Of all the “reforms” with which the Republican party has been associated the last decade—health-care reform, regulatory reform, tax reform—its legacy may be a sort of cultural reform. In politics, members of Congress and the president have unique influence on the American public, given the ever-widening scope of the federal government. But this trait is a matter of policy, like the repeal of Obamacare, the retrenchment of the EPA, and relief from the IRS.
Such concerns are not within the purview of Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state and the apparent favorite on Tuesday night to become Republican nominee for governor. What binds Kemp to President Trump and local Republicans these days is more attitudinal: that career politicians are untrustworthy, that liberals are trying to unravel the very fabric of American life (which many liberals also believe of conservatives), and that the media have it out for them. These beliefs are unspecific to any level of government—an office-seeker anywhere can profess them.
That includes Kemp, 54, who has played up his ownership of a small business (a real estate investment company) more than his 12-plus years in state government. He proudly staked out ground as a “politically incorrect” candidate—one of his ads included him seated with a shotgun on his lap pointed in the general direction of a teenage boy Kemp described as being “interested in” one of his daughters. When some in the press accused him of pointing the firearm “at” the youngster, Kemp’s campaign cut a follow-up commercial in which a different camera angle showed the barrel pointed to the right of him. The campaign called the spot “Fake News Machine.”
Two months later, Vice President Mike Pence told a crowd of several hundred that “Brian Kemp will bring the kind of leadership to the statehouse that President Donald Trump has brought to the White House.” Pence was in central Georgia during the weekend to campaign for Kemp, whom Trump endorsed the week before his primary runoff against Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle on Tuesday. Cagle was the favorite in a split Republican field, if only because of his proximity to popular outgoing governor Nathan Deal, his fundraising, and his seeming inoffensiveness. He finished first in the May primary election but fell short of capturing the 50 percent necessary to win the nomination outright.
Ever since, the fourth-place candidate, Clay Tippins, has periodically released damaging snippets of a private conversation with Cagle he recorded on an iPhone in his coat pocket. In one of them, Cagle said that he backed “bad public policy” to deprive a third gubernatorial candidate, Hunter Hill, of financial support. While Kemp has played up the tapes, he’s also stuck to a Trump-appealing message and surged to being the front-runner.
“I believe in God, family, and country, in that order. I say ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘God bless you.’ I strongly support President Trump, our troops, and ironclad borders. And I stand for our national anthem,” Kemp says in another advertisement his campaign released last Monday. “If any of this offends you, then I’m not your guy.” The script is as much on-brand as it is a finger in Cagle’s eye—Cagle told Tippins in one part of the recording that “the issues you talk about are the issues I care about as well. The problem is in a primary … they don’t give a (expletive) about those things,” the Associated Press reported.
In two polls the last few days from the Atlanta-based Opinion Savvy and SurveyUSA, Kemp led by 6 and 18 percentage points, respectively. The first survey was conducted between July 15 and 19, and the second between July 17 and 18; the president endorsed Kemp the afternoon of the 18th. Sensing what he called a “Kemp surge,” the candidate looked ahead to November during a rally in Macon with Pence on Saturday.
“Georgians are sick and tired of these politically correct liberals like Stacey Abrams,” said Kemp of the Democratic candidate, “who are offended and outraged by our faith, our guns, and our big trucks.” (Kemp has said he has one such truck, just in case he needs to “round up criminal illegals and take them home” himself.)
“There’s a lot of talk about the general election and who can beat Stacey Abrams and her billionaire backers. The only way to beat a radical liberal Stacey Abrams is with a Trump conservative who will put Georgians first.”
Abrams, the former state house minority leader, already has an emerging national profile. At 44, she would be the nation’s youngest Democratic governor. She also would be the first black woman elected to such a job. Before Trump backed Kemp, national Democrats and possible White House hopefuls like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris traveled to Georgia to boost Abrams’s campaign. A victory for her would help Democrats establish a foothold in a state they’re trying to turn blue in presidential contests, as well as elevate a young leader in the party to a large platform.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution speculated that the White House may have backed Kemp because of the candidate’s ties to the Perdue political family—Trump’s secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue, appointed Kemp secretary of state when Perdue was governor. But the national GOP has several political reasons not to let this office get away from the party. While Cagle and Kemp both had a two-point edge over Abrams in the recent SurveyUSA poll and election experts say the race favors the Republicans, Cagle is freshly scandal-ridden. The GOP has an inherent numbers advantage in Georgia: Although the government doesn’t keep statistics on party registration, there are no elected Democrats statewide in office. Kemp may be the party’s best bet to keep it that way—and, incidentally, to keep the country’s culture wars front and center.
