‘This Is Going to Be a Tough Cycle for Us’: Georgia’s Governor Has a Warning for Fellow Republicans
On the sidelines of the Masters, Brian Kemp lays out his strategy for 2026.
The tournament is, as Jim Nantz says, a tradition unlike any other, and I had a sense that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp was not going to miss his state’s signature spring event in his last year as governor.
The point of “On The Road” is to marry politics, food and place and, let me tell you, all three converge at Augusta National.
Well, not necessarily on the grounds of the course itself. The Masters is Mardi Gras for the quarter-zip set only with a lot more rules. So, unless I borrowed Nantz’s CBS blazer, they weren’t about to let us film on site.
Thankfully, though, the famous clubhouse concessions are largely portable.
So I sat down with Kemp Thursday over barbecue, pimento cheese and egg salad sandwiches that all held up well — the barbecue comes in a Chick-fil-A style sandwich bag — and peach ice cream sandwiches that held up well enough.
The governor was eager to wrap our conversation and get over to the club for day one. But he was even more eager to make the case for his preferred Senate candidate, Derek Dooley, and said he’d do everything possible to get Dooley into a runoff after the first round of primary voting next month.
You Senate watchers will recall that Kemp was perhaps the most prized 2026 recruit-who-got-away for Republicans. Had the popular, outgoing governor run against Sen. Jon Ossoff this year, his party would be in a much stronger position to retain the Senate in November.
President Donald Trump has to date stayed away from the intraparty contest, though, leaving a bit of a muddle. Trump may feel gun-shy because of the party’s well-documented, recent unpleasantness in Georgia Senate races.
Or, as Kemp put it to me: “We have been down the road where we didn’t have the right candidate and we got our ass kicked in the general election.”
For his part, all Kemp has done is win: Outside of Georgia, he’s best known for being one of the few Republicans who confronted a Trump-backed primary opponent and lived to tell about it (Yes, Kemp recited his exact margin from that 2022 whipping he delivered to David Perdue).
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/04/14/georgia-brian-kemp-midterms-senate-on-the-road-00870220
