State Sen. Michael Williams, R-Cumming, speaks to a meeting of the Dalton Tea Party at the Huff House on Tuesday. Williams is running for the Republican nomination for governor in 2018.

DALTON, Ga. — President Donald Trump received 70.85 percent of the vote in Whitfield County last November. That may explain why state Sen. Michael Williams, R-Cumming, got such a warm welcome at a meeting of the Dalton Tea Party at the Huff House Tuesday evening.

Williams was the first elected official in Georgia to endorse Trump, way back in 2015 when many political observers were dismissing Trump’s chances of winning the Republican Party nomination for president, much less the presidency. Like Trump, Williams is a businessman and relative newcomer to politics. Williams is only in his second term in the state Senate.

Now, Williams is a candidate for governor, something he says he never dreamed of doing until very recently.

“My whole life has been business,” he said.

Williams said when he was 8, he and his sister went door to door in their neighborhood offering parents to teach their children how to swim. By the end of the summer he had $300.

“I had dreams of all the things I was going to buy with that,” he said.

But that’s when his father showed him his first copy of The Wall Street Journal and told him that if he would invest that $300 in the stock market instead of spending it he would match it dollar for dollar.

Williams earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Montevallo in Alabama and worked as an accountant for several years. He then opened a Sports Clips hair salon that he eventually grew into 18 franchises. He sold them in 2013, he said, because of the costs Obamacare was imposing on him.

He ran for the state Senate the next year, funding his own campaign and defeating a long-time Republican incumbent, Jack Murphy, in the primary.

State Rep. Steve Tarvin, R-Chickamauga, another early supporter of Trump, said he got to know Williams while they were campaigning for Trump.

“He’s a strong fiscal conservative, and he’s someone who believes we have to get government back to the people,” Tarvin said.

State Sen. Chuck Payne, R-Dalton, said Williams was one of the first people to reach out to him when he entered the Senate in January, after winning a special election to fill the unexpired term of Charlie Bethel, who had been appointed to the state Court of Appeals.

“He opened his office to me. He had his secretary help me set up my schedule,” Payne said.

And Payne said he and Williams often found themselves members of a “group of eight” senators who were often the only Republicans voting against bills supported by the Senate leadership because they did not think the bills were conservative.

Williams told Tea Party members that despite having a Republican governor for almost 16 years and Republican control of both chambers of the Legislature for over a decade, lawmakers have failed to enact tax reform, spending cuts and other measures popular among Georgia conservatives.

“Ninety percent of the bills we pass are done in the final two days of the session. That’s by design,” he said.

He said the system is set up to kill conservative bills and pass bills favored by lobbyists, especially the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.

He says if elected governor he will work to expose that system and put pressure on lawmakers to change it.