Nationwide controversy over the new Georgia voting law is brightening Gov. Brian Kemp’s reelection prospects even as influential former President Donald Trump demands his ouster in the 2022 Republican primary.
Trump complained Monday that Kemp settled for “watered-down” election reforms that fell short of fixing regulations he claims enabled Democrats to steal Georgia’s electoral votes last November. But Republicans in the state are rallying around their embattled governor. Amid Democratic assertions the law assaults minority voting rights and stinging rebukes from major corporations threatening to boycott Georgia, a defiant Kemp signed GOP legislation increasing security and oversight of elections that is popular among Republicans.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that this helps Brian Kemp with Republican voters,” Georgia GOP strategist Chip Lake said Tuesday.
If enactment of the new Georgia voting law helps Kemp weather opposition from Trump, Republican operatives say he may owe a particular debt of gratitude to Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred. His decision to move the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver, action taken to punish Georgia for enacting Senate Bill 202, has outraged Republicans and made Kemp a sympathetic figure inside the party.
Republicans say Manfred acted on faulty information and under political pressure from Democrats. Although the statute reduces early voting and adds identification requirements to absentee voting, it actually increases access to the franchise, Republicans say, by making drop boxes permanent; guaranteeing more early voting than some blue states; and providing government funds to eliminate long Election Day lines in urban black neighborhoods.
“The more people have found out about the law — the better the governor looks,” said Jack Kingston, a Republican former congressman aligned with Trump. “People are pretty ticked off about Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game because it really did hurt a lot of people.”
‘WOKE-A-COLA’: COKE FACING BLOWBACK FOR RESISTANCE TO GEORGIA VOTING LAW
Losing the All-Star Game could cost Georgia up to $100 million. It’s a gut punch to local businesses and workers struggling financially because of the coronavirus. Professional baseball, Republicans note with contempt, moved its annual midseason event from a majority-black city to a majority white city and to a state, Colorado, that offers fewer days for early voting and whose election law does include a voter identification component.
Critics of the Georgia law emphasize Colorado automatically mails ballots to all registered voters and that its identification requirements are less onerous. Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, corporate titans based in Atlanta, are among the ranks of businesses that have spoken out against the law — a development jeopardizing the alliance between big business and the GOP.
Meanwhile, some Georgia Republicans are skeptical the dust-up over the voting law will rescue Kemp.
Asked to assess the governor’s standing with grassroots Republicans and whether tension with Trump was insurmountable, a Republican strategist responded via text message by sending the Washington Examiner a short clip from the 1960 movie The Magnificent Seven.
In the scene, with actors Vladimir Sokoloff and Steve McQueen, Sokoloff’s character asks: “Are you ready for him? What if he comes now?” McQueen’s character answers wryly: “It reminds me of the fella back home who fell off a 10-story building … As he was falling, people on each floor kept hearing him say, ‘So far, so good.’ So far, so good.” In other words, Kemp is still in deep trouble, this Georgia GOP insider believes.
In 2018, Kemp won a competitive Republican gubernatorial primary after receiving a crucial endorsement from Trump. Two years later, their relationship crumbled.
Trump blamed unsubstantiated election fraud for costing him a landslide reelection victory, homing in on a half-dozen battleground states where he lost narrowly, including Georgia. President Joe Biden defeated Trump there by 11,779 votes. The polling in Georgia down the stretch of the 2020 campaign, and the acceleration of visits by Trump and his top surrogates, suggested Biden could win and, at the very least, that no Republican landslide was in the offing.
Sure enough, Trump became the first Republican presidential nominee to lose the Peach State since 1992. But the 45th president insisted the state’s 16 Electoral College votes were stolen and grew livid with the governor in the weeks after the election for refusing to assist in overturning the results. He still blames Kemp and has vowed to exact revenge by recruiting and supporting a primary challenger to block the governor from a second term.
“Too bad the desperately needed election reforms in Georgia didn’t go further, as their originally approved bill did, but the governor and lieutenant governor would not go for it,” Trump lamented in a statement, still dissatisfied with Kemp (and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, also a Republican). “This bill should have been passed before the 2020 presidential election.”
So far, no major figure has come forward to challenge Kemp in the Republican primary.
