‘George Soros Company’: Electric Vehicle Plant Deal Emerges as Flashpoint in Georgia Governor's Race
A multibillion-dollar electric vehicle plant coming to a rural site outside of Atlanta has become a source of contention in Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial primary race.
The electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian finalized the $5 billion deal for the plant with Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in December, and Kemp challenger former Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) has latched onto the deal, which he describes as “crooked,” as a means to continuously criticize Kemp as Perdue campaigns to unseat him.
“A scheme to give away hundreds of millions of tax dollars to a Soros-owned company. It’s not Stacey Abrams. It’s RINO Brian Kemp,” a recent Perdue ad says. “Kemp’s crooked deal cost Georgians but made Soros even richer.”
Kemp is giving away hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars to a George Soros company that makes electric cars. Kemp has refused to disclose the full details of this back room deal. It’s no doubt good for Soros. The question is—why is the Governor hiding it from Georgians? pic.twitter.com/fuEBSqkxfF
— Team Perdue (@TeamPerdue) March 29, 2022
Perdue began ramping up the campaign attacks related to Rivian on March 1, when he held a press conference in Rutledge at the site of the proposed plant to protest its construction.
Perdue, a wealthy businessman who previously served as CEO of Reebok and Dollar General, charged at the event that he had created “thousands of valuable American jobs” through his past work while Kemp had given away “tax dollars to George Soros.”
“I’m just a business guy, not a career politician. I’ve spent my life creating thousands of valuable American jobs. This is not the way you do it,” Perdue said. “We can grow the economy without selling out and giving our tax dollars to George Soros. We can create jobs without buying them. We can invest in rural Georgia without kicking our communities to the curb.”
Democrat megadonor George Soros purchased close to 20 million shares of Rivian, which amounted to about $2 billion, in the final quarter of 2021, according to a Reuters report.
While Soros’s shares equated to about a two percent stake in Rivian, Bloomberg notes other investor giants have “significantly” higher stakes in the publicly traded company, including Amazon, T. Rowe Price, BlackRock, and Ford.
A top competitor of Rivian is Tesla, an electric automaker giant aiming to expand its business in China. Tesla’s largest shareholder is chief executive Elon Musk, who owns about a 17 percent stake in the company. And while Rivian is focused on growing its company in Georgia, Tesla is planning to build a highly active factory in Shanghai, China, which is expected to more than double Tesla’s production in the communist-run country.
Georgia had for months competed with other U.S. states, including North Carolina and Texas, to secure the deal with Rivian, but according to a report this month from local outlet 11Alive, incentives the Kemp administration offered to Rivian to draw it to Georgia have not yet fully been disclosed.
In addition to Perdue’s criticism about Soros being a shareholder of Rivian, Perdue has also highlighted the still partially undisclosed incentives as an indication that a “secret backroom deal” took place.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) lobbed similar complaints at Amazon about incentives before Amazon canceled plans to build its coveted second headquarters in Queens, New York. The move deprived the state of what would have been, according to Insider, an estimated 25,000 new full-time jobs, a $2.5 billion investment in Queens’ Long Island City neighborhood, and millions in projected city and state tax revenue. Amazon announced its decision to pull out of the Queens deal in February 2019, saying, “A number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence.”
Some opposition has also been expressed regarding the Rivian plant’s inevitable local impact. Georgia Tenth Congressional District candidate Mike Collins has been conveying his disapproval on the campaign trail about how the facility, which will span some 2,000 acres, will upend life in the area.
I stand with the voters of Morgan & Walton County to OPPOSE the disastrous Rivian plant being planned.
There is a movement going on to take back our country—and it starts in communities just like this. pic.twitter.com/BJwGo1AZhG
— Michael Collins (@MikeCollinsGA) February 13, 2022
While Collins indicated in a social media post in February that voters in the affected counties of Morgan and Walton oppose Rivian coming to Georgia, a Georgia Chamber of Commerce survey of four area counties, Morgan, Walton, Newton, and Jasper, found that, by contrast, respondents who were aware of the plant proposal supported it two to one (49 percent support and 24 percent oppose).
Kemp, for his part, celebrated the project as the “single-largest economic development project in Georgia history” when he announced it in December. He noted the plant, which would be located at the “East Atlanta Megasite” — a site that had been ripe for new development and pitched to other companies in the past — would bring 7,500 jobs to Georgia.
The investment, Kemp said, “represents the future of automotive manufacturing and establishes the leading role the Peach State will play in this booming industry for generations to come.”
[embedded content]Kemp campaign spokesman Cody Hall said in a statement provided to Breitbart News that Perdue’s attacks on Kemp relating to Rivian were “outright lies.”
“David Perdue’s clown car campaign has resorted to outright lies as they attack 7,500 good-paying, American manufacturing jobs coming to the Peach State,” Hall said. “It should come as no surprise, as they’re down in the polls, can’t raise money, and are desperate to avoid addressing Perdue’s decades-long career of outsourcing American jobs to China.”
Perdue has the backing of former President Donald Trump as he aims to defeat Kemp but has so far been roughly ten points behind Kemp in polls. While Perdue had initially made election integrity — Trump’s premier issue — the centerpiece of his campaign, Perdue’s lagging poll numbers have appeared to prompt the former senator to expand his messaging to include economic issues like the Rivian deal, as well as issues of crime like the proposal to allow the wealthy suburb of Buckhead to deannex from Atlanta so that it could create its own police force.
The gubernatorial primary takes place May 24, and early voting will begin in just over a month.
Write to Ashley Oliver at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @asholiver.
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