The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Kemp may have cracked Trump code for GOP
Pay attention, Republican elected officials, both local and national. And open your ears, GOP voters wondering where your party has been since 2016. Also, right-of-center family members with that crazy uncle who keeps coming to Thanksgiving, this one’s for you.
You need to get out your pencil to diagram the feat Brian Kemp will have engineered in Georgia if he can get out of the David Perdue challenge alive and keep the Republican party intact on his way to November.
As ballots were still being counted Tuesday evening, it’s starting to look like that could be the direction Kemp is headed.
That means that the Georgia governor will have been the subject of the most intense, sustained hellfire former president Donald Trump has to deliver — and still found a way to appeal to the Donald Trump supporters that Kemp and all Republicans in the state need to get elected.
Through a combination of substance, strategy and self-control, Kemp may have hacked open a path that others can follow.
Let’s take the last piece of Kemp’s playbook first, self-control, because no matter what Trump said about the governor after Kemp refused to help overturn the 2020 Georgia election results, Kemp never fired back at Trump.
Could you sit on your hands when someone called you a “loser,” in front of tens of thousands of people, as Trump said about Kemp? Or a “disaster,” a “RINO,” weak, and the worst governor in America?
How about when Trump tried to entice Doug Collins, and later successfully appealed to Perdue, to run against Kemp? Or when he said Democrat Stacey Abrams would make a better governor than Kemp?
In Republican circles, those are low blows. But, all the former president got was crickets from Kemp-world, which only made him more furious.
There was a strategy behind Kemp’s silence. By never saying a sideways word about Trump, he also never insulted Trump voters. They would have taken any insult against him as an insult to them. But Kemp held back.
The second leg of the stool for Kemp, beyond the self-control, has been a heavy dose of substance.
Kemp used the levers of the power at the state Capitol to dole out goodies to voters across the political spectrum, most especially in this election year.
The first basket went to the conservative Trump base — an election overhaul so broad that Major League Baseball packed up the All-star game and sent it to Colorado.
And for the gun crowd, a bill to save them the hassle — and background check — that used to be required every five years to carry a gun. A license to carry is no longer required in Georgia.
And for the Right-to-Lifers, Kemp signed the state’s 6-week abortion ban.
With a record so conservative, there really was nowhere for Perdue to take his campaign past election conspiracies.
The final ingredient for Kemp has been a twosteps-ahead strategy. While they pushed a message conservative enough to keep Ralph Reed coming back for more, Kemp and his team have always been looking to November, too.
Along with the still-bleeding red meat, Kemp also signed an across-the-board tax cut that GOP leadership pushed, but the governor will get credit for anyway.
He also promised a $5,000 raise for every teacher in the state and delivered it, along with a pay hike for every state employee, including lots of Democrats, and a gas tax holiday that lasts just until after Primary Day.
With another election possibly on his horizon, talks are already underway to extend the gas tax suspension even longer.
For the 40 days after the Legislature wrapped up for the year, Kemp had bill-signing ceremonies around the state stacked on his schedule like planes on a runway.
No matter who gets out of these Republican primaries, the test resets entirely with Stacey Abrams and Democrats waiting for them in November.
Not only did this group of Democrats seed the state for the party’s wins in Georgia over the last two years, they’ve embraced a progressive message as the state has grown larger and even more diverse.
Georgia has added 400,000 residents since Abrams lost in 2018 by 55,000 votes — with many of them the young, diverse voters most likely to be receptive to a progressive agenda this time around.
Add to that the wild card of abortion rights, suddenly on the table for the first time in the lives of an entire generation of Georgia women, and you’ve got a state that truly feels like it’s up for grabs.
One question we won’t be able to answer until November is whether the hard-core Trump voters, the Stop-the-stealers who are still so steamed at Kemp they voted against him Tuesday, would come back out in November if Kemp is on the ticket instead of a Trump pick.
I took a mini straw poll at a “Bikers for Trump” event last week where Perdue took the stage after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. The bikers cheered Greene onto the stage with chants of “Let’s go Brandon!” They whooped when John Gordon, Trump’s AG pick, talked about sending people to jail for teaching CRT. They gave Patrick Witt, the Trump-approved insurance commissioner candidate, a round of “Hell yeahs!” when he promised not to let insurance cover gender-reassignment surgery.
These were not Kemp’s people. But would they vote for him in November? Every person I asked gave me the same answer.
“I’ll vote for anyone against Stacey Abrams,” a man named Chris told me, before he refused to give his last name to the “fake news media.”
Maybe Chris will come around to the “fake news media” like he’s ready to come around for Kemp? Stranger things in Georgia politics have already happened.
That Kemp might actually make it to play for the jump ball against Abrams is its own kind of story — and it’s one Republicans around the country should, and will, pay attention to.