Steve Peoples and Jeff Amy, The Associated Press Posted on Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at 8:57 PM EDT
ATLANTA (AP) – Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp won the Republican primary for governor on Tuesday, beating hand-picked rival Donald Trump in a contest that showed the limits of ex-president and his policy fueled by conspiracy in a key. swing state.
Kemp will face Democrat Stacey Abrams this fall in what will be one of the most watched governorship races in the country.
Despite the resounding setback in tonight’s main contest, Trump’s favorite Senate candidate, former NFL star Herschel Walker, easily prevailed in his primaries, while a Trump-backed candidate to serve as director Georgia’s election campaign was still in full swing. And in Republican primaries in Alabama and Arkansas, dozens of Conservatives are likely to win their primaries after accepting Trump’s lies about his loss in the 2020 election.
But Trump’s main goal this primary season was to run for governor of Georgia.
The former president personally recruited former Sen. David Perdue to challenge Kemp, whose only sin was to reject the former president’s baseless allegations of widespread election fraud. Kemp emerged as a powerful fundraiser with a list of conservative hits to mitigate Trump’s opposition. In the final days of the campaign, he announced plans for a $ 5.5 billion Hyundai Motor plant and 8,100 jobs near Savannah.
Perdue’s allies were preparing for an unequal defeat, the only question was whether Kemp would win the majority of the 50% he needed to avoid a second round of elections next month.
“We will not have a second round,” said Matha Zoller, a longtime Republican activist and presenter of Northeast Georgia talks with ties to both Trump and Perdue. “It will be embarrassing.”
The results could raise questions about where power resides within the GOP. While Trump remains very popular with the party’s most loyal voters, the early stages of the mid-term primary season have shown that they are not always on the side of his election. Other prominent Republicans, meanwhile, are increasingly assertive.
Trump Vice President Mike Pence himself met with Kemp in the Atlanta suburbs Monday evening.
“Elections speak for the future,” he told the crowd, adding that “when you vote for Brian Kemp tomorrow, you will say yes to a future of freedom here in Georgia. You will say yes to our most cherished values at the heart of it all. what we love. “
Trump, meanwhile, staged a phone call for Perdue, describing him as “100% MAGIC.”
Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats elsewhere clashed over ideological and strategic divisions that will determine what kind of candidates to nominate and what issues to prioritize for the November general election.
Democrats focused especially on a run-off election in South Texas, where incumbent Henry Cuellar faced a fierce challenge from progressive Jessica Cisneros in a race where abortion was a prominent issue. Cuellar is the latest anti-abortion Democrat to serve in the House.
Republicans were deciding on a series of lower-profile primaries.
In Arkansas, former Trump aide Sarah Huckabee Sanders was expected to demand the nomination of the Republican governor. And in Alabama, Conservative Rep. Mo Brooks was running to represent the GOP in the race to replace retired Sen. Richard Shelby. Brooks, a prominent figure in the January 6 “Stop the Steal” demonstration that preceded the Capitol attack, was initially endorsed by Trump, although Trump fired him after seeing Brooks fight in the surveys.
No state has had more consistent elections this week than Georgia, a long-running Republican stronghold that has changed Democrats in the last election. Biden defeated Trump in Georgia by less than 12,000 votes in 2020, and Democrats won both seats in the Senate two months later.
This year, Trump’s obsession with his loss in 2020 has been raised over the Republican primary election for governor, Senate and secretary of state.
Trump had backed Walker in Republican Senate primaries to face incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock this fall, rejecting warnings from Walker Republican competitors about his history of domestic violence and mental health struggles.
Trump’s main ally, MP Marjorie Taylor Greene, was also expected to win her primary election in the 14th district of the state Congress, despite a prominent first term for her conspiracy theories and controversy.
On the Democratic side in Georgia, two members of Congress, Lucy McBath and Carolyn Bourdeaux, clashed with each other in the Atlanta suburbs, forcing infrequent primaries between incumbents and incumbents after Republicans returned. to draw the map of the Congress.
In the meantime, Georgia’s Republican primary for governor – and the GOP Secretary-of-State contest – will have a direct impact on Georgia’s 2024 presidential contest.
In the Republican primary for Secretary of State, Trump has criticized GOP incumbent Brad Raffensperger, who refused to support the former president’s direct calls to cancel the 2020 election. Raffensperger faces three main challengers, including Trump-backed Rep. Jody Hice. The winner will serve as Georgia’s election director in the 2024 presidential election.
Tuesday marked the first election in Georgia under a new Republican-backed state legislature-approved voting law in response to Trump’s complaints. The changes made it harder to vote by mail, which was popular among Democrats in 2020 amid the pandemic; introduced new voter identification requirements that critics warned could deprive black voters; and extended early voting to rural areas where Republicans usually vote.
The new law also prohibits distributing food or water within 150 feet of a polling station, a common practice in urban areas where there are usually long queues of voters.
In the afternoon, no major system-wide problems were reported in Georgia. There were sporadic reports of polling stations open late, minor equipment problems and some voters were in the wrong place.
Early voting totals in Georgia suggested a huge interest from voters, especially on the Republican side.
As of last Friday, 857,401 voters had voted in advance, including 795,567 who voted in advance in person, according to the secretary of state. That included 483,149 votes cast by Republicans and 368,949 by Democrats.
These figures broke early turnout in the 2020 presidential election, when a total of 254,883 Georgians voted early.
Democrats downplayed the vote gap, noting that the state’s highest-profile contests were playing on the Republican side.
“As Democrats unite behind our candidates, Republicans are in chaos as they work with an extreme agenda and try to outdo each other as the most MAGA candidate,” the Democratic National Committee chairman said. , Jaime Harrison.
Meanwhile, in the Atlanta suburb of Woodstock, 19-year-old Brody Nelson said Trump’s influence on the governor’s career was a “big problem” in his decision to support Perdue.
“When Trump was in office, he did a lot for this country and did a lot to help small businesses and people fighting in the world compared to the rich and the powerful,” he said.
But Nathan Johnston, a 42-year-old surveyor, said he had voted for Kemp for his leadership for “about four difficult years.”
“We didn’t stay locked up any longer than we had to and we worked during the pandemic, and the economy is going pretty well, so I think that’s well reflected in it,” he said.
Informed peoples from Washington. Associated Press writer Jeff Martin in Woodstock, Georgia, contributed to this report.