‘I think when all this settles down, they’re going to look back and see that I was on the right side of history,’ Kemp said.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp knows a segment of his state’s Republican Party isn’t happy with him.
He heard the crowd roar at an early January rally when then-President Donald Trump vowed he’d be back “in a year and a half campaigning against your governor, I guarantee you that.”
He’s aware that in late December, Trump called on him to resign because Kemp refused to perpetuate the falsehood that Trump had “won Georgia, BIG!”
Heading into January’s Georgia Senate runoff elections, when Republicans desperately needed to be united, Trump was chiseling away at a rift in his own party, dividing Georgia’s conservative base over its loyalty to him.
Kemp knows there are still divisions among his fellow Republicans, many of whom are loyal Trump supporters who’ve bought into the former president’s election fraud conspiracy theory. But Kemp, who is likely to face a difficult re-election battle next year, also believes the party is stronger than it’s being portrayed. He believes the healing has already begun, and the anger that built up in November and December will begin to fade “even within a couple of months.”
“There’s definitely some people that are mad, they’re mad at me, but they’re also very confused right now, because unfortunately the president was telling people, or demanding things of me that I just didn’t have the constitutional or legal authority to do,” Kemp said in an interview with National Review. “And you know, when I’ve talked to people who have been mad at me and explained that, they say, ‘Look, I understand. Just keep fighting for us.’”
The Georgia Senate runoffs, where the incumbent Republicans lost both seats, laid bare the divisions that threaten the Republican Party’s future, not only in Georgia, but nationally as well.
The party is divided by class, by age, by temperament, by political philosophy. But more significantly it is divided over fealty to Trump, and in some regards, over truth itself.
Some Republican pundits worry the divisions are so deep, so difficult to bridge, that the party could be torn apart and left to wander in the wilderness for years. But Kemp doesn’t have years. He is up for re-election in 2022, likely to face a rematch with Democrat Stacey Abrams, whom he narrowly defeated in 2018.
Despite high-profile losses in November and earlier this month, Kemp looks at the political landscape in Georgia and sees reasons for optimism. While President Joe Biden won Georgia by about 12,000 votes, flipping the state blue for the first time since 1992, Republicans down ballot fared well. The Republican Party is still “home” for most Georgia voters, Kemp said.
He believes the state’s Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue would have won their runoff re-election bids had the party not been distracted, “whether it was what (Trump) was saying about me, whether the election was stolen, whatever it was,” he said.
“I caught the ire of a lot of people,” Kemp said. “I think when all this settles down, they’re going to look back and see that I was on the right side of history on that one.”
Going forward, Trump remains the biggest question mark, and the most important wild card. How involved will he be in the national debate? Does he have a long enough attention span and a strong enough grudge to actively fight Kemp and other Republicans he sees as traitors to his cause? And after being kicked off Twitter, what tools will he use to communicate with and mobilize his loyal followers?
“A Twitter-less Donald Trump is a shell of what he used to be,” said Chip Lake, a Republican political strategist in Georgia. “I don’t know now, without Twitter, that he’s going to be able to play the role that he probably wanted to play. Does that mean that his voice is silenced? No, it does not. It just means he’s neutered.”
Before the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, carried out by Trump backers, militants and conspiracy theorists, Lake said he expected Trump to be “the most politically active former president we’ve ever seen by far.” Because of the riot, and because Trump has been kicked off Twitter, Lake said, the extent of Trump’s influence going forward “is more cloudy.”
It’s not clear Trump has much interest in putting the pieces of the party back together, anyway.
“I don’t think Donald Trump’s long-term goal is to heal and unite the Republican Party,” Lake said. “He’s about Donald Trump. And I don’t say that to be critical. He would agree with that assessment. He doesn’t make any bones about it.”
Supporting Donald Trump
Running for the Republican nomination for governor as an anti-establishment outsider in 2018, Kemp embraced Trump’s down-and-dirty campaign style, and won the “full and total endorsement” of the then-president in an out-of-the-blue tweet.
Trump has since said he is “ashamed” of the endorsement, because he doesn’t feel that Kemp did enough to question and overturn the Georgia election results in November. Kemp said he did everything he could, within the law, to support Trump throughout the campaign.
“Look, nobody fought harder for Donald Trump in the election than I did,” he said.
Kemp supported Trump’s economic policies. He approved when Trump took on China. Trump was right, he said, to build up the military and to crack down on human trafficking.
Outside of the presidential race, Republicans in Georgia fared well in November. They maintained control of the statehouse and, on the national level, gained ground in the House.
“How did we do so well in the U.S. House? It’s because the candidates were out there working hard, staying on message, and putting a good contrast out there,” Kemp said.
Kemp believes the reason Republicans lost the Senate runoffs is a lack of focus.
He said he’s had “no second thoughts at all” about appointing Loeffler, an Atlanta businesswoman, to the Senate after former Senator Johnny Isakson stepped down for health reasons in 2019. Trump had urged Kemp to appoint his ally, then-Congressman Doug Collins. Collins then challenged Loeffler during a 20-candidate jungle primary in 2020.
Because of the tough primary and the dynamics of the run-off, Kemp said, Loeffler “never got to run on the message that was the No. 1 polling issue in the race, of being a check and balance to liberal Democrats and extremism.”
Kemp said he is confident that conservative candidates who stand up for the law and embrace the Constitution can still win in the state. He points to a Republican public service commissioner who was on the ballot in January with the Senate candidates and won his race.
“What happened was, people went down the ballot and they voted against our senators,” he said, “but then when they got to the race that they didn’t know anything about, they went back home and they voted Republican.”
Daniel Franklin, a professor emeritus of political science at Georgia State University, said that at heart, Georgia is still a red state. Franklin expects that when Trump eventually disappears from the scene, the Republican Party in Georgia will revert back to its normal contours. But, he said, “it could be a while.”
“Charismatic leadership, it’s very difficult to pass the baton,” he said. “It’s going to be very difficult for somebody to take up the Trump mantle. Trump has a special sort of talent that just can’t be reproduced, and if (Senator Ted) Cruz or (Senator Josh) Hawley think they’re going to do it, they’ve got another thing coming.”
Healing Republican Wounds
Debbie Dooley believes Kemp is “history” in Georgia politics.
The founder of the Atlanta Tea Party and the co-founder of the national tea party movement, Dooley has actively been looking for candidates to run primary challenges against establishment Republicans, including Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
“I’m seeing people on both sides saying it’s time for Kemp to go,” said Dooley, who supported the governor in his 2018 bid. “You have some people say, ‘Hey, we shouldn’t primary the governor if we want to keep the governor’s mansion.’ I don’t believe that. It’s better to have someone in there that people will vote for, because I think there’s a big segment that will just absolutely not vote for Kemp, period, in the general election because they’re so angry.”
Political strategists who spoke to National Review said they suspect Kemp will survive a likely primary challenge, because he’ll be organized and well-funded, and because it’s just generally hard to unseat an incumbent governor in a primary.
Kemp is still largely popular in Georgia, in part because of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. A recent poll from an Atlanta TV station showed 73 percent of the state’s Republicans still viewed Kemp favorably, down from 78 percent about a year earlier.
Trump’s criticism damaged Kemp to a degree, “but not enough to pick him off in a primary,” said Erick Erickson, a longtime conservative blogger and radio host in Georgia.
But Erickson does worry that a bruising primary fight next year could hurt Kemp’s chances in a general election fight with Abrams by forcing him to spend a lot of money early.
Erickson said there is likely no one who can better bring together the different factions of Georgia Republicans than Abrams, a media darling whose been credited with building up the state’s Democratic political machine over the last several election cycles.
“To a degree, Stacey Abrams heals all wounds,” Erickson said. “Stacy Abrams is really the great uniter for the Republican Party more than anyone else right now in Georgia.”
The Future of Georgia’s GOP
While Kemp talks optimistically about the health of the Republican Party in Georgia and healing divisions quickly, Dooley’s anger at the establishment is palpable.
Dooley, who is among Georgia’s loudest pro-Trump voices, believes Trumpism is the future of the party in Georgia and nationally. She would be happy to vote for Trump again in 2024. And she said she’s also more than willing to leave the Republican Party all together if enough Senate Republicans join with Democrats to convict Trump in an impeachment trial.
“If we’re going to purge anybody, it’s going to be Never Trumpers,” Dooley said.
Others worry that remaining too tightly tied to Trump could make it hard to win over younger, college-educated voters, many of whom abandoned the Republican Party with his rise.
Lake said the Democratic Party now led by Biden is far more progressive than when Biden was in the Senate or serving as Barack Obama’s vice president. Lake suspects Democrats, who control all of the elected levers of power in Washington D.C., will overreach over the next two years, opening an opportunity for Republicans to win back many younger suburban voters.
Rooting out the conspiratorial mindset Trump has encouraged could allow the party to grow through subtraction.
“Some people have left the party forever,” Lake said. “But some people were not a part of our party because Trump was the leader of our party.”
Erickson said the conspiracy theories that have found a home in some right-wing circles are “hugely dangerous and could potentially render the Republican Party irrelevant for the next generation.” He said “the QAnon stuff doesn’t play well with” college-educated voters.
“You’ve got to prune a rose to make it grow bigger blooms,” he said.
Kemp said he worries about misinformation being peddled on the internet, on social media, and by Trump and his allies. He said and it’s important to keep educating people.
“I had somebody this morning that send me some screenshots of all these numbers that said there were 10,000 felons that voted in Georgia, and X many dead people, and X many that weren’t 18. And that’s just simply not true,” he said. “We’ve had prominent people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and Lin Wood and others that have been fueling that rhetoric for a long time, and quite honestly just lying to people, and not being truthful with them. Now you’re seeing what’s happening to those individuals.”
Franklin, the Georgia State University professor, said he believes distrust of the voting system will be “the lasting legacy of this election cycle.”
“I think that distrust of the election is going be with us for a long time,” he said. But it’s not just a problem with Republicans, he said. Franklin, who is a Democrat, said partisans on his side were the first to complain about Dominion voting machines. And he noted that Abrams refused to concede after she lost to Kemp in 2018.
Kemp said lawmakers will have an opportunity to better secure the state’s election procedures during this year’s legislative session, which kicked off last week. Among the measures he supports is a photo ID requirement on absentee ballots. Still, he insists there’s no reason to believe election fraud is widespread in Georgia.