ATLANTA — Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, the Trump-scorned Republican who resisted the former president’s pressure to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Georgia, is not ruling out a potential 2024 presidential run of his own — one that would require him to take on Trump directly.
“I’m not focused on 2024,” Kemp, who just bested Democrat Stacey Abrams in his re-elected bid for governor earlier this month, told NBC News in a new interview. “We’re working on getting a budget put together for this great state. We got our legislative session coming up. We got our inauguration coming up.”
Kemp said he is focused on boosting the U.S. Senate candidacy of Republican Herschel Walker ahead of the heated Georgia Senate runoff next Tuesday against Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock.
Earlier this year, Trump tried to oust Kemp from office by backing former U.S. Sen. David Perdue’s primary bid for governor against Kemp, but the popular Georgia conservative routed Perdue in the May primary by more than 50 percentage points despite Trump’s incessant attacks, calling Kemp a “turncoat” and a “coward.”
Kemp then went on to beat Abrams by nearly 8 percentage points and garnered the votes of 200,000 more Georgians than Walker did in his Senate contest.
Kemp, to NBC News, said that he has “not thought about 2024” and is only focused on Walker’s bid.
This week’s Republican Senate runoff effort runs in stark contrast to the runoff effort in January 2021, when Trump flew into the state to campaign for the GOP’s then-Senate candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue despite having lost his own race in Georgia two months prior.
This year, the former president is not hitting the campaign trail with Walker in the closing weeks. Instead, it’s Kemp who is making a late play to aid his campaign effort and help save the Republican effort, lending his campaign’s ground organization to Walker’s runoff effort and cutting a television spot in which he touts their potential Republican partnership.
Over the last two years, Kemp has largely ignored the former president. When asked by NBC News about what Republicans nationally should take away from his re-election, Kemp said: “I was doing what I told [Georgians] I would do. I was following the law and the Constitution. To me, that’s bigger than me. It’s bigger than any other political figure in our country, including a president.”
Kemp also suggested there would be a litany of Republicans who jump into the GOP’s field for the White House.
“There’s going to be a lot of great Republicans that are going to be running,” Kemp predicted.
When asked specifically about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Kemp, in part, responded: “I think Governor DeSantis has done a great job. ... I think, much like myself, Ron’s been fighting for conservative values and to keep his state moving forward. And I think he got rewarded on Election Day for that.”
