Brian Kemp is the first lifelong Republican to ever serve as governor of Georgia.
Let that simple fact sink in for a moment.
A state that has been ruled by Republicans for the last several decades had never sent a governor to the state capitol who had been a lifelong member of the party.
The Republican revolution of the mid to late-2000s may have been led by Sonny Perdue and Nathan Deal, but both men got their political starts as Democrats before ascending to the state’s highest office.
That all changed with Kemp’s victory in 2018, when the Republican from the Classic City waged what started out as a dark-horse bid for the Republican nomination. A late endorsement from President Donald Trump (which feels like forever ago) rocketed him to victory, setting up the first of what would be two successful campaigns against Democrat Stacey Abrams.
The question now, as Kemp’s two terms in office draw to a close: was he Georgia’s first lifelong Republican chief executive, or will he be the only one for the foreseeable future?
Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms will succeed Kemp as Georgia’s 84th governor after her party triumphed in Tuesday’s elections, capturing every statewide constitutional office and flipping control of the state House.
U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, secured a commanding victory in Tuesday’s elections and won several counties that had never voted for a Democratic candidate before.
And of course there’s the complete and utter thumping Republicans took in the battle for control of Congress, where Democrats are projected to hold at least 250 seats in the House and could capture as many as 56 Senate seats.
“It was a wipeout of GOP power in Georgia,” said Jason Esteves, a former state senator who ran against Bottoms in the primary.
Hindsight is 20/20, I guess. Quite a few of the now-victorious Democratic nominees, almost all of whom are Black women, faced significant fundraising and institutional hurdles.
Katherine Juhan-Arnold, the Democratic nominee for agriculture commissioner, was challenging Republican incumbent Tyler Harper in a race to oversee Georgia’s most vital industry. Harper maintained great respect among both parties and was thought to have his own bright political future ahead of him.
He also massively outraised and outspent Arnold, who had just $4,000 (yes, four thousand dollars) on her most recent disclosure form and had frequently filed her paperwork late, if she filed at all.
But it all ended up not mattering for Commissioner-elect Juhan-Arnold.
So what was the root cause of this nationwide shellacking?
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
It’s a political theory almost as old as politics itself: The more people are paying, whether at the gas pump or at the checkout line, the worse the optics are for the party in power that’s working to assure the public that everything is going fine.
Trump and Republicans were elected on the promise that they would ease the pain voters were feeling. His famous line during the campaign was “Kamala and Democrats are for they/them, while President Trump is for YOU.”
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Two years in, you’d be hard-pressed to find any reasonable voter or analyst who agrees that things have gotten better. Depending on who you ask, some would say Trump’s aggressive tariff campaign combined with the war in Iran that he launched in late February has only made things worse for consumers.
There’s also minority voters.
The shifts we saw towards Trump and Republicans among voters of color, particularly Black and Hispanic voters, was one of the biggest subplots of the 2024 cycle. This year, the biggest storyline is their apparent return to their Democratic roots.
You also can’t gerrymander gas prices or grocery stores. Everybody pays the same price for everything, everywhere, and even the craftiest gerrymander in the world can’t erase the public’s economic pain, which might explain why none of the mid-decade Republican gerrymanders achieved their intended goals.
And then there’s the president himself.
Quite frankly, the only reason we’re even talking about Democrats flipping every statewide office, the state House and a bunch of U.S. Senate seats in red states is because the entire Republican party’s political identity has revolved around one single man for the better part of the last decade.
And people are clearly exhausted.
Hopefully now is the time for Republicans to do some soul-searching and figure out what and how they’ve managed to essentially piss off the entire country after just two years in power. At least, that’s Gov. Kemp’s hope.
“Republicans now have the opportunity, and responsibility, to heed the will of voters and learn from (Tuesday’s) results,” Kemp said shortly after voters named Gov.-elect Bottoms as his successor.
“I firmly believe the conservative principles of our party lead to greater freedom, security, and prosperity for all Americans—and it’s time we get back to those principles in the months and years to come.”
But what does a new GOP identity look like? Who will be the one (or ones) leading the GOP out of electoral darkness? And how does that new identity start?
“It starts by completely dissociating with Trump,” as one of my Republican friends told me.
“It’s to be seen if we find it.”
Brian Kemp might be the first lifelong member of his party to ever sit in the governor’s chair. But after Tuesday, he may very well be the only one to ever do so for quite some time unless and until his party takes some time to self-reflect.
Niles Francis is the author of Georgia political newsletter Peach State Politics.
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