Kemp will face Abrams for Georgia governor

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp won the state’s Republican primary for governor on Tuesday, beating back former president Donald Trump’s hand-picked challenger in a contest that demonstrated the limits of the former president and his conspiracy-fueled politics in a key swing state.

Still, Trump’s preferred Senate candidate, former NFL star Herschel Walker, easily prevailed in his primary, while a Trump-backed candidate to serve as Georgia’s chief election officer was still in the running. And in Republican primaries in Alabama and Arkansas, dozens of conservatives were likely to win their primaries after embracing Trump’s lies about his 2020 election loss. But Trump’s chief focus this primary season was the race for Georgia governor.

Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams secured the Democratic nomination after running unopposed. But on the Republican side, Trump personally recruited former Sen. David Perdue to challenge Kemp, whose only sin was to reject the former president’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. Kemp emerged as a powerful fundraiser with a list of conservative accomplishments to blunt Trump’s opposition. In the final days of the campaign, he unveiled plans for a $5.5-billion, 8,100job Hyundai Motor plant near Savannah. Perdue’s allies braced for a lopsided defeat, the only question being whether Kemp would win the 50 per cent majority he needed to avoid a runoff election next month.

“We’re not going to have a runoff,” said Matha Zoller, a longtime Republican activist and northeast Georgia talk show host with ties to both Trump and Perdue. “It’s going to be embarrassing.”

The results could raise questions about where power resides within the GOP. While Trump remains deeply popular among the party’s most loyal voters, the opening stage of the midterm primary season has shown they don’t always side with his picks.