It’s not easy to make Brian Kemp laugh, but at the mention of Donald Trump, the governor of Georgia lets out a rueful chuckle. “Well, heh-heh, I don’t know,” he drawls, leaning against the lunch counter at Charlie Joseph’s chili-dog stand in the western Georgia town of LaGrange. “You’d have to ask him about that.”
Kemp is perched on a red-leather-and-chrome stool, reflecting on the trials of the past four years—many of them at the hands of the former President. Once upon a time, the 58-year-old Republican was a loyal Trump ally. But that was before he declined to help overturn the 2020 election, prompting Trump to mount an all-out campaign to defeat him. “I guess he got mad at me,” Kemp says with a shrug.
That’s an understatement. Trump put more money and effort into unseating Kemp this year than any other Republican who has crossed him, even Liz Cheney, the crusading anti-Trump congresswoman. In today’s GOP, the former President’s endorsement is usually a golden ticket, and his enmity is almost always the kiss of death. The vast majority of Republicans believe his false election claims. When he turned on Kemp, many figured the governor’s career might as well be over.
But Trump’s attempt to oust Kemp failed spectacularly. The governor clobbered Trump’s handpicked candidate, former Senator David Perdue, by more than 50 points in the May primary. And far from damaging Kemp, the feud with Trump may have left him better off politically than he was before, burnishing his brand with Trump-skeptical independent voters. That makes Kemp the rare—perhaps the only—GOP pol to have used Trump better than Trump used him.
The hard-fought primary, Kemp tells me, was a blessing in disguise. “It gave me an opportunity, quite honestly, to remind people of what my record was,” he says. “And what I told them I’d do when I was running, I actually did as their governor. And I think the longer things went, the more people realized that, and that paid off big.”
Now, as the general election nears, Kemp looks poised to get his revenge. He is favored to win his rematch with Democrat Stacey Abrams more convincingly than four years ago. Back then, Kemp eked out a victory in a race Abrams refused to concede, insisting it was tainted by voter suppression. This time the dynamics are in some ways the opposite. In 2018, Kemp was the Trumpy candidate accused of subverting democracy; now he’s the candidate who defied Trump to defend it, and his opponent is the one accused of election denial. Despite being outspent nearly 2-to-1, Kemp is ahead by an average of about 6 points in the polls.