Republican governors hatched the plan months ago. Meeting at the desert Biltmore resort in Phoenix in mid-November, they agreed to confront a new threat to their incumbents: Former president Donald Trump was ramping up support for primary challengers as part of what one former governor called “a personal vendetta tour.”
To protect incumbents up for reelection this year, the Republican Governors Association decided to spend millions of dollars in primaries, an unusual step for an organization that typically reserves its cash for general election matchups against Democrats.
“The focus is on 2022. I don’t believe we should spend one more moment talking about 2020,” Republican Governors Association Co-Chairman Doug Ducey said in an interview with The Washington Post. Asked if Trump’s help for his preferred candidates was worth much, the Arizona governor, who pointed to states where GOP governors avoided or defeated Trump challengers, replied: “It hasn’t been to date.”
It’s Trump vs. Pence in the Georgia gubernatorial primary on Tuesday — sort of — after Pence made the intriguing decision to come in late for a candidate Trump hates: Gov. Brian Kemp (R).
It’s possible to oversell the significance of this; Mike Pence has backed establishment-oriented GOP candidates like Kemp before. But Pence had to know this would be provocative to Trump, and decided to do it anyway, even opting to make a public appearance for Kemp on the eve of the primary.
It now looks like it’ll pan out quite nicely. Kemp led former senator David Perdue (R-Ga.) 60 percent to 32 percent in a recent Fox News poll, further cementing him as the odds-on favorite. His win wouldn’t necessarily affirm Pence’s political stock — Kemp was already showing double-digit leads — but it would be a nice boost for Pence and his presidential aspirations.
And it’s merely the latest example of Pence carving out some calculated distance from former president Donald Trump. And he’s navigated the potential pitfalls relatively well: Though Trump has criticized the former vice president for not helping him overturn the 2020 election, it hasn’t amounted to the kind of sustained campaign he often launches against his apostates.
Pence has criticized as “un-American” Trump’s plot to have him unilaterally overturn the election — an issue on which, it turns out, Republicans side with Pence. He also went after his party’s “apologists” for Russian President Vladimir Putin after Trump praised Putin’s supposed strategic genius. And now he offers a high-profile endorsement in opposition to Trump.
The RGA invested some $5 million in Georgia, according to a person familiar with the group’s outlays, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details. A parade of Republican governors and luminaries have lined up to protect Kemp. And former vice president Mike Pence, who once served as governor of Indiana, will appear with Kemp on Monday — setting the stage for Pence’s most direct confrontation yet against Trump in the midterms.
The influx of RGA money in Georgia, according to strategists on both sides of the governor’s race, has dealt a devastating blow to Perdue, who has struggled to raise funds to compete.
“This is just not the best use of our money. We would much rather use it just in races against Democrats,” said former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who is the co-chair of a 2022 fundraising arm for the RGA and described the November meeting in Phoenix to The Post. “But it was made necessary because Donald Trump decided on the vendetta tour this year and so we need to make sure we protect these folks who are the objects of his vengeance.”
The clash has brought into focus an extraordinary battle over the future direction of the GOP that extends well beyond Georgia. On one side is an aggrieved former president who retains widespread loyalty in the party from voters. On the other, conservative governors who align with Trump on many issues but have grown tired of his stolen election claims, which post-election audits have shown to be false.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/22/trump-kemp-perdue-georgia/
