Kemp wins Ga. GOP gov’s race in stinging rebuke of Trump

ATLANTA » 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.

Kemp will face Democrat Stacey Abrams this fall in what will be one of the nation’s most closely watched governor’s races.

Despite the stinging setback in the night’s top contest, 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.

The former president 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, 8,100-job Hyundai Motor plant near Savannah.

Perdue’s allies braced for a lopsided defeat, the only question being whether Kemp would win the 50% 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.”