By Jeffrey Blehar
Thursday, May 08, 2025
There is portentous news this week: Brian Kemp, the
two-term governor of Georgia, announced on Monday that he would not be getting into the race for the
state’s U.S. Senate seat, currently held by Democrat Jon Ossoff. It’s
objectively terrible news for the GOP’s hopes of expanding their current Senate
majority; I have difficulty imagining any Republican candidate other than Kemp
who has a realistic chance of winning statewide in Georgia against an
incumbent, in what by any reckoning is likely to be a “backlash” election
against Trump and the GOP. (This is the way of nearly all midterms, even in our
increasingly rigid and polarized age, and Trump’s recent economic moves do not
speak of a man too terribly concerned about the outcome of the next election.)
I cannot say, however, that Kemp’s decision to pass came
as much of a surprise. I don’t claim any deeper insight into his
decision-making process than what his public résumé provides — although he was
a fine speaker at the National Review Institute Ideas Summit in March — but it
long ago seemed obvious that he had many reasons for giving the 2026
Georgia Senate campaign a miss. Consider for a moment the governor as an actual
person with a life and a history — and not some robot or piece on an abstract
political chessboard to be moved around by others — and all that becomes clear.
But this requires a brief history lesson first.
Kemp was a member of the gubernatorial Class of 2018. You
remember 2018, right? The year was otherwise known as Trump’s greatest
electoral wipeout to date; he saw his House majority swept away on a wave so
vast that it provided a Democratic majority that would eventually impeach him
twice. Perhaps the good news that year in the Senate has led people to retire
the year from their memory banks of Grand Republican Disasters. The 2018 map
favored the GOP in a historically unique way, allowing them to reclaim seats in
once-competitive but now blood-red states such as Indiana, Missouri, and North
Dakota — so much that they actually increased their Senate majority
in the midterm.
Keep that thought about the 2018 Senate in your back
pocket for a moment, for it was during that same election that Kemp won his
first race for governor. It was a notably fraught campaign: Kemp, then
Georgia’s volubly pro-Trump secretary of state under Governor Nathan Deal, took
a mere 26 percent of the vote in the first GOP primary round against Lieutenant
Governor Casey Cagle’s 39 percent. He then won the second round with nearly 70
percent — but only after Trump endorsed him publicly as the MAGA candidate in
the race and Vice President Pence campaigned for him in person.
Kemp subsequently faced a race against Democratic State
House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, which he won by an alarmingly narrow 1.5
percent margin. Both during and after the brutal campaign — in a cynical gambit
whose supreme irony was only knowable in retrospect — Abrams relentlessly
accused Kemp, in his official role as secretary of state, of seeking to
“suppress the vote” of black Georgians. Those utterly spurious allegations
dogged Kemp endlessly during his first term as governor. Abrams refused to concede
the race, contending for years that she was the actual, fraudulently denied,
winner. (The media played along,
laboring mightily during this era to build Abrams into the Great Woke Hope of
the Democratic Party, for retrospectively obvious cultural reasons and with predictably sordid practical results.
***
It was the Covid pandemic that set Kemp on a different
path. Much like Ron DeSantis, his fellow Trump-indebted member of the Class of
’18, Kemp declined to go along with the national craze for harsh lockdowns when
they were otherwise supported with a unified voice by the “medical community,”
the legacy media, and (this last is often forgotten) the Trump administration. Kemp’s refusal to buckle to the panic
was rewarded (like DeSantis’s) with accusations that he was recklessly
encouraging the deaths of his constituents – criticisms that came from none other than Donald Trump himself, among others.
And then the November 2020 election happened, and Georgia
politics has never quite recovered from the fallout. I have zero appetite to
rehearse the “Stop the Steal” madness of that era, or the disgraceful role of
the president and his supporters in seeking to overturn the election and
pressure state officials such as Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, Kemp’s successor
as secretary of state, not to certify the state’s vote. (It will suffice to
note the keen irony, given Kemp’s race against Abrams.)
What matters is that Trump’s public denunciation of the
fairness of the Georgia elections became the issue on which the state’s
two Senate races — both of them unexpectedly close and set for a runoff, but
presumed winnable on Election Night — turned. And they turned against Trump, as
appointed Senator Kelly Loeffler lost to charismatic Baptist preacher Raphael
Warnock while incumbent David Perdue was humiliatingly turfed out of office by
Jon Ossoff, a candidate whose sole prior experience in politics had been losing
a 2017 special election.
Trump’s effect on losing both races was undeniable:
Perdue ran behind his Election Day percentage in the runoff. Within the
span of one electoral cycle, Trump had not only given back all the Senate gains
of 2018 but singlehandedly frittered away what would have been — were it not
for his mad, world-historic temper tantrum — the Senate majority that
Republicans needed to block the worst of Biden’s spendthrift legislation. To
this day, Trump — with his indefatigable self-centeredness — believes himself
to be the victim in this story, and he has always been happy to tell you the
names of the real villains: Secretary of State Raffensperger and Governor Kemp,
both of whom refused to help him “find the votes” to “stop the steal.”
On a personal note, I clearly remember the night we
frittered those two Senate runoff races away — needlessly, idiotically
self-inflicted dual defeats in races we were favored to win — because I thought
of it at the time as perhaps the lowest moment yet in my adult life as a
Republican. Those elections were held, of course, on January 5, 2021 . . . and that,
dear readers, is an irony one never forgets. Speaking of irony, I remember
thinking one other thing to myself as the votes came in, the twin losses
materialized, and Trump’s people took once again to denouncing Georgia
Republican officials as the real cause of the disaster: “Brian Kemp’s
political career pretty much ended tonight.”
I have rarely been so delighted to be so wrong. It’s not
as if the hits ever stopped coming for Kemp, either: Mere months after he
seemingly torched his political future with MAGA by failing to play along with
Trump’s claims of vote fraud, Major League Baseball then stepped in at the
behest of Stacey Abrams to yank the 2021 All-Star Game away from Atlanta mere months before
it was set to be played. The reason, ridiculous as it now seems given
skyrocketing Georgia voter turnout in recent cycles, was a milquetoast voter-ID
law that Kemp had signed. (With no decent recourse left to them, the Atlanta
Braves took revenge that year by winning the World Series.)
And when Kemp’s reelection campaign rolled around, guess
who was standing there against him in the opposite corner? Once again it was
Donald Trump — never one to forget an injury — who in late September 2021
proclaimed the governor a “disaster” and argued that Stacey Abrams (set for a
rematch) “might be better.” He then summoned the tattered wraith of
the recently departed David Perdue to run against Kemp in the primary,
continuing to wage a MAGA campaign of revenge against Kemp and Raffensperger
for failure to bend the knee.
The result: blowout victories for both of them.
Raffensperger won his primary against a Trump-endorsed representative by 20
percent, which would have been the story of the night were it not for Kemp
rolling up a devastating 74 percent of the primary vote against Trump’s own
handpicked former senator. (Having been dispatched to the electoral afterlife
once and for all, Perdue sat in limbo for years until — in a stroke of karmic
justice — he was recently sentenced to become ambassador to China during a trade
war.)
Sometimes Trump’s handpicked primary candidates fail to
advance in open-seat primary races, but who else can you think of in the
Republican Party that incurred Trump’s electoral wrath so publicly and
concertedly, and yet survived to tell the tale? The list, near as I can tell,
comprises Kemp and Raffensperger, in that order. (Liz Cheney? Won’t see
her no more.) Neither has suddenly fallen into Trump’s good graces, either
— although Trump himself saw the writing on the wall and “endorsed” Kemp once his victory was inevitable.
***
With all that in mind, instead of asking why Brian Kemp
wouldn’t want to run for Senate in 2026, it makes more sense to ask yourself why
he would. (That this doesn’t occur to most analysts is evidence that they
tend to think of politicians as wind-up toys who are automatically expected to
take the “next step” in programmed game of political self-promotion.) Kemp is
no young upstart chancer like Jon Ossoff himself was back in 2020; the man is a
two-term governor who shepherded his state not only through Covid and a woke
backlash that hit Georgia directly, but through Hurricane Trump, its own unique
sort of natural disaster.
If he were to run in 2026, it would be a brutally hard
race in potentially historically rough political weather for the GOP. If he
were to win, his reward would be to head to the back of the line in Washington,
D.C., as the junior senator from the Peach State. And all to find
himself required — for the first time ever — to serve the whims of Donald
Trump, when he has defined himself politically by sparring against Trump. It’s
a thankless gig top to bottom for a man not with Kemp’s professional
qualifications and personal history.
A national story is emerging about both Senate
retirements — older Democrats seemingly eager to pass their seats on while they
are most likely to stay in Democratic hands — and Senate challengers. These
last especially bode ill for the Republicans in November 2026, as potential
challengers such as Kemp or Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire decline to
take a swing at seats that, under more fortuitous circumstances, could be ripe
pickings for the GOP.
But I worry far more about Republican prospects in future
statewide elections in Georgia. Ossoff is now strongly favored to hold a Senate
seat he won in the first place only thanks to the political equivalent of force
majeure. Representative Buddy Carter of the first district announced his
candidacy in the race this morning, and notorious gadfly Marjorie Taylor Greene
has dropped hints about entering the race as well — which is what I suppose we
deserve, as sinners in the hands of an angry God.
Georgia’s other Senate seat remains even more firmly
entrenched in the hands of Democrats. Herschel Walker’s hopeless Trump-backed
attempt to dislodge Raphael Warnock in 2022 only revealed Warnock’s significant
retail political skills to the state’s voters. Every Georgia observer I know
agrees that Warnock is by far a better politician than Ossoff. He is praised
not just for his natural charisma or the electoral strength of his built-in
African-American constituency, but also for his constructive working relationships
with local officials. People like him. (“Ossoff is lucky; Warnock can make his
own luck,” is how one smart campaign guy put it.) Now that he has twice been
tested electorally statewide, it will take an elite-level candidate in a
perfect political climate to dislodge him. Do you think 2028 looks to offer
that sort of climate?
But hope springs eternal, does it not? Look, this is
Georgia we’re talking about here: There are something like 547 counties located
within the Atlanta metropolitan region alone, and you’re telling me we
can’t thwack a peach tree in the suburbs with a stick and shake off one or two
regionally respected businessmen without criminal records? I will leave such
investigations to those who live and vote in the state. I can only hope that
Georgia’s Republican Party is not about to go the way of Arizona’s now that
Brian Kemp is no longer there to bypass its insanity.
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