ATLANA – In a major blow to Donald Trump’s reputation as a Republican king, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp defeated former Sen. David Purdue in the Republican primary for governor. The double-digit blow came despite the fact that Trump supported Perdue and cleared the field of other contenders, while making Kemp his only biggest goal of defeat in the first season.
Georgia has been the target of Trump’s obsession since losing his state in the 2020 presidential race and running a conspiracy-filled and ultimately unsuccessful campaign of pressure to undo the results. Perdue’s support was the main focus of his revenge campaign, a strategy that has now been flatly rejected by voters in Georgia.
“I want to be crystal clear to all of you here tonight: our battle is far from over tonight,” Kemp told supporters of his victory party in the Atlanta region late Tuesday night. “Tonight begins the struggle for the soul of our country to ensure that Stacey Abrams will not be our governor or the next president.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp campaigns Monday in Keneso, Georgia (Joe Redl / Getty Images)
Kemp’s victory will resonate in the political world of Republicans, including among the presidential candidates in 2024, as they continue to assess how much electoral muscle Trump will have in the future.
“It was the biggest political battle of the interim terms for Donald Trump, and he lost it in double digits,” GOP operative and Trump critic Mike Murphy told Yahoo News. “Governor Kemp has proven that a conservative with strong experience who is not afraid to stand up to Trump can not only repel Donald, but he can actually defeat the former president quite badly.
Kemp’s strong performance of nearly 50 points with 33% of the expected votes announced when the Associated Press called the race just 34 minutes after polls closed means he is avoiding a run-off with Perdue and can now focus exclusively on rematch. his with the Democratic Candidate for Governor Stacey Abrams, which he defeated in 2018. Abrams, who is running without resistance, won today’s primary election of the Democratic Party.
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In another closely watched race in Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Rafensperger, another valuable scalp for Trump, is running in his main race against Representative Jody Hayes. Trump endorsed Heath and called Rafensperger an “enemy of the people” for resisting pressure from a January 2, 2021 phone call to “find” enough votes to undo Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia.
With the majority of the votes counted, Rafensperger has over 51% of the vote. This margin, if maintained, would bring perhaps the worst defeat of all for the former president. If Rafensperger finishes with more than 50% of the vote, he will be the winner. If neither candidate exceeds 50%, the two will face the runoff in June.
Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Rafensperger, in the center, and his wife Trisha arrive for a party on election night on Tuesday. (Ben Gray / AP)
A chipper, Rafensperger, arrived at a party on election night at a restaurant in Norcross, a suburb of Atlanta, expressing confidence that he would prevail, but said he was fully prepared for the run-off against Trump-approved rival Jody Hayes.
“I have participated in more run-offs than anyone else in Georgian politics,” he told reporters, noting that he had won numerous run-offs in his career, ranging from running in the local city council to his victory in 2018 as secretary of state. making him the last Republican to win a statewide race. Rafensperger seems to have been boosted by cross-voted Democrats, as early results showed when early results showed he received more than 60 percent in the predominantly Democratic county of Fulton, which helped him surpass the magic 50 percent needed for a landslide victory. There is no party registration in Georgia, but government officials say as much as 18 percent of the 453,942 ballots cast in the early Republican primary were from voters who had previously voted in the Democratic primary.
However, Rafensperger disputed that he benefited from Democrat voters, rejecting the view that it could hurt his chances if the race was held in a runoff. Asked about estimates that 18 percent of previous Democrat voters had voted in the GOP primary, Rafensperger said the total was a significant number of traditional Republicans who voted against Trump in 2020. “These are Republican voters who they’re coming home, “he said. Also in Georgia, former football star Herschel Walker successfully won her primary election for the Republican nomination for the US Senate. He will face Democratic Senator Rafael Warnock, who won a seat in a special election in January 2021.
But no race was watched more closely by Kemp-Perdue because it was seen as a test of Trump’s continued detention of Republican voters. Trump was fully invested in the race; he aggressively recruited a lukewarm Perdue to run in the first place, traveled to Georgia to help him, organized a fundraiser, and poured $ 2.64 million from his own political committee to fuel Perdue’s campaign. “If David Purdue loses, it won’t be because of Trump,” said one Trump aide, describing how Trump has worked harder for Perdue than any other candidate in this cycle.
Meanwhile, Trump is obsessively training his fire on Kemp, whom he insults for refusing to help him cancel Georgia’s presidential election in 2020. At a rally in Georgia in March, Trump said: .
For his part, Perdue is running as a single candidate, hitting Kemp over and over again for disagreeing with Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 presidential election.
None of this worked.
Republican nominee for governor of Georgia and former senator David Purdue campaigns in Rutledge, Georgia (John Baysmore / AP)
Although Kemp’s victory will be seen by many Republicans as a sign that they may not have to bow to Trump’s knees or praise him while campaigning, it takes political skill to break away from Trump and still prevail. . Kemp’s campaign provides a guide for Republican candidates.
Political observers attribute to Kemp that he showed iron discipline in resisting being involved in a battle with Trump, who attacked him mercilessly throughout the campaign. “Kemp never responded to Trump,” said Brian Robinson, a prominent Republican political operative in Georgia. “You know he had to kill him inside, but the discipline paid off.
At the same time, Kemp emphasized his hard-line conservative qualities and achievements, while using the powers of the position to his advantage. According to Robinson, he has ticked all the boxes for each part of the Republican coalition. For defenders of gun rights, Kemp passed a constitutional law to carry through the legislature; for opponents of abortion, he helped pass a bill banning abortion once a fetal pulse could be detected; he provided two large-scale projects for the country’s economic development, the Rivian electric truck plant and the Hyundai car plant. And he managed to secure a $ 500 tax rebate for married couples who got into bank accounts just before the early vote. (The issue of gun control returned to the forefront on Tuesday, when at least 18 children were killed in a mass shooting at a Texas primary school.)
People are mourning in front of the Willi de Leon Civic Center, where students were transported from Rob Elementary School after a mass shooting in Uwalde, Texas. (Marco Bello / Reuters)
“Kemp managed to caress all the erogenous zones of Republican voters in Georgia,” Robinson said.
But not every Republican candidate will have the luck, the advantage of the position or the set of political skills like Brian Kemp. The cult of personality of Trump may have been tainted in some parts of the Republican Party, but Trumpism is still alive and well. Even those Republican candidates who were not backed by Trump or, like Kemp, were targeted by him, completely embraced Trump’s political agenda and were careful not to criticize him.
Most Republican candidates who were outspoken critics of Trump either lost their primary election or chose not to run in the first place. An example of this is Charlie Baker, the moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts, who – despite being the country’s most popular governor with 74 percent approval – chose not to run for re-election. Baker faced the likely prospect of losing the Republican primary to a Trump-backed candidate.
Despite Trump’s rejection on Tuesday, the drama surrounding Trump’s efforts to cancel Georgia’s 2020 presidential election is far from over. Rafensperger said Tuesday that he was fully prepared to testify in Fulton County Attorney’s Office Fanny Willis’ investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results when he is expected to be summoned in the coming weeks.
“We are ready to testify when and if we are called,” Rafensperger said. But there is no doubt that his refusal to comply with Trump’s demands to “find” enough votes to change the results of the Georgia election has defined him for most voters. “It was the boldest act of a Georgian politician in my life,” said a longtime party friend and Republican activist who, fearing alienation from Trump supporters, asked not to be identified by name.
Tom LoBianco contributed to the reports.
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