Trump choice loses in Ga. GOP primary for governor

ATLANTA » Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp won the state’s Republican primary for governor on Tuesday, beating back former President Donald Trump’s handpicked 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.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene defeated five challengers Tuesday in a GOP primary race that tested how her conservative Georgia constituents judged her turbulent freshman term.

Greene, 47, became a celebrity of the Republican Party’s far-right fringe with her election two years ago as she embraced former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and engaged in conspiracy theories about the coronavirus.

In the Georgia GOP primary for secretary of state, Trump has railed against GOP incumbent Brad Raffensperger, who refused to support the former president’s direct calls to overturn the 2020 election. Raffensperger faces three primary challengers, including Trump-backed Rep. Jody Hice. The winner will serve as Georgia’s chief election officer in the 2024 presidential election.

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. “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.”