Can Laura Loomer Take Down Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Conspiracy theorist and self-described Islamophobe Laura Loomer floated a potential primary challenge to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene last week after the Georgia Republican remained in House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's corner ahead of his bipartisan and controversial compromise with President Joe Biden's White House to raise the debt ceiling.

Last week, Loomer, who lost bids for Congress in 2020 and 2022 in Florida, posed to her followers on social media the idea of moving "one state over" to primary Greene, who has drawn the ire of some of the party's most conservative voices over her willingness to work closely with a House speaker seen by some as too moderate for the modern GOP.

Loomer has a history with McCarthy as well as Greene, particularly after the congresswoman talked former President Donald Trump out of hiring the "mentally unstable" 29-year-old Loomer for a key campaign post this spring, prompting talk of Loomer coming to "take her job."

Heading into Monday, the pair continued taking jabs at one another, with Loomer blasting Greene on Twitter while Greene has sought to distance herself, telling colleagues like Florida Representative Matt Gaetz in text messages obtained by multiple media outlets that people like Loomer will "not beat me."

Whether Greene—often maligned by the left as a caricature of right-wing Republican politics—is vulnerable to attacks from her right is questionable, strategists in her district said, primarily because of the issues themselves.

Just because Loomer's online fiefdom is mad about something, they say, doesn't mean the Republican base is. And if she decides to try to convince Greene's voters she deserves to lose her job, she's going to need a lot of money—and a lot of help—to do it.

"The people of northwest Georgia—like most others anywhere else in the country—weren't following the ins and outs of the debt ceiling debate like they were out in the Beltway," Brian Robinson, a longtime political strategist in the region and a onetime communications director for former Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, told Newsweek. "It's not first and foremost on their minds right now. And it would take an extraordinary amount of money to educate them on that one issue and try to put a dent into someone that they know."

And in Greene's district, they like her a lot. While she is a transplant—she moved 90 minutes west from the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta to her current home of Rome ahead of the 2020 Republican primaries—Robinson said Greene has the steadfast support of a constituency that voted for Trump over Biden by nearly a 50-point margin in 2020.

"There is a trust there and a relationship between her and that constituency I've rarely seen," Robinson said. "I spent seven years on the Hill, I've been in and out of these situations, and no one is going to come into that district and unseat her in a primary."

But Loomer—who is from Arizona and attended college in Massachusetts and Florida—has made a career of bouncing from location to location. In the mid-2010s, she came to prominence via a number of high-profile incidents in New York City and at her alma mater of Barry University in Florida, where she performed an undercover sting of university officials for right-wing investigative site Project Veritas.

In 2020, she won the Republican primary in Florida's deeply Democratic 21st Congressional District by a double-digit margin, ultimately losing in the general election to incumbent Lois Frankel by 20 points.

She tried again in the more conservative 11th District in 2022, losing in a three-way primary to incumbent Republican Daniel Webster by 7 points after maligning him for his age in a district predominantly inhabited by senior citizens. Despite Webster's wide margin of victory, she refused to concede. (Trump would go on to carry the district by more than 30 points in the general election.)

Greene's district, Georgia's 14th Congressional District, represents a different environment, however. While containing a sliver of the Atlanta suburbs, the district is largely rural, with Rome—a city of about 37,000 residents—the largest community in the region. And while the district is extremely red, it's potentially more moderate than some believe, leaving Loomer to fight for the scraps of a highly conservative coalition that has been broadly supportive of Greene's candidacy.

Jay Williams, a political strategist with Georgia's Stoneridge Group, said in an interview that more people in the district voted for Republican incumbent Governor Brian Kemp in last year's elections than they did for Greene, adding that he believed Greene's more moderate opponent, John Cowan—who earned 43 percent of the vote in Greene's victorious 2020 election—might have stood a better chance that year if he was able to run a better campaign.

Whether Loomer can is questionable. While she raised nearly $785,000 over the course of the 2022 election cycle, she also spent nearly a million dollars that year, leaving her campaign accounts with just over $6,000 in cash on hand and more than $16,000 in debt, according to her latest reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.

"She'd have to spend a bunch of money just introducing herself," Williams told Newsweek. "But then she'd have to make the case that Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't doing what these guys elected her to do. But I have a hard time believing that she'd have any room on the right to run. I mean, I don't know how you out-right Marjorie Taylor Greene."

To make the case that Greene is an "establishment Republican," as she has sought to frame her, Loomer will need to find other examples that Greene has somehow betrayed conservatives' values. If her support of the debt ceiling compromise is the best Loomer can do, Williams said, she likely stands little chance, even in as conservative a district as Georgia's 14th.

"I don't think in any district you could run against McCarthy and be successful, regardless of how he did the debt ceiling thing," he said. "People look at [campaigns] holistically, and unless it's a vote for like impeachment or some crazy thing, I don't know that they are going to throw somebody out."