ATLANTA– Georgia Governor Brian Kemp will endorse his fellow Republicans’ presidential ticket in November. That doesn’t mean he will cheer on former President Donald Trump or even support him by name.
“I’m going to support the nominee,” Kemp told reporters this week after Trump won his state’s primaries on his way to clinching the Republican nomination.
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, once a favorite potential presidential candidate for anti-Trump Republicans, officially endorsed the former president last week. But he only did so after Trump won the Virginia primaries on Super Tuesday. And Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, one of the nation’s highest-ranking black Republicans, still won’t endorse him.
“Everyone has to make their own decision,” she told reporters after Trump’s victory. She then quoted an Old Testament verse, Hosea 8:4, which reads in part, “They have set up kings, but not by me.”
While Trump clinched his third consecutive Republican nomination, his dominance over the party has not been seamless. Some high-profile members of his party, especially in swing states full of voters skeptical of Trump, are trying to keep their distance while securing their own futures.
For figures like Kemp and Youngkin, who could make their own presidential bids in four years, this means careful positioning designed to satisfy enough Trump supporters without alienating voters turned off by the former president. For Trump, it means a tougher path to winning coalitions in battleground states that he lost to Biden in 2020 and since then Kemp and Youngkin have won, enacting policies popular with the right.
“He’s the King Kong of Republican politics,” Whit Ayres, who worked for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said in an interview that led to Trump officially clinching the nomination. But, Ayres said, that is not the same as uniting 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 support before November.
Trump faces a rematch pitting President Joe Biden against a contingent of Republican dissenters, many of whom supported former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley before dropping out after Super Tuesday. Haley performed above her statewide margins during the primaries in areas with many suburban and college-age voters, highlighting Trump’s enduring weaknesses against those groups.
Haley won 35% of the primary votes in Virginia. And nearly 78,000 people in Georgia — about 13% of the total vote — elected her in Tuesday’s primary, although early voting was available before she dropped out.
Haley declined to endorse Trump when she suspended her campaign and instead urged him to try to “engage people to your cause, not turn them away.”
Trump “has to earn the votes of people who have left the party,” said Eric Tanenblatt, a national Republican Party fundraiser who backed Haley over Trump.
Tanenblatt said he sees “no evidence” so far that Trump or his team is aggressively reaching out to skeptical Republicans in court, and he argued that successful Republican elected officials are well positioned to run 2024 on their own terms.
In 2021, a year after Biden won Virginia by double digits, Youngkin maintained Trump’s lead in rural areas and small towns but converted enough Biden voters in more urban and suburban areas. In Georgia, Trump underperformed in the Atlanta suburbs, helping Biden win statewide by fewer than 12,000 votes out of 5 million cast. Two years later, Kemp posted a reelection victory by 7.5 points, outperforming Trump across the state.
Kemp, for his part, appears to have decided how to navigate his party’s divisive politics: hammering Biden, focusing on Georgia and talking about the future.
“It doesn’t really matter who our candidate is or would have been — my goal is to ensure that we maintain our legislative majorities,” Kemp said this week, making clear that his own state is his top electoral priority.
Like Trump, Kemp has been particularly enthusiastic about immigration, especially since Laken Riley, a nursing student, was killed in Athens, Georgia, prompting authorities to charge a man they say entered the U.S. illegally from Venezuela.
“The president had control of the House and Senate from 2020 to 2022 and did nothing on the border, and we complained as much then as we do now,” Kemp said this week, chiding Biden for using his State of the Union. to remind voters that Senate Republicans stood in the way of an agreement on border security.
But Kemp remains dismissive of Trump’s continued lies that his loss was somehow rigged. He often says that Republicans “don’t need to look in the rearview mirror” or “complain about the 2020 election.” He also usually skips Trump’s name when he gives that advice.
The governor and the former president have had an uneasy relationship since Kemp rebuffed Trump’s pressure to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia — a campaign for which the former president now faces a racketeering charge in Fulton County.
“We need to give people a reason to vote for us, not just be against the other candidate,” Kemp said. When asked explicitly why he would support Trump after the former president criticized him so aggressively after 2020, Kemp naturally turned to the opposition. “Well, I think he would be better than Joe Biden,” Kemp said. “It’s that simple.”
Youngkin was a little more complementary. In his endorsement, Youngkin praised Trump’s record on taxes, immigration and the economy, saying: “It’s time to unite around strong leadership and policies that grow our great nation, not another four years of president Biden.”
Yet that argument came in a written statement from Youngkin’s political action committee and circulated on social media, not at a live event with voters or where the governor could answer questions.
Whether or not Trump wins in November, Republicans who distance themselves from him now may have to placate Trump’s most ardent fans in a future presidential primary.
Rose McDonald, an 87-year-old who voted for Trump in the northern suburbs of Atlanta on Tuesday, insisted that “there are things that happened that we know were wrong with all that voting by mail.” Federal and state investigations found no evidence. of tampering with ballots that could have affected the election.
“I’m especially pleased with Kemp,” she said. “Mostly, I still think he was a chicken in 2020 for not letting Trump contest the election.”
Kemp believes his political organization, even if it remains focused solely on legislative races, will prove his worth and loyalty to the party.
“My belief is that if we do that right as Republicans and tell people what we are for and stay focused on the future, we will have a great night,” Kemp said, “and it will be all the way up and down. the ticket.”
___ Associated Press reporters Jeff Amy in Atlanta and Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Virginia, contributed to this report.