By BILL BARROW (Associated Press)
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp will support the Republican presidential candidate in November, but he will not actively promote or endorse former President Donald Trump.
“I’m going to support the nominee,” Kemp told reporters this week after Trump won his state’s primary on his way to clinching the GOP nomination.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, once a favorite potential presidential candidate for anti-Trump Republicans, officially endorsed the former president last week. But he did so only after Trump won the Virginia primary on Super Tuesday. And Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, one of the nation’s highest-ranking Black Republicans, still won’t endorse him.
“Everybody has to make their own decision,” she told reporters after Trump’s victory. She then cited an Old Testament verse, Hosea 8:4, that reads in part, “They have set up kings, but not by me.”
While Trump easily won the Republican nomination for the third time, not all prominent members of his party, especially in swing states where many voters doubt Trump, are trying to keep some distance while safeguarding their own futures.
For figures like Kemp and Youngkin, who may run for president in four years, this means carefully positioning themselves to satisfy enough Trump supporters without alienating voters put off by the former president. For Trump, it means a tougher path to building alliances in battleground states he lost to Biden in 2020 and where Kemp and Youngkin won, then moved to implement policies popular among conservatives.
“He’s the King Kong of Republican politics,” Whit Ayres, who worked for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016, said in an interview leading up to Trump officially securing the nomination. But, Ayres said, that’s not the same thing as unifying the party and expanding the coalition in a general election.
A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to an Associated Press inquiry about how the former president plans to build party unity or seek more endorsements ahead of November.
Trump heads into a rematch with President Joe Biden facing a contingent of Republican dissenters, many of whom backed former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley before she dropped out after Super Tuesday. Haley ran above her statewide margins throughout the primary in areas with lots of suburban voters and college graduates, highlighting Trump’s enduring weaknesses with those groups.
Haley won 35% of Virginia’s primary vote. And nearly 78,000 people in Georgia — about 13% of the total vote — chose her in Tuesday’s primary, though early voting was open before she dropped out.
Haley declined to endorse Trump as she suspended her campaign and instead urged him to try “bringing people into your cause, not turning them away.”
Trump “has to earn the votes of people who have moved away from the party,” said Eric Tanenblatt, a national GOP fundraiser who backed Haley over Trump.
Tanenblatt said he believes there is no proof so far that Trump or his team are actively trying to appeal to doubtful Republicans, and he argued that successful Republican elected officials are well-positioned to let 2024 unfold as they wish.
In 2021, a year after Biden won Virginia by a large margin, Youngkin maintained Trump’s advantage across rural areas and small towns but managed to convert enough Biden voters in more urban and suburban areas. In Georgia, Trump did not do as well in the Atlanta suburbs, which helped Biden win statewide by less than 12,000 votes out of 5 million cast. Two years later, Kemp easily won reelection with a 7.5-point victory, exceeding Trump’s results across the state.
Kemp, for his part, appears to have decided on how to navigate his party’s divided politics: criticize Biden, focus on Georgia and discuss the future.
“It doesn't really matter who our nominee is or would have been—my goal is to ensure we're maintaining our legislative majorities,” Kemp said this week, making it clear that his top electoral priority is his own state.
Like Trump, Kemp has been particularly vocal about immigration, especially since Laken Riley, a nursing student, was killed in Athens, Georgia, prompting authorities to charge a man they allege came into the U.S. illegally from Venezuela.
“The president had control of the House and the Senate from 2020 to 2022 and did nothing about the border, and we were complaining just as much then as we are now,” Kemp said this week, criticizing Biden for using his State of the Union to remind voters that Senate Republicans obstructed a border security deal.
But Kemp remains dismissive of Trump’s continual falsehoods that his loss was somehow rigged, often saying that Republicans “don’t need to be looking in the rearview mirror” or “complaining about the 2020 election.” He typically avoids mentioning Trump when giving that advice as well.
The governor and the former president have had a strained relationship since Kemp declined Trump’s pressure to help overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia—a campaign for which the former president now faces a racketeering indictment in Fulton County.
“We have to give people a reason to vote for us, not just be against the other candidate,” Kemp said. Of course, when asked specifically why he would support Trump after how aggressively the former president attacked him after 2020, Kemp shifted to criticizing the opposition. “Well, I think he'd be better than Joe Biden,” Kemp said. “It's as simple as that.”
Youngkin was a bit more complimentary. In his endorsement, Youngkin praised Trump’s record on taxes, immigration and the economy and said “it’s time to unite around strong leadership and policies that grow our great nation, not four more years of President Biden.”
Still, that argument was made in a written statement issued by Youngkin’s political action committee and spread on social media, not in a live event with voters or where the governor could take questions.
Whether or not Trump wins in November, Republicans who distance themselves from him now may have to appease Trump’s most fervent supporters in a future presidential primary.
Rose McDonald, an 87-year-old who voted on Tuesday for Trump in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, claimed that “there were things that happened that we know weren’t right with all those mail votes.” However, federal and state investigations have not found any proof of tampering with mail-in ballots that could have changed the election outcome.
“I’m mostly content with Kemp,” she stated. “Mostly – I still think he was hesitant in 2020 for not allowing Trump to challenge the election.”
Kemp believes his political group, even if it focuses only on legislative races, will demonstrate his worth and allegiance to the party.
“I believe that if we perform well as Republicans and communicate our objectives and remain committed to the future, we’ll have a successful night,” Kemp remarked, “and that will apply to all levels of the election.”
