Wins for Kemp and Carr in Georgia show Trump’s grip on GOP slipping

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Georgia governor Brian Kemp won the state’s Republican primary for governor on Tuesday, easily overcoming a challenge from former senator David Perdue in a stinging setback for Donald Trump.

The ex-US president had sought to oust Kemp as part of his post-presidential crusade to punish anyone he blames for his 2020 defeat.

The Associated Press declared Kemp the winner over Perdue, who Trump personally courted to run against Kemp, after the governor refused to overturn the results of the presidential election in Georgia – a contest that multiple reviews determined was won by Joe Biden.

By contrast, Perdue embraced Trump’s myth of a stolen election but recent polling showed him trailing far behind the incumbent governor, whose conservative agenda drew the support of many of the state’s big donors and political leaders.

In another defeat for Trump in the state, Georgia’s attorney general Chris Carr beat back a challenge from John Gordon, who made Trump’s stolen election myth a central plank of his campaign.

Kemp will now face Democrat Stacey Abrams, setting the stage for a rematch of their showdown in 2018, when she narrowly lost the governorship but emerged as a rising star on the left and a prominent advocate for voting rights. The race for governor of Georgia is expected to be one of the fiercely fought contests of the cycle.

Once deeply Republican, Abrams is credited as a leading architect of the party’s expanding electoral power in Georgia, culminating in last year’s election of two Democratic senators.

In a sign that not every race was going against Trump in the state, former football star Herschel Walker won the Republican nomination for Senate in what is already shaping up to be a marquee race that could determine control of the evenly-divided chamber.

Riding Trump’s endorsement and his own celebrity in a state where football often seems to reign supreme, Walker managed to deflect questions about his academic and business achievements and a history of violence against his ex-wife. Walker, who is Black, will face incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock, a longtime civil rights champion and the state’s first Black senator who is running for a full term after winning the seat in a special election in 2021.

In the north-west corner of the state, far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene cruised to victory in a primary that tested conservatives’ tolerance for her extremist brand of politics, a week after voters in North Carolina ousted her ideological ally, congressman Madison Cawthorn.

Trump’s efforts to exact revenge on the Republicans who did not bend to his will in 2020 extends to a closely-watched race for secretary of state in which the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger faces a Trump ally.

Georgia is one of several states holding primary elections on Tuesday.

In Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former White House press secretary under Trump, secured the Republican nomination in the race to become the state’s next governor. She is the daughter of Mike Huckabee, who served as governor of Arkansas for a decade.

Meanwhile, in Texas, George P Bush, the former president’s nephew, failed to take down the embattled attorney general, Ken Paxton, in a race that tested the strength of the Bush family’s political dynasty. Paxton, who was endorsed by Trump after leading an unsuccessful lawsuit that asked the US supreme court to overturn the 2020 election, is the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation related to allegations of corruptions and, separately, was indicted in 2015 for securities fraud.