Kemp to 2024 GOP field: "We cannot get distracted"

As Trump leads, Kemp encourages candidates to look to the future

Brian Kemp

He’s not a candidate himself, but Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has strong advice for those seeking his party’s presidential nomination.

The governor appeared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday to discuss the upcoming race for the White House. Without mentioning any candidate specifically, he urged all of the Republican candidates to move on from the 2020 election.

“We cannot get distracted,” he said. “If you look in the rearview mirror for too long while you’re driving, you’re going to look up and you’re going to be running into somebody, and that’s not going to be good.”

The interview came after Kemp spoke at a Republican National Committee retreat in Nashville, Tennessee, where he urged donors to move past claims that the 2020 election was rigged. “Not a single swing voter will vote for our nominee if they choose to talk about the 2020 election being stolen,” Kemp warned.

He also said Sunday that Republican candidates must tell voters what they stand for. But he refused to explicitly say whether or not he believes that former President Donald Trump is unelectable, saying that that’s a decision for voters to make.

He did, however, say that continued focus on the former President’s legal troubles will only help President Joe Biden and the Democrats. Trump is facing dozens of felony charges in New York and is expected to soon be charged in the Atlanta investigation into his attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat.

“For people to ultimately be able to win, we have to tell people what we’re for, we gotta focus on the future,” Kemp says. He also said Republican candidates must present a clear contrast between their agenda and the “disaster” of the Biden administration’s policies.

Kemp, now a few months into his second term as Georgia’s governor, argued that his landslide 2022 victory could serve as a model for 2024 candidates. “You have to tell the voters of your state why they need to vote for you,” he said, pointing to issues ranging from inflation, gas prices and crime.

A one-time Trump ally, the Georgia Republican emerged as one of his biggest intra-party rivals after the governor refused to side with his false claims of election fraud. He then launched a personal effort to defeat Kemp in the 2022 primary — an effort that Kemp easily dispatched.

But Kemp’s warning to Republican candidates might not be resonating with primary voters just yet. A recent poll from the University of Georgia found that Trump would easily win the GOP primary in Georgia if the contest were held today.

The former President clocked in at 51% while soon-to-be announced candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis earned 30%, a lead of more than twenty percentage points. Moreover, most GOP primary voters say that his legal troubles should not disqualify him from running for President again.

“Trump is the clear favorite among almost all blocs of Republican voters at this early stage in his comeback bid, scoring some of the heftiest advantages among the party’s most conservative voters, and those who are older, poorer and have lower levels of education.”

But even as the former President remains the frontrunner for the GOP nomination, the governor is optimistic that the eventual nominee will offer a winning message and encourage voters to look to the future.

“I think we’re going to have a lot of good candidates that, if they focus on those things, we have got a great chance of winning the White House in 2024,” the governor said.