Feud highlights division in Georgia
Likely gubernatorial winner to face questions over race
ATLANTA — His election still undecided, Republican Brian Kemp is proceeding as a victorious candidate and promising to be a governor for all Georgians. That might not be so easy.
Should his narrow lead hold over Democrat Stacey Abrams and send him to the governor’s mansion, Kemp would face lingering questions about how and why he oversaw his own election as secretary of state. His victory would be fueled by an even starker than usual urban-rural divide, with Abrams drawing most of her votes in metro Atlanta and smaller cities, and Kemp running up massive margins in rural and smalltown Georgia, eclipsing 85 percent in some counties.
Then there’s his embrace of President Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric, from Kemp warning about “illegal votes” to promising to “round up criminal illegals” in his pickup truck.
That plays into what civil rights leaders and observers from both parties describe as a bitter, race-laden contest that pitted Abrams’ bid to become the nation’s first black woman governor against Kemp’s fierce effort to preserve his overwhelmingly white party’s hold on a diversifying Deep South state.
The after-effects, they say, won’t easily dissipate.
“In the hypothetical scenario that Brian Kemp becomes governor,” said NAACP activist and former congressional candidate Francys Johnson, “then he and Donald Trump will have both won because they were able to stoke the deepest darkest fears among their base.”
Some Republicans acknowledge the atmosphere even as they defend Kemp from charges he ran a racially and culturally divisive campaign. “Some of this is beyond Brian Kemp’s control,” said Brian Robinson, a former adviser for outgoing Gov. Nathan Deal and for Kemp’s vanquished GOP primary rival. “Brian Kemp cannot extricate himself from the national political environment that now drives every election down to the county level. You run for coroner, you have to say whether you want to ‘make America great again.’”
For his part, Kemp notes “a very polarizing climate that we’ve been in.” But he defends his pledge to “put Georgians first” — a rhetorical cousin to Trump’s “America First” — and he rejects any notion that he could take office under a cloud that would make his job harder.
“It was a tough election,” Kemp said two days after the vote. He pointed to his time as a state senator representing a swing district: “I’m going to serve this whole state and move forward with the plans we have.”
Undeterred, Abrams’ campaign filed a federal lawsuit Sunday asking a judge to delay the vote certification until Wednesday and make officials count certain absentee and provisional ballots that would otherwise be rejected. The campaign said thousands of ballots could be affected.
Kemp spokesman Ryan Mahoney said Monday the lawsuit shows Abrams has “moved from desperation to delusion.”
“Stacey Abrams lost,” he said, “and her concession is long overdue.”