Brian Kemp Wins Georgia GOP Runoff for Governor to Face Stacey Abrams

ATHENS, Ga. — Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, captured the Republican nomination for governor Tuesday, dispatching the preferred candidate of the state party establishment after a series of provocative ads that evoked President Donald Trump’s incendiary politics and a well-timed endorsement from the president himself.

Kemp now faces Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee, in a November general election that will test whether this rapidly changing Southern state prefers a Trump-style conservative or a progressive black woman.

According to results from The Associated Press, Kemp held a wide lead in the runoff over his opponent, Casey Cagle, the state’s lieutenant governor. Georgia Democrats were also choosing candidates Tuesday to compete for a pair of Atlanta-area House seats held by Republicans who could prove vulnerable.

In the governor’s race, Kemp and Abrams will both likely recalibrate their appeals to try to reach Georgia’s growing population of moderate voters. But Kemp — whose hard-line campaign has featured ads in which he volunteers to round up unauthorized immigrants and brandishes guns — will first have to unite his party, after an unusually bitter runoff that effectively ended last week when Trump endorsed him.

The victory by Kemp, who won just 26 percent of the vote during the first balloting in May and was heavily outspent throughout the nominating contest, was the latest testament to the strength of Trump’s grip on the Republican electorate. And in a mournful essay that amounted to an early concession, Cagle wrote Monday that Trump’s intercession was a “kick in the gut.”

But what alarms Republican officials in Washington and Atlanta, where the outgoing governor, Nathan Deal, endorsed Cagle, is that Trump’s endorsement of Kemp may have made it harder to defeat Abrams in November.

Large swaths of suburban Atlanta swung away from the Republicans in 2016, recoiling from Trump’s divisive and racially tinged appeals. And Kemp has adopted the same approach, but even more vividly.

Kemp aired commercials that showed him wielding a shotgun that, he vowed, “no one’s taking away.” And he sat in a Ford F350 truck that he said he would use “just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take them home myself.”

In a separate ad that many here believe helped propel him into the runoff, the secretary of state pointed a shotgun at a young man purportedly interested in dating one of his daughters.

And as secretary of state, Kemp backed so-called “religious freedom” legislation that has drawn strong opposition in the past from the business community and gay-rights groups.

Democrats immediately attacked Kemp as an inept public official whose policies would jeopardize the state’s business-friendly reputation. But in a statement released soon after Kemp’s victory become apparent, the chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party stopped just short of explicitly tying Kemp to Trump.

Cagle appeared in a ballroom at an Atlanta hotel to concede about 90 minutes after the polls closed. Calling Kemp “a dear personal friend of mine for a long, long time,” Cagle urged his supporters to put aside the ugly primary fight and back Kemp against Abrams.

“I know that when you’re in the arena sometimes you get the boxing gloves out and there’s a lot of hits that go on,” Cagle said. “We have to rally around him in order to make sure we win in November.”

Kemp’s fiery language and attacks on unauthorized immigrants and others raise questions about whether the state’s image-conscious corporate titans will rally to his side as they did with Deal, whose mild-mannered politics tempered the more conservative inclinations of the state Legislature. Deal is leaving office because of term limits after eight years as governor.

Democrats have not won a governor’s race since 1998, and Abrams not only would be the first black governor here — she also would be the first black female governor in the country. She ran in her own primary as a down-the-line liberal, criticizing other Democrats who have sought to win by tailoring their message to appeal to the state’s rural conservatives.

But even if Republicans do maintain an advantage in Georgia, the nomination of Kemp in a year when suburban woman are flocking to Democrats could, at a minimum, force GOP groups to spend money in a state they have safely counted in their column in recent years. What is clear is that Kemp’s ads, in which he boasted about being “a politically incorrect conservative,” appealed far more to grass-roots conservatives in this Trumpian moment than Cagle’s decadeslong experience in state government.

The commercials, as with most everything Trump-related, prompted eye rolling from establishment-aligned Republicans in private. And one of those Republicans snickering was Cagle himself.

Cagle, the lieutenant governor since 2007, spent much of this year’s race as the Republican front-runner. Yet well before Trump intervened in the campaign on Kemp’s behalf last week, Cagle encountered difficulty when he was recorded talking in blunt terms to a former opponent — recordings that were leaked out in extended and excruciating fashion.

Cagle was heard on tape saying the Republican primary had become a test of “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest.” And he conceded that he had supported what he believed to be bad public policy in an effort to thwart an opponent’s fundraising efforts and boost his own.

The recordings gave Kemp an opening. In a television commercial, he promptly declared, “If that’s not criminal, it should be.”

Seeing Cagle weakened politically, his rivals in Georgia and beyond seized on the recordings, which were surreptitiously made on an iPhone by Clay Tippins, who also ran for governor and placed fourth in the Republican primary.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who preceded Deal as governor, made the case for Kemp with the president following a Cabinet meeting last week. And just a few hours later, the president caught much of the political world by surprise with a tweet in support of Kemp.

Trump’s intervention blindsided Republican governors, who had grown frustrated over his appetite for inserting himself in primaries for candidates who might struggle in the general election. And it irritated some White House aides who see Trump being used as a tool in rivalries that predate his presidency — in this case between Perdue and Deal. Many in the West Wing find little upside to the president’s taking sides in intraparty contests where both candidates are Trump loyalists.

But the degree to which Trump was pressed into the endorsement was made clear when, immediately after the endorsement, a rally featuring Kemp and Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled for Saturday in Macon.

By Monday, Cagle wrote an open letter in which he said, “There’s nothing in a Republican primary runoff that’s more crushing than having the president endorse your opponent a week before the election.”

Cagle complained that Trump had “decided to do this because some Washington insiders who have weaseled their way into his ear convinced him to make a power play.”

On Tuesday afternoon, at a news conference in Atlanta, Cagle said that he had been in weekly contact with the White House in pursuit of the president’s endorsement, and that Trump’s support for Kemp came “somewhat out of nowhere.” He said he had been told up until Trump tweeted his endorsement that the president would not take sides.

Cagle noted that Trump’s intervention placed him in opposition not only to the state’s sitting Republican governor but also to the National Rifle Association, which endorsed Cagle. The group’s incoming president, Lt. Col. Oliver North, appeared at three rallies for Cagle several days before Trump’s endorsement.

Yet after a decade of planning to run for governor, and a career in state politics that dated to his election to the state Senate at 28, the complaint by Cagle was but a lament for an opportunity that slipped his grasp thanks, in part, to a few tweets.