Democrat Gov. Stacey Abrams is speaking at a news conference during the May 24, 2022, Atlanta, Georgia, primary elections.
Dustin Chambers Reuters
Stacey Abrams will win the Democratic primary for governor of Georgia, while the Republican gubernatorial election was too early to call when the election closed on Tuesday night, NBC News predicts.
Incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp was polled to defeat David Purdue, a former U.S. senator backed by former President Donald Trump.
The Republican candidate running in the general election will face Abrams, the progressive Democrat who narrowly lost to Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial race.
If no candidate wins a majority, the two favorites will run in a runoff in late June.
Kemp won Trump’s wrath by certifying President Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in Georgia in the 2020 election, making Biden the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state in decades. Trump falsely claims that this race and others were set against him through widespread voter fraud. He urged Kemp to take steps to overturn Georgia’s election results, but the governor refused.
Trump also backed Representative Jody Hayes, R-Ga, who challenged Republican Secretary of State Brad Rafensperger, another of Trump’s alleged enemies. Rafensperger rejected Trump’s request to “find” enough votes in Georgia to win in 2020.
Both Perdue and Hice echoed Trump’s campaign allegations. Ballot reviews conducted by government and federal officials found no evidence of widespread voter fraud; William Barr, Trump’s attorney general at the time, came to the same conclusion. Dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies have failed to change the election results of any state.
The primary race in Georgia, a rocking state struggling to vote for Biden in the 2020 presidential election, is also the biggest test to date of Trump’s lasting influence on the Republican Party.
Trump highlighted the fact that most of the candidates he backed in the 2022 election cycle won the primary, although many of those contests were not competitive. Fifteen months after his only term in the White House, the former president retained his status as the de facto leader of the Republican Party. Many Republican candidates in the primary have tried to turn to the party base by elevating their pro-Trump powers, even if the former president does not support them.
The by-elections will set the table for midterm elections in November, when Republicans hope to gain majority control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Democrats are fighting up: the president’s party tends to perform less in the by-elections, and the by-elections were marked in part by high inflation and low approval ratings for Biden.
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