Georgia Republicans are rallying behind Gov. Brian Kemp and fighting back against Donald Trump and their own party leaders, angered by a rally last month in which Trump again attacked Kemp for not helping him overturn Jo Biden’s win in the state.
Kemp’s supporters warn that a total embrace of Trump, his false claims about election fraud and his vendetta against the governor for not trying to overturn Trump’s loss in Georgia last year “could ruin Republican chances in 2022 in the narrowly divided state,” The Independent reports.
“Right now we are joined at the hip to Donald Trump, who doesn’t share the same interests,” said James Hall, a state Republican Party committee member from Savannah, according to the news outlet. “He wants to torpedo Brian Kemp.”
Georgia is one of several states seeing Trump-driven infighting. The former president also continues to roil the party’s internal politics in Arizona where he has targeted Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, and Wyoming, where he is driving an effort to oust Liz Cheney, the state’s lone U.S. House member. Trump is endorsing primary candidates across the nation, continuing a drive to remake the Republican Party in his image.
The moment that sent Kemp supporters over the edge was when Trump, repeatedly calling Kemp “a disaster,” twice suggested he would prefer Democrat Stacey Abrams as Georgia’s governor. Abrams became a national Democratic superstar even though Kemp edged her out in 2018. Georgia Democrats strongly want her to run again for the governor’s office in 2022.
“Stacey, would you like to take his place? It’s OK with me,” Trump said at the rally in Perry, Georgia.
The Independent noted that “Kemp allies are particularly angry at state Republican Party Chairman David Shafer, who introduced the rally. Critics say Shafer violated party bylaws requiring him to not pick sides in primaries by appearing at an event during which Trump repeated his endorsement of several candidates.”
Shafer, who continues to echo Trump’s false fraud claims and call for an additional audit of Georgia’s results, tried to distance herself from the debacle, saying that it was Trump’s event, not the party’s.
“When we accept a contribution or sponsorship from a Republican candidate to speak at an event, that does not mean we are endorsing the candidate or agreeing with everything the politician says,” Shafer wrote in a letter to state committee members on Monday after Hall and others complained.
“My job is to emphasize the areas of agreement and not the areas of disagreement with other Republicans,” Shafer said. “We can’t win divided. We’ve got to pull everyone back together, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
It’s unclear how the infight will affect Republicans Republicans in a state that has swung sharply toward Democrats in recent years.
