Photo: Alyssa Pointer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Donald Trump confirmed his total domination of the Republican Party this year by crushing a field of presidential-nomination rivals that at one point reached 13 candidates. At least four of them ran as anti-Trump candidates (Will Hurd, Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie, and, once it became a head-to-head race, Nikki Haley). One other aspirant, former vice-president and longtime Trump punching bag Mike Pence, seems to have become an embittered anti-Trump Republican after dropping out of the presidential race, even as Haley pretty quickly transitioned from hating on the 45th president to endorsing him. Still another outspoken anti-Trump Republican, former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, played with the idea of leaving the GOP entirely to run for president on a nonpartisan No Labels ticket but instead downshifted to a U.S. Senate race in which his arm’s-length relationship with Trump could become both a swing-voter magnet and a base-energizing problem.
Clearly, dissenting from the MAGA gospel is a dangerous move for an ambitious Republican politician. But there is one major GOP politician who has battled with Trump, and even won, yet still seems to have a bright future in the Republican Party. That would be Georgia governor Brian Kemp.
Well before he drew any 2024 primary challengers, Trump tried to make Kemp and Brad Raffesnperger, his successor as Georgia secretary of state, object-lessons in the consequences of crossing him. The pair certified Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia and repeatedly refused to comply with Trump’s demands to undo it (Kemp by declining to call a special legislative session to decertify Biden electors and Raffensperger by turning down Trump’s request to “find” him enough votes to flip the results). So the two politicians had a big bullseye on their backs in the 2022 midterms. Trump recruited formidable primary opponents for them (former U.S. Senator David Perdue to oppose Kemp, congressman Jody Hice to take down Raffensperger) and for another dissenter, Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, who was so intimidated he chose not to run for reelection.
Kemp and Raffensperger proceeded to rout their MAGA-approved opponents without even needing a runoff. The methodical Kemp, even though he had theoretically made himself vulnerable in the general election by signing a near-total abortion ban, proceeded to dispatch Democratic super-star and exceptional fundraiser Stacey Abrams by a significantly larger margin that he did in defeating her in 2018.
Having established himself emphatically as the master of Georgia politics, Kemp has subsequently walked a tightrope in terms of his positioning on national GOP controversies. His state remains a MAGA hotbed in some respects; its congressional delegation, after all, includes notable hyper-extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andrew Clyde, and Mike Collins. The state GOP is controlled by Trump loyalists; Kemp has largely ignored it and built his own political organization. He brushed off talk of challenging Trump himself in 2024, and remained neutral in the presidential primaries until a few days after Nikki Haley dropped out. On the very day of Georgia’s primary, he endorsed the unopposed Trump as an act of party loyalty.
So now Brian Kemp can look forward to a broad and sunny group of options in Republican politics. He’s halfway through his second (and final, thanks to term limits) term as Georgia governor, and his job approval rating is at a solid 57 percent. If Trump’s current steady lead in polls of Georgia holds up through November, Kemp can take some of the credit, and neutralize some of the bad MAGA vibes over what happened in 2020. He’s maintained a pretty strong conservative ideological street cred (there’s a reason Trump endorsed Kemp over a more moderate gubernatorial candidate in 2018 before their falling out); aside from his hardline position on abortion, he’s cut taxes, pushed through two restrictive election laws, resisted Medicaid expansion, and signed a private-school voucher initiative. He was to the right of then-president Trump on COVID-19 policies, which was actually the first source of friction between the two men.
At 60, Brian Kemp could choose to retire in 2026, but it’s more likely he’ll run for higher office. A tempting target is the U.S. Senate seat of freshman Democrat Jon Ossoff, an exceptional organizer and fundraiser but not quite the political powerhouse his colleague Raphael Warnock has become. If he takes on Ossoff and wins or even if he doesn’t run, there’s talk of Kemp as a presidential contestant in 2028. He’s cautiously reentering the national GOP picture already, as Politico reports:
[T]he popular swing-state governor is building up his political operation, not only helping a handful of candidates in tight [races] across the country, but cultivating influence ahead of his own possible future run.And he will attend the Republican nominating convention in Milwaukee this summer, according to a person familiar with Kemp’s plans who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter. …
Kemp in September will speak for the first time at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual convention, a gathering that draws some of the GOP’s highest profile leaders and donors.
Kemp doesn’t have the warmest personality you’ll find in politics, but compared to his Florida neighbor Ron DeSantis, he’s folksy and relatable enough. And after what happened in December 2020 and then in 2022, nobody is going to doubt Kemp’s toughness and political savvy. There’s one bit of leftover business from those days that could still cause him issues: the trial, assuming it ever transpires, of Trump and various cronies in Atlanta on felony racketeering charges related to the effort to overturn the 2020 election results. Back in November of 2022 Kemp testified before an Atlanta grand jury that eventually handed down the Trump indictments, and will likely be compelled to testify in public once the trial finally convenes. This could bring back some tensions between Kemp and the 45th president, who has almost completely ignored him after his Georgia purge effort failed so badly.
For now, though, Kemp looks like the anti-Trump politician with the brightest future. Christie and Pence appear washed up; Haley has a long way to go in rehabilitating her shaky image as a flip-flopping opportunist; Hogan is in an uphill Senate race; and nobody much has heard from the others lately. The Georgia governor is undefeated against the former president so far, and that’s a boast almost no one else can make.
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