CALHOUN, Georgia—Brian Kemp, the successful but term-limited governor of Georgia, could be spending his final months in office basking in the glow of his popularity, perhaps taking another few more economic development trips overseas, or casually shopping for some corporate boards to sit on once he’s a private citizen again next January.
Instead Kemp, a Republican who has one of the highest net approval ratings of any governor in the country, is stumping across the state alongside Derek Dooley, a lifelong family friend running for the U.S. Senate. Dooley is one of three Republican candidates—the others are Reps. Mike Collins and Buddy Carter—hoping to challenge the first-term Democratic incumbent, the young and charismatic Jon Ossoff.
The governor, who seems to be enjoying his time on the trail as conditioning for a potential presidential run in 2028, isn’t shy about why he’s spending his political capital to boost Dooley ahead of the May 19 primary.
“I want to win our Senate seat back,” Kemp told a small crowd at Cassie’s, a restaurant in this charming downtown in northwest Georgia. “I don’t have to tell you all what’s gone on in our U.S. Senate races over the last two or three times, and we got an opportunity to get one of our seats back, and I believe that Derek’s the best person to do that. People ask me, ‘Why are you supporting him and getting so involved in this race?’ It’s because I want to win, you know? I want to win and get our seat back.”
Republicans haven’t won a Senate race in this state since 2016, when Johnny Isakson was elected to serve a third term. Since then, Democrats have won every Senate election—regular, special, and runoffs. Ossoff’s fellow Democrat, Raphael Warnock, won the special election and subsequent runoff in 2020 and 2021, then won a full term in 2022 against Republican Herschel Walker, the former football star and deeply flawed champion of Donald Trump. That same year, Kemp himself won reelection. As Dooley puts it, there’s a lesson that Republican primary voters ought to learn from all this.
“In that election, 300,000 people voted for [both] Gov. Kemp and Raphael Warnock. Herschel lost by 41,000 votes in that election. That’s it,” Dooley told the same crowd. “If you’re going to win a statewide election in Georgia, you got to have a candidate that not only can energize and appeal to the Republican and Trump voters, but you better have somebody that can find some common ground or have a leadership style that connects with voters that don’t always vote Republican, or they don’t always vote in the midterm.”
This might sound like consultant-speak, but for Republican voters nodding in Calhoun and in other spots in northwest Georgia, this part of Dooley’s stump speech rings true. They know Dooley is right about their state being more diverse, more discerning, and more closely divided politically. A recent special election for the U.S. House in this part of the state underscored the truth.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation from Congress in January prompted Kemp to schedule a special election in March. The district is the most Republican-friendly in the state, having voted in 2024 for Greene by 30 points and for Trump by 37. But in the jungle primary last month, which included multiple Republican candidates, the first-place finisher was a Democrat, retired Army one-star Gen. Shawn Harris. He and the second-place finisher, Republican Clay Fuller, advanced to the April 7 runoff, which Fuller won—but by a relatively small margin of just 12 points. If the alarm bells weren’t already going off for Georgia Republicans, they sure are now.
“It’s going to be a challenging environment,” Kemp told me when I asked him about what the special election revealed about the upcoming midterms in Georgia. “Republicans have not performed well in specials for years now.”
What Kemp won’t say explicitly is that GOP underperformance in special elections in Georgia—and, by extension, struggles in non-presidential elections overall—is correlated with Trump’s influence on the party. The canary in the coal mine was Karen Handel, a Republican who ran in a special election for a suburban Atlanta congressional seat in 2017 that had been in GOP hands since Newt Gingrich first won it decades earlier. Handel squeaked by a formidable challenge from … Jon Ossoff, who fell about 9,000 votes short. But the anti-Trump sentiment in the suburbs was real and growing, and Handel lost reelection the next year to a Democrat, Lucy McBath, who has held the seat ever since.
That Trump effect has migrated to Georgia’s exurbs and rural areas, providing another reminder to Peach State Republicans that their two decades of dominance can’t be taken for granted anymore.
“I think it should be a wake-up call,” said Karen Burnsed, a voter from Dallas in Paulding County at the southern and exurban end of MTG’s old district. Burnsed is a committed Republican—she was attending the Paulding County Republican Women’s event in Hiram, where Kemp and Dooley (along with gubernatorial candidate Burt Jones) were all speaking. But she told me her party has to show voters who aren’t loyal to the GOP that it’s about more than the president.
“It’s not just Trump’s Republican Party,” Burnsed said.
But isn’t it? Dooley’s opponents in the primary herald their allegiance to the president with a dedication bordering on desperation. The campaign for Carter, the congressman from the rural and coastal district in south Georgia, has dubbed him a “MAGA Warrior” and features that brand on all of his signs. And Collins calls himself an “America First fighter,” though he also seems to be fighting an ethics investigation from the House over some salacious claims that his chief of staff misused congressional funds for personal reasons. (Collins has called the investigation “meritless.”)
Make no mistake, Dooley is not anti-Trump or running as such. He labels himself “Georgia First” and has promised to work with Trump to “get his agenda done.” But his alignment with Kemp, who famously tussled with Trump over the 2020 election (and won), is also a signal to those Republican primary voters that he identifies with the more successful wing of the Georgia GOP. (It helps that his father, the late Vince Dooley, was the legendary and beloved football coach for the University of Georgia; the less said about Derek Dooley’s disappointing tenure as head coach for rival University of Tennessee, the better.)
So far, however, the sparse polling of the primary doesn’t indicate his message has taken off with those primary voters. The three-way race all but guarantees that no candidate will get 50 percent of the vote, so the game for Dooley is to get at least second place and make the case even more explicitly in a runoff that he will be the best candidate to take on the well-funded Ossoff in November.
“You got to be able to stay on offense, to educate the Georgia people on what John Ossoff stands for,” Dooley said in Hiram, saying that Ossoff would prefer to spend his campaign money attacking his opponents on their history of conservative votes and divisive social media posts. “Well, guess what? He can’t do any of that on me, because I don’t have any of those things, and that’s why I’m gonna stay on offense on him.”
There’s an unspoken sense that Dooley’s success in 2026 could redound to Kemp’s benefit in 2028, should he run for the Republican nomination for president. In Calhoun, I asked Kemp about the veracity of the rumors that folks want him to serve as president of his alma mater, the University of Georgia, after he leaves office. Kemp said it isn’t a job he wants, then he asked me to go off the record.
In the meantime, however, Dooley initially misheard my question and thought at first I was asking the governor about being president of the United States. “That’s not a rumor,” Dooley broke in. “We all want him to be president!”
Putting a Senate seat back into the GOP column wouldn’t hurt that cause.