Nearly every one of Brian Kemp's stops on his weeklong bus tour are in rural Georgia hotspots – the areas where he's expecting to win big margins in November against Stacey Abrams.
And at every one of them, the Republican has a similar message: The race is a battle of ideals, for the very soul of the state, he says, and Georgia can’t afford an “extremist” with out-of-state views.
At a campaign stop Tuesday at a museum in Cartersville, he called Abrams a “radical career politician who wants to turn Georgia into California.”
At a barbecue joint in Newnan, he trumpeted that “we are right here in Coweta County and my opponent is going to San Francisco.”
And at an opulent farm in Bremen, he talked of the "California-like" ideas that his Democratic opponent is proposing, such as the elimination of cash bail.
“This is what drives me – to put Georgians first, ahead of the people in California who use Stacey Abrams to get what they want,” he said.
Abrams has countered the outsider narrative by highlighting her Southern roots. She often says she’s a “Mississippi-born, Georgia-raised” daughter of the Deep South who went to high school in Atlanta and made her career there.
But Kemp’s attacks have begged another sort of question: What does he mean when he talks about Georgia values?
Says Kemp:
"An average Georgian to me is just somebody I've worked with for over 30 years. I've done everything you could imagine. I've driven a backhoe. I've dug ditches. I've poured concrete. I've done carpentry work ... That's who I'm thinking about. We've got plenty of construction jobs. But a lot of people don't want to move away from where they grew up to go get good opportunities. And my job as governor is to try to find better opportunities in more zip codes across the state."
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Abrams stayed busy on Tuesday, too. Catch up on her campaign's star-studded day here.
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Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's controversial confirmation hearings are galvanizing Democrats and Republicans in the race for governor. Here's why.
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A cash-raising ritual takes place at the end of each Kemp campaign stop.
It starts with the Republican pointing to his hulking campaign bus and lamenting the cost of diesel fuel. He usually asks a member of the crowd how much a gallon of gas costs these days, and some variation of “too much” usually causes the audience to erupt in laughter.
Then he turns to the bus driver, Mike, to ask how the bus is holding up. Mike gives some sort of grave answer – “it’s rattling a lot,” he said at one stop – shaking his head solemnly.
“That’s too bad,” Kemp responds, as the group of supporters brace for the ask.
That’s when a Kemp aide pulls out an oversized yellow diesel fuel can and a raft of envelopes, asking supporters to chip in a few dollars and fill out their details to help top off the bus.
And, inevitably, a flurry of small-dollar donations comes Kemp’s way.
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