Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, powered by an endorsement from President Donald Trump, easily captured the Republican nomination for governor Tuesday night after Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle conceded the race.
Cagle contacted Kemp roughly 90 minutes after the polls closed and as Kemp mounted a huge lead. He was ahead of Cagle 69.16 percent to 30.84 percent with 62 percent of the precincts in the state reporting.
Kemp’s win was also a victory for Trump, who bucked the state’s Republican establishment — including popular Gov. Nathan Deal — to support the secretary of state over Cagle.
This sets up a classic battle of the bases between Democrat Stacey Abrams, vying to become the nation’s first African-American female governor, and the conservative Kemp.
The race will be one of the most-watched in the country with the candidates offering sharp contrasts between conservative and liberal agendas on issues ranging from immigration to abortion to gun control and government spending and taxation.
An online poll of likely November voters conducted by WXIA/SurveyUSA last week found Kemp ahead of Abrams 46 percent to 44 percent, with 10 percent of respondents undecided. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.3 percent.
The Republican Governors Association wasted no time in attacking Abrams, launching a television ad hours before the polls closed calling her “the most radical liberal to ever run for governor” in Georgia.
Secret recordings, a closing-hour endorsement from President Donald Trump, and bickering over who’s corrupt and who’s incompetent punctuated the race between two conservative candidates who had little political daylight between them.
Instead of policy, the contest morphed into a battle of style between Cagle, the business-like bespectacled lieutenant governor who had the endorsement of popular outgoing Gov. Nathan Deal, and Kemp, the slow-drawling secretary of state who made his good ol’ boy persona the focal point of his campaign.
Cagle rhetorically attacked Kemp as an incompetent secretary of state, noting that the 2015 inadvertent release of Social Security numbers and other information of more than six million voters happened on his watch.
Kemp portrayed Cagle in unflattering ads as a corrupt career politician who’ll do and say anything to get elected.
Cagle entered the runoff as the frontrunner, his campaign coffers filled with over $10 million in contributions mainly from establishment Republicans and Georgia’s business community compared to Kemp’s $4.5 million war chest.
Then the Clay Tippins tapes happened.
Tippins, a former Navy SEAL who finished fourth in May’s Georgia GOP primary and eventually endorsed Kemp, secretly recorded a conversation he had with Cagle in which Cagle said he supported an education bill that he considered “bad policy” to keep a rival politician from receiving millions of dollars from a political action committee.
In one snippet released to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Atlanta’s WSB-TV, Cagle complained that the primary felt like it was about “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest.”
Kemp’s campaign ads featured him pointing a shotgun toward a teenager, vowing to use his big truck to “round up criminal illegals and take ‘em home,” promising to be a politically incorrect governor.
The White House ended a fight between Cagle and Kemp over who was more Trump-like when the president endorsed Kemp in a tweet last week.
“He loves our Military and our vets and protects our Second Amendment. I give him my full and total endorsement,” Trump tweeted.
Vice President Mike Pence campaigned with Kemp in Macon Saturday and proclaimed the secretary of state was “the real deal.”
The vice president reinforced the White House’s support Tuesday, saying in a tweet that Trump “and I are all in for you.”
Cagle didn’t hide his disappointment or his frustration over the endorsement. He called it a “kick in the gut” on his campaign website Monday and added that “the president doesn’t know my opponent at all.”
“The president decided to do this because some Washington insiders who have weaseled their way into his ear convinced him to make a power play,” Cagle wrote. “Why? So they’ll have a governor who answers to them instead of Georgians.”