Georgia On My Mind

Some thoughts on the Georgia election this past Tuesday.

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Election Day in Georgia

This week’s newsletter is going to be a little different format because I have a lot of thoughts on the recent primary elections in Georgia but not a coherent theme that pulls them all together. As a result, I am going to write brief blurbs on each of my thoughts without worrying about them connecting to each other. With that said, here we go.

Brian Kemp

I’m not sure there has been a politician that has completely altered my view of them for the positive once taking office as Brian Kemp has. In 2018, I refused to vote for Brian Kemp and left the governor’s race blank on my ballot because of the way that he presented himself. The best way that I can put it is that he was obnoxiously and stereotypically conservative without real substantive ideas. I mean, remember these ads?

I thought Kemp would be just another Trump copycat politician that sought to “own the libs” without really carrying that much about conservative policies. Four years later, it is clear that I was mistaken. Over the course of four years, Brian Kemp has been one of the most conservative governors in the country.

Economically, Governor Kemp’s record is incomparable. In 2020, he demanded that all government agencies reduce their budgets by 10% in face of the COVID pandemic. As all hou seholds know, if your income suddenly and drastically falls, then you must cut back on spending in order to remain in sound financial condition. He also allowed businesses throughout the state to reopen and was the first governor in the country to do so in spite of criticism from then-President Trump and this infamous Atlantic article. The combination of these two policies led to Georgia having a budget surplus in which Governor Kemp used the excess money in the most conservative way possible: giving it back to taxpayers.

He has also worked with the General Assembly to pass noneconomic, conservative legislation as well. For example, the General Assembly passed and Governor Kemp signed HB 481, more widely known as the Heartbeat Bill, in 2019 which banned abortions once a fetal heartbeat was detected (except if the life of the mother was in danger or in cases of rape). With the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June (fingers crossed), this law will be enforced which is a huge pro-life win. In April of this year, the General Assembly and Governor Kemp passed into law SB 319 (also known as the Constitutional Carry Act), which allows all Georgians who can legally carry a gun to carry one without a permit, and HB 218, which allows residents of other states “to carry a weapon in this state if licensed to carry in any other state.” 

I say all of this because this helps explain why Brian Kemp was able to trounce David Perdue in the Republican primary on Tuesday. The average Republican voter in Georgia went to the polls for the primary with all of Kemp’s conservative accomplishments in their mind. It turns out that there are still a lot of conservative Republicans that care about conservative policies in Georgia, not continually rehashing the 2020 election.

Donald Trump

This brings me to my second thought regarding the Republican primary in Georgia: Donald Trump’s influence is limited in Georgia. For unknown reasons, Donald Trump has been seething in rage with Georgian politicians as his main target since he lost the 2020 election. Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger (the Secretary of State) have been the target of his ire in particular, but Trump had endorsed a candidate in almost every statewide election. Yet, almost every Trump-backed candidate lost their election.

I have already mentioned Kemp beating the Trump-backed David Perdue by 50 points but Brad Raffensperger beat out Trump-backed Jodi Hice for Secretary of State (and avoided a runoff in the process), Attorney General Chris Carr beat Trump-backed John Gordon, and John King beat out Trump-backed Patrick Witt for Insurance Commissioner. The Raffensperger win is particularly noteworthy because he took a pretty antagonistic stance against Trump and had a pretty high name ID across the state because of it.

With that said, I think the more significant victories are the victories of Carr and King. The candidates running in these races had very little name ID across the state, so, theoretically, a Trump endorsement should have bolstered Gordon and Witt pretty significantly. That simply wasn’t the case. In fact, it’s clear that the influence of incumbency outweighs the influence of Donald Trump.

There were two Trump-backed candidates that did end up winning: Burt Jones won the Lt. Governor’s race against Butch Miller and Herschel Walker won the Republican Senate primary. In Herschel Walker’s case, Donald Trump’s support did not really matter much since everyone in the state of Georgia pretty much knows who Herschel Walker is. Trump’s endorsement of Burt Jones, on the other hand, almost certainly helped Jones win, but the current Lieutenant Governor, Geoff Duncan, did not run for reelection. It seems that a Trump endorsement is only influential when there is an open seat not against an incumbent.

Georgia Voting Law

One last thing, Georgia had record early voting in spite of the newest voting laws that many Democrats, including Joe Biden, called Jim Crow 2.0 and/or Jim Eagle. As many people pointed out at the time, the voting bill expanded voting in Georgia by enshrining into law many of the voting measures that had been implemented temporarily in 2020 due to the pandemic.

To be fair, we won’t know exactly how many absentee votes were thrown out because of the new law until later, but I find it hard to believe that the number will be significant enough to make claims of voter suppression stick. Also, it will be interesting to see what turnout looks like in the general election in November. Hopefully, the loser of all of the different elections will accept the results and not claim voter suppression or voter fraud as the reason they lost.

Prediction

I want to end with a prediction which I don’t do very often. I think that Brian Kemp will beat Stacey Abrams in November by a significantly larger margin than he did last time. The difference last time was somewhere in the ballpark of 50,000 votes between the two. I expect that number to at the very least double this time around. On the other hand, I am usually pretty bad at predicting so who knows.

God Bless,
Hunter Burnett