground for Republican candidates grappling with the deluge of headlines surrounding Trump’s White House and the Russia investigation.
Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff are pitted against each other in a June 20 run-off election for the traditionally GOP seat, and Republicans are hoping voters will focus on local issues over controversies out of Washington.
Later in the day, Jones set out to knock on doors around the district.
Comey’s testimony was on the minds of many of the voters who answered their doors.
“I just turned off the TV. … I was a little disappointed at some of the Republican questions,” Marietta Republican Mary McGinnis told Jones as she stood in her yard gardening. “They just seemed to have their own agenda.”
“It makes me more interested in what really went on, and what happened. Before, I maybe wasn’t that interested, now I maybe more so,” McGinnis said to CNN. “I have mixed feelings about President Trump.”
Regardless of her feelings about the Republican President, McGinnis said she was a strong Handel supporter.
“I’m just hoping more people see it the way you see it, and keep that seat red,” Jones said before heading onto to her next house.
“It seems like every day the news coming out is never anything good, it’s always negative news,” Jim Lazenby, another Handel supporter in the neighborhood, told CNN. “I think that’s why we’re seeing more Ossoff yard signs.”
Both Lazenby and McGinnis told CNN they voted for Trump in the presidential election.
Meanwhile, Ossoff supporters told CNN the testimony just confirmed their opinions of Trump.
“It’s reaffirmed our belief that he is unethical and immoral, but we knew that months before he was elected,” Adam Weathersby told CNN outside an Ossoff campaign stop in Tucker. “So I don’t know where the solution point is going to be. It wasn’t today but maybe we’re getting closer.”
