THOMASTON, GA – Brian Kemp, Georgia’s current governor and a prominent figure on former President Donald J.’s list of enemies. Trump, wandering around in a pair of cowboy boots in this small town on a recent morning, happily made his way through an adoring Republican crowd to a place called the Greatest Generation Memorial Park. He soon faced a smiling man wearing a baseball cap adorned with the capital letter A.
It was a hat from the University of Alabama. Mr. Kemp, a sports nut, is a prominent supporter of the University of Georgia, his alma mater and one of Alabama’s rivals on the grid. He even adopted Bulldog’s motivational phrase, “Keep chopping,” as his own.
There was a brief moment of a good-natured athlete. Then Mr. Kemp turned left and turned to the man with the badge. “We need to lock this man up, Sheriff,” he said emphatically. The crowd laughed.
With his boots, his football fixation and his distinctively folk Southern voice – one that rarely hits the “g” at the end of the gerund in campaign mode – Mr Kemp presents himself as the most Georgian of Georgians. And his gift for reflecting and rewarding his conservative constituency in Georgia is what gave him a surprisingly good lead in opinion polls ahead of Tuesday’s Republican election, although Mr. Trump, who remains extremely popular in Georgia, continues to belittle him. as a “Republican only” and urged voters to punish Mr. Kemp for refusing to help him undo the results of the November 2020 state presidential election.
What the former president clearly did not rely on was the willingness of many Republicans in Georgia to remain loyal to both Mr. Trump and Mr. Kemp.
Right after the Thomaston campaign, Upson County Sheriff Dan Kilgore identified himself as a Trump voter. But he said Mr Kemp seemed naturally fit for the state. “He’s one of the people,” Mr Kilgore said. “He’s one of us.”
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Linda Reeves, a retired government official, said she and her husband Clarence voted for Mr Trump and even believed his claim that the Georgia election had been stolen, an argument that proved unfounded. “We are supporters of Trump,” she said. “But everything that comes out of someone’s mouth is not necessarily true.” Mr Kemp, she said, had proved his good faith, most recently by signing a law restricting race discussion in public school classrooms and another allowing Georgians to carry firearms without permission.
“Brian Kemp is a very conservative governor,” she said.
While Mr. Kemp reassured socially conservative Republicans with legislation, he also strengthened his hand with important victories for economic development, including a planned Rivian electric truck plant east of Atlanta and a new Hyundai electric vehicle plant to be built outside Savannah. . The state budget he signed this month includes salary increases for teachers and government employees. Former Vice President Mike Pence plans to come to Georgia on Monday to campaign on behalf of Mr. Kemp; in a statement, he called Mr Kemp “one of the most successful conservative governors in America”.
Mr Trump backed former US Senator David Purdue, former chief executive of the Dollar General concession chain, who repeated Mr Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, but Mr Purdue, who lives in the exclusive community of Sea Island , is fighting to win a grip in its primary election against the governor.
This week, NBC News reported that the former president had complained in private about Mr Purdue’s presentation and had essentially written him off. Mr Trump dismissed on Friday a social media post calling the report “FALSE”.
“I’m with David all the way because Brian Kemp was the WORST governor’s worst governor in terms of election integrity!” He wrote.
Mr. Trump’s record in the impact of Republican primary results this season is mixed. Successful Trump-backed candidates include JD Vance, the author of The Elegy of the Hills and a candidate in the Ohio Senate, and Doug Mastriano, a candidate for governor of Pennsylvania who echoed Mr. Trump’s false allegations of electoral fraud. But other Trump candidates have lost high-ranking Republican primary races in North Carolina, Nebraska and Idaho.
Mr Trump has backed a wide range of Republican candidates in Georgia, where he and some of his allies are being investigated in Fulton County for potentially violating U.S. criminal law in an attempt to interfere in the presidential election. But the results of Trump’s team members in Georgia this primary season may vary.
A recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll of likely Republican voters shows that the U.S. Senate nominee and former Georgia University, who withdrew Herschel Walker by a wide margin in his main race, may have been aided by both Mr. Trump’s support and and from Mr. Walker’s status as a football legend. The same poll shows Trump-backed US Secretary of State candidate Jody Hayes in a close primary race against incumbent President Brad Rafensperger.
The April AJC survey shows that Mr Kemp has a 23-point lead over Mr Purdue; a recent Fox News poll found the governor ahead by more than 30 points. Mr Purdue, whose speeches this week included the Bikers for Trump event in Plainville, Georgia, hopes the high turnout is a sign that Trump voters are quietly moving the needle in his direction and will at least allow him to force Mr n Camp in the runoff.
Kemp’s campaign was well ahead of Perdue’s, a sign that much of Georgia’s donor class, which tends to be wary of political turmoil, prefers the status quo. And while Mr Perdue has benefited from television commercials from outside groups involving Mr Trump, Perdue’s campaign has not aired with its own ads since late April, according to Adimpact, an ad tracking company.
Kemp, meanwhile, countered Mr Trump’s anger with a relentless focus on cases in his own backyard. On Wednesday, Norman Allen, chairman of the Upson County Commission, praised Mr. Kemp for personally accepting his calls in 2020 and promised additional help from the state government as the county suffered in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr Kemp also strategically distributed booty to the executive branch, including coveted government appointments, by keeping fellow Georgian Republicans in his camp or at least on the sidelines. This seems to have been the case earlier this year, when the State Council, which oversees Georgia’s state college system, which is backed by Kemp loyalists, elected Sonny Purdue, a former Georgia governor and Trump cabinet official, as system chancellor. he happens to be a cousin of David Purdue.
Before his speech in Thomaston, Mr. Kemp mingled with the crowd, rolling up his shirt in red, shaking hands with old acquaintances, talking about backstage parties from past football seasons and praising the ridicule of his eighty-year-old mother.
Mr. Kemp is aware that this kind of warm welcome from a rural, mostly white crowd coexists with a strong aversion to him from the left and from influential voices outside Georgia. In 2018, a number of high-ranking Democrats described some of the moves he made as secretary of state as a tactic to suppress voters. Some of them used variations of the word “steal” to describe Mr Kemp’s defeat by Democrat Stacey Abrams that same year in the run for governor. Ms Abrams, who also claims that Mr Kemp was involved in voter repression, has never admitted to the race.
His four years in power brought more controversy. President Biden described the comprehensive law that Mr. Kemp signed after the 2020 election to restrict access to voting “Jim Crow in the 21st Century”. And Mr. Kemp was heavily criticized for his decision in April 2020 to allow many companies in the state to reopen in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.
In a speech in Thomaston, Mr Kemp said he knew these criticisms were wrong because he had listened to voters. “I knew how badly they hurt them because I heard from them,” he told business owners in Georgia and workers affected by the pandemic. “I spoke to them. I talked to barbers, beauticians, waitresses and restaurant owners. ”
The governor did not mention David Purdue or Mr Trump, but rather looked ahead, repeatedly mentioning Mrs Abrams, whom she would face in the general election if she got there. “You are in a battle for the soul of our country,” he said. “We get up every morning to make sure Stacey Abrams is not going to be our governor or our next president,” he said.
He added: “Keep chopping, may God bless you and thank you for coming.
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