ATLANTA
Lots of candidates pitch themselves as political outsiders. Derek Dooley goes a step further: he didn’t even vote.
The former football coach is running for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia. But his own ballot history is sparse.
He sat out the 2016 election, when Donald Trump first won the presidency. He sat out 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden. In fact, Dooley says he didn’t vote for nearly two decades.
Now he’s asking Georgians to send him to Washington.
Dooley doesn’t see the contradiction as a liability. Instead, he argues that his distance from the process is exactly what qualifies him.
Washington, he insists, needs someone with a fresh outlook—someone not focused on “their own political career or their political ambitions.”
And about those missing votes? Dooley points out that millions of Americans stay home on Election Day. He wants to inspire more of them to participate.
“If you’re not vigilant in exercising that right, things can go pretty sideways in our country,” he told The Associated Press.
The pitch is unconventional: a man who ignored his civic duty for years, now asking to be entrusted with it. Whether Georgia voters see a convert or a contradiction may determine his political future.
By James Kisoo
