Analysis | Trump’s backing doesn’t get you the win, but Trumpism does

ATLANTA When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp stepped on a stage at the 30-yard-line of the mock football field at the College Football Hall of Fame to address his supporters last Tuesday, he looked out at reporters standing in the end zone. They’d just seen the Republican governor evade a tackle by former president Donald Trump, who had made defeating Kemp in the primaries his top priority in this election cycle. Kemp had stomped to victory over Trump-endorsed former senator David Perdue, a man who had made Trump’s Big Lie about a stolen 2020 election the centrepiece of his campaign.

You might have expected Kemp to spike the ball.

And it almost seemed like he might, when he started a sentence that seemed to echo a favourite phrase of that 2020 Trump-slayer, President Joe Biden. “Tonight, the fight for the soul of our state begins…” Kemp said. But he wasn’t talking about a battle with the former president as he continued his sentence by looking to his Democratic general election candidate: “…to make sure that Stacey Abrams is not going to be our governor or the next president.”

In fact, throughout the campaign, and in its final days while I was in Georgia observing, Kemp was careful to make it clear that though Trump was relentlessly attacking him, he had no problem with the former president.

At one campaign stop, he told reporters about Trump’s endorsement of his opponent. “I’ve never said a bad word about their administration and I don’t plan on doing that.”

That was a bit of a theme among the Republican candidates who won in primaries this week despite Trump targeting them: they often proclaimed themselves to be true disciples of Trumpism despite the personal vendettas being pursued against them. Mo Brooks, the Alabama representative who forced a runoff in the Senate race there despite Trump rescinding an endorsement and attacking him after Brooks said it was “time to move on” from disputing the 2020 election, continued to campaign as “MAGA Mo” and the true leader of Trump’s movement in the state.

Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who famously refused to “find” the votes Trump asked him to in order to overturn the election results there — and who won the renomination despite Trump pursuing a full-on vendetta against him — based much of his reelection campaign on tightening voting restrictions in just the way Trump’s conspiracy-mongering suggests.

There appears to be a civil war in the GOP with Trump and those who will go all in on the Big Lie about 2020 on one side and those willing to tell the truth about 2020 on the other side. But only one side is firing any ammunition.

Which is why there needs to be a big asterisk next to the headlines you may have read analyzing such primaries as a “big loss for Trump” or some such. The results in Georgia, among other places, certainly show that his personal endorsement isn’t determinative even in Republican primaries. But the races, and the ways in which candidates are winning despite his attacking them, are showing that Trumpism is still the dominant ideology in the party.

An Alabama Daily News poll in the days leading up to the primary showed Brooks with a solid lead among those who identified themselves as “Trump Republicans.” It’s a phenomenon that tracks with some voters I spoke to in Rome, Georgia — the home district of super-MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — who told me they liked Trump but were still voting for Kemp and Raffensperger, because they liked them, too. Despite the disputes over the 2020 election and Trump’s personal ill-will, they still saw the Georgia officials as part of the same political movement as the former president.

In the city of Atlanta on voting day, on the other hand, most of the people I encountered were Democrats. But they were rooting for Kemp and Raffensperger in the Republican primary specifically because they remain scared of Trumpism. And it seems like some such voters might have cast a ballot for those Republicans in the open primary: An Atlanta Journal Constitution analysis suggests about seven per cent of those who voted in the Georgia Republican primary had previously voted in Democratic primaries, suggesting they may have crossed over to support those running without Trump’s endorsement.

Georgia will be one of the most important and fascinating states to watch in November’s election, as the races for governor, secretary of state, and senator will all be tight in the traditionally Republican state whose demographics have been shifting, and which Democratic senators and Biden won in 2020. Governance of the state will depend on the state races, of course, where in any event many will be relieved the election deniers did not make it to the ballot. Control of the Senate may hinge in part on the Georgia Senate seat being contested, currently held by a Democrat.

But in the meantime, the primaries were interesting for how they showed that Trump’s influence doesn’t determine who wins and loses. Even if the race also demonstrated that Trump still determines the party’s messages and policy direction — even among those he hates.

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