Alex Isenstadt has a piece for Politico that explains how Governor Brian Kemp was able to solidify support within the Republican Party of Georgia and cruise to victory over David Perdue in yesterday’s primary election. It’s a master class in political strategy:
Perdue’s political network began to fracture nine months before he even got into the race.
That’s when reports emerged that Kemp was considering tapping the former senator’s cousin and the Perdue family patriarch, former Georgia governor and Trump Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, to become chancellor of the Georgia state university system. The appointment was formalized this March.
But Sonny Perdue was only one of several top David Perdue allies whom Kemp put in positions of power, effectively breaking down the former senator’s political infrastructure. Shortly after the 2020 election, Kemp appointed Alec Poitevint, a longtime Perdue friend and former campaign chair, to the Georgia Ports Authority. (Poitevint would end up backing Kemp’s reelection effort.) That spring, Derrick Dickey, Perdue’s former chief of staff, was tapped to oversee a pro-Kemp outside group.
Fundraising, too:
Last June, Kemp phoned Steve Hufstetler, a Georgia real estate developer and major GOP contributor, and asked if the two could meet at Hufstetler’s office.
At first glance, Hufstetler was the type of donor who could conceivably fund a Perdue primary effort: He had given six figures to Trump’s reelection effort, had served on Perdue’s Senate campaign finance committee and had been concerned about Kemp’s handling of the 2020 election. After the election, he had conducted an informal survey of the Kemp supporters he knew and found they no longer backed the governor.
But Kemp worked to sway Hufstetler during the 90-minute meeting, delivering what the developer later recounted to POLITICO as a “lengthy and data-driven explanation” about why he did not intervene in the vote count. Hufstetler walked away convinced — and eventually donated more than $100,000 to back the governor.
The courtship illustrates how aggressively Kemp moved to deprive Perdue of money, effectively shutting down his fundraising reservoir. The results were devastating for the former senator, who was outraised more than 6 to 1. Perdue, who had raised more than $99 million for his nationally watched Senate campaign in 2019 and 2020, disclosed raising just $3.5 million for the governor’s race.
The Kemp team did everything well, from start to finish.
Read Isenstadt’s whole piece here.