Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) has decided to skip this year’s state Republican convention, underscoring a deepening rift between the rising political star and a party that continues to embrace former President Donald Trump and his debunked 2020 election claims.
Instead of speaking to party delegates at a June meeting in Columbus, Georgia, Kemp will “continue to build his own organization to energize conservative voters and elect GOP officials,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
BRIAN KEMP WARNS THAT TRUMP ELECTION FRAUD CLAIMS WILL HINDER GOP IN 2024
Senior Kemp adviser Cody Hall said the governor’s focus will be on “making sure we can replicate our successes last November and win at the ballot box in 2024 and 2026.”
The Georgia Republican Party has been going through an identity crisis of sorts for the past few years. It has spread wild theories without evidence and promoted people such as Kandiss Taylor to its ranks.
Taylor, who lost her primary challenge to Kemp, has peddled conspiracy theories that Republican leaders were closet communists and that Democrats were secret pedophiles. Despite these comments, she was elected Saturday as the GOP chairwoman for the 1st Congressional District, a position that gives her a platform within the party’s infrastructure. Taylor is just one of many hard-line Republicans who now hold leadership roles in the party, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
The relationship between Kemp and the state GOP really started to sour after the governor accepted the 2020 election results in the state and refused to overturn President Joe Biden‘s victory. The vitriol that played out publicly gave Georgia voters an intimate look at a state party that had deep divides and took aim at a sitting governor up for reelection against Stacey Abrams, a strong Democratic foe and fundraising giant.
The state party did little to tamp down Trump’s anger at Kemp or Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump called Kemp a RINO, a Republican In Name Only, and pledged to campaign against him in 2022. He made speeches and campaign stops where he claimed Kemp “caved to the radical left-wing woke mob” and said he was “ashamed” he endorsed Kemp in 2018. Party Chairman David Shafer openly sided with Trump-backed primary challengers over Republican incumbents.
In the end, Trump’s candidates were defeated by wide margins in the primaries, and Shafer recently announced he wouldn’t seek another term as he remains in the crosshairs of Fulton County prosecutors investigating Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 results.
Since being reelected, Kemp’s approval rating has only gone up, according to Morning Consult, which puts the governor’s rating at 60%, up from 47% in January 2021, Kemp’s first month in office.
Kemp isn’t the first Republican governor at odds with the state party.
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Former Gov. Sonny Perdue often clashed with party activists during his second term. Then-Gov. Nathan Deal skipped the 2016 GOP convention following a push by delegates to sanction his veto of a religious liberty bill that would have allowed faith-based organizations to deny services to those who violate their religious beliefs and preserved the right to fire employees who didn’t adhere to those beliefs.
Deal faced enormous pressure from the business community that threatened to leave the state if the bill became law.
