Bookman: Has the Kemp model fallen out of fashion in Georgia politics?

Brian Kemp, in his eighth and final year as governor, still enjoys significant popularity. In an Emerson poll conducted last weekend, only 24.5% of Georgians said they disapprove of his job performance, which in this divisive era is remarkable.

You might think that kind of long-running success would make Kemp a model to be emulated by other Georgia Republicans wanting to step into his shoes. If so, you would be wrong. The political lineage that Kemp represents, from Sonny Perdue to Nathan Deal to Kemp himself, has no apparent successor within the Georgia GOP, with serious potential consequences to the party and the state.

First, we should define what that lineage means. 

Perdue, first elected in 2002, and Deal, first elected in 2010, were conservative Southern Democrats before they switched parties. Perdue and Deal were more pragmatist than ideologue, more businessmen than culture warriors, and for the most part they governed that way. Kemp has followed in that pattern, stylistically moderate but conservative in policy and governance.

Like Perdue and Deal, Kemp plays hardball but chooses not to make it his public identity. He has an ego, but he doesn’t often gratify it at the expense of others. He’s disciplined, wielding power with a quiet precision that allows him to get away with things that a more flamboyant figure could not. 

But if you look at polling in statewide primary races for governor and U.S. senator, it becomes pretty clear that such an approach has gone out of fashion in the Republican Party. Today’s Republican voters demand confrontation, culture wars and total loyalty to Donald Trump. Competence is not much valued.

In the 2026 governor’s race, Attorney General Chris Carr and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger are stylistically and temperamentally similar to Kemp, and each has won statewide races by comfortable margins. They would seem to be his natural heirs. Yet combined, Carr and Raffensperger draw about 17% of the GOP primary vote, according to Emerson. (That’s consistent with other polling in the race.) 

The U.S. Senate race is a similar story. Kemp balked at running himself, perhaps to run for president instead. (It’s also fair to note that the duties of a GOP senator under a Trump presidency wouldn’t be a comfortable fit for the governor.)

Instead, Kemp has worked hard and spent a lot of money trying to sell Derek Dooley as his designated protégé. The polls again tell us that his fellow Republicans aren’t buying Dooley as Kemp-lite, preferring the flamboyance and social-media persona of U.S. Rep. Mike Collins.

Part of the problem is with Dooley himself. He’s a former football coach, but prior to this campaign he had never taken a snap in the political world. In fact, he had barely even bothered to vote. He’s basically a scout-team QB thrown into a game to absorb some hits while the starter sits on the bench, staying fresh for a bigger game down the road. Dooley is struggling to get out of single digits, so as UGA football fans might put it, he’s no Stetson Bennett.

Politics is often a question of timing, and Kemp’s departure from office, if not from politics, has come at a bad time for Georgia Republicans. The state party is now free to be itself, to redefine itself, to go full MAGA if it so chooses, and judging from its primary campaigns that’s exactly what it plans to do. But that freedom comes at a moment when the MAGA coalition nationally seems as if it might be collapsing under the weight of its multiple absurdities, contradictions and obsessions. Post-Kemp, they are lashing themselves to the mast of a foundering ship.

Take a look at what happened Tuesday, in the special election in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. It’s a deep-red district, most recently represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Democrats have no hope of winning it in the April 7 runoff. But Democrats on the ballot this week, led by Shawn Harris, won 40% of the vote, in a district where Kamala Harris got just 31%. The world is shifting.

In an era in which our country faces very real challenges, the GOP is committed to running a politics of distraction, running against voter fraud that doesn’t exist, sharia law that doesn’t exist, trans athletes that largely don’t exist. Serious times require serious people, and serious people just aren’t popular in tomorrow’s Georgia GOP.