Brian Kemp Is Better at Politics Than You Are

B rian Kemp is a winner. Though his margin of victory was large, his win was not inevitable.

Donald Trump made it a mission to defeat Kemp after he refused to play along with Trump’s stolen-election nonsense in 2020. He endorsed David Perdue, the former Georgia senator, in the Republican primary.

Going up against the former president, who remains the most prominent personality in the Republican Party, was no small task. But Kemp approached his reelection campaign intentionally and with considerable skill.

First step: Defeat Perdue. Already a known quantity statewide, Perdue could have defeated Kemp. Many other Republicans who faced the threat of running against a Trump-endorsed candidate in the primaries essentially conceded the race before it began or retired from politics altogether.

Not Kemp.

He was the incumbent governor. He had defeated Stacey Abrams in a close race in 2018 after being baselessly accused of “voter suppression” by the entire left wing of the country. He had assembled a solid conservative record. He cut taxes and oversaw extraordinary job growth (the state’s unemployment rate is below 3 percent). He signed a law banning abortion after a heartbeat is detected. He expanded school choice for Georgia K–12 students.

He stood up to the entire national media on Covid policy. When other governors were locking down and contemplating Covid passports, he was the first to let businesses and churches reopen and pushed to reopen schools. The Atlantic hyperventilated about “Georgia’s experiment in human sacrifice.” Georgia’s Covid death rate is middle-of-the-pack, nearly identical to New York and lower than New Jersey and Michigan, whose Democratic governors were objects of adoration for Kemp’s critics.

He stood up to the entire national media, corporate America, and the Democratic Party on Georgia’s voting law. “Easy to vote and hard to cheat” was his line, and he stuck to it. The law turns out to have worked exactly as he said it would. Georgia saw extraordinarily high turnout in early voting, and the average number of minutes spent waiting in line to vote was in the single digits statewide.

That conservative record is hard to beat. Instead of playing Donald Trump’s loyalty game, he went to work.

Kemp put on a master class in political strategy to defeat Perdue in the primary. As Alex Isenstadt recounted for Politico in May, Kemp split Perdue’s supporters and consolidated the state’s largest GOP fundraisers behind himself. (Getting a positive story about a Republican campaign in a mainstream outlet also demonstrates a level of skill in working the press that most Republicans are incapable of.) He crushed Perdue in the primary, earning roughly three quarters of the vote.

Then, the general: a rematch against Stacey Abrams, who would get glowing media coverage and have fundraising support from all across the country. Kemp was indeed outraised, $98 million to $69 million. But that’s never the end of the story in elections (just ask Michael Bloomberg, who spent $1 billion in the 2020 Democratic primaries and only won American Samoa).

PHOTOS: Midterm Election Day

Kemp campaigned, hard, for every vote. As George Will wrote last month, “Kemp’s campaign is spending millions to send people down country roads and into Georgia’s mountains to locate and motivate people whose interest in elections evaporates when Trump is not on the ballot.” While Abrams was doing an event with actress Kerry Washington, Kemp was at a Diwali event celebrating the Hindu festival of lights with Indian-American Georgians.

Abrams never really had a foothold, with polls consistently showing her trailing Kemp and other Democrats grumbling about her lackluster performance to the New York Times. As Kemp told Ryan Mills last month, “Our people are fired up on the ground out there. We’ve just got to keep them working and not have them take anything for granted.”

The determination paid off, with Kemp cruising to reelection. As a cherry on top, Kemp effectively got Trump to concede, with an election-eve “endorsement” for Kemp from the former president.

Brian Kemp is simply better at politics than just about anyone else currently practicing the trade. Both within his own party and against Democratic opponents, Kemp has proven that he knows how to win and how to deliver for conservatives. While other Republicans were relying on the national environment to carry them across the finish line, Kemp was methodically exploiting every weakness of Abrams and touting every achievement of his own to any Georgian who would listen. The voters heard, and they rewarded him with a victory.