Former President Donald J. Trump has reached an uneasy truce with Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, setting aside a yearslong grudge over his Republican counterpart’s refusal to help him overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
The question for Republicans, as Georgia looks increasingly crucial to the party’s chances of retaking the White House, is how long the volatile Mr. Trump will let it last.
So far, the main signs of their reconciliation have been a few kind words. Weeks after the former president ripped into Mr. Kemp at an Atlanta rally last month — accusing him of wanting Mr. Trump “to lose” and of leading a state that had “gone to hell” before insulting his wife — he gratefully accepted the governor’s endorsement. Mr. Trump, who had been urged by his advisers to reconcile, thanked Mr. Kemp on social media for “all of your support and help.” The governor has said in interviews and at fund-raisers that he stands behind Mr. Trump.
Their arranged political marriage is born of necessity for the former president: The governor was re-elected by more than seven percentage points in 2022, and he enjoys notably high approval ratings despite Georgia’s polarized political environment, remaining popular among both right-wing and moderate Republicans.
That alone could make Mr. Kemp a powerful ally for Mr. Trump. What’s more, the governor has an influential political machine in the state, whose canvassers are out knocking doors for State House candidates in metro Atlanta. At a time when Mr. Trump’s ground game is far inferior to Vice President Kamala Harris’s in the battleground state, Mr. Kemp could put that machinery to use for the former president.
But as Peach State Republicans try to clean up the fallout of Mr. Trump’s vendetta against Mr. Kemp, they are also counting on a tenuous level of self-control from the former president, who keeps questioning the legitimacy of the last election as he campaigns in the current one.
Election-denial claims and conspiracy theories are again spreading rampantly in Georgia, and conflicts are stewing over the state’s Republican-controlled election board. Mr. Kemp’s steadfast defense of Georgia’s 2020 results, and of the integrity of its current election system, raises the question of whether the former president will be able to resist further clashes.
“It’s in President Trump’s best interest to have Governor Kemp on his team and his organization mobilized,” said Eric Tanenblatt, a Republican strategist and donor who supported former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina during the Republican presidential primary race. “I think we’re there now, but it’s sort of fragile at the moment.”
Advisers to Mr. Trump brokered the détente shortly after his Atlanta rally, insisting to Mr. Kemp that they could help eliminate tensions between the two leaders. Their efforts laid the foundation for both men to present a united front.
Mr. Kemp has long argued that Republicans’ success in November will boil down to an old-fashioned ground game: knocking doors, waving signs and talking to voters in the state’s conservative exurbs and deep-red rural regions. But the mix of Republican turnout efforts in the state has made for a disjointed exercise in which party leaders, the Trump campaign and conservative activists are all working on their own to get voters to the polls.
Mr. Kemp’s state leadership committee, Georgians First, is spending nearly $2 million on a paid canvassing operation that for the last several months has been knocking on doors in the Atlanta area encouraging prospective Republican voters to support six G.O.P. candidates in their closely contested races.
While the organizers’ message to voters is not explicitly pro-Trump, they have adopted a rising-tide philosophy, arguing that the voters they mobilize to support Republican down-ballot candidates are likely to cast ballots for Mr. Trump, too.
“The Bible says that love covers a multitude of sins, and in politics, victory covers a multitude of mistakes,” said Ralph Reed, the leader of the conservative evangelical Faith & Freedom Coalition, noting that the Trump-Kemp animosity had not been ideal for the party but saying that there had been “healing” in their relationship as they focused on the election. His organization plans to knock on roughly 750,000 doors in Georgia before Election Day: “‘Just win’ is the motto.”
The efforts come as polls show a tightening race between Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris, whose six-week-old candidacy has re-engaged key groups of Democrats who had grown unhappy with President Biden, like women, young people and Black voters.
Ms. Harris’s campaign has built a significant turnout operation in Georgia, with 26 offices and 200 staff members. Last week, she and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, campaigned in Savannah as part of a swing billed as a tour of rural Georgia — a departure from the Atlanta area, Democrats’ main engine of votes in the state.
Still, Republican leaders in the state believe that their party is motivated to re-elect the former president and is looking past any tension between state and national leaders.
“We’ve got the wind at our back in a lot of ways,” said Joshua McKoon, the chairman of the state Republican Party, who pointed to its efforts to tie Ms. Harris to the Biden administration’s policies on immigration and the economy. “The only thing that will prevent us from being successful is if we allow these sort of petty disputes on the margins to distract us from doing what we need to do to win the election.”
Allies of Mr. Kemp have expressed confidence in his ability to turn out Republican voters in light of his dissipating feud with the former president, which most agree was largely driven by Mr. Trump.
In discussing the presidential campaign, the governor has stressed a need to move on from false claims about the 2020 election, which are widely believed to have sunk Republican candidates in several important races in the 2022 midterms. He has instead focused on policy talking points, particularly about immigration and the economy, that have proved salient for Republicans.
Cole Muzio, an influential conservative activist and ally of Mr. Kemp’s, argued that Georgia Republicans still largely favored the policies of the Trump era — something that could benefit the former president. But Mr. Trump’s failure to explain those policies clearly has become a drag on his re-election prospects in the state, Mr. Muzio said.
“The grievances, the noise, the constant distractions are not things that Georgia voters like,” he said. “And so when Donald Trump insists on imposing his personal grievances into the race, it is kind of a signal to those voters that largely would support his policies that he just can’t clear that basic hurdle that they’re looking for, which is, ‘Does he care more about me than he does himself?’”
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