Gov. Brian Kemp didn’t run for Senate, but so far he’s running the race

Plus, polls showed Kemp as the strongest challenger to Ossoff before he declined a run, so a loss for Republicans next year could come back to haunt Kemp down the road. The first step to addressing all of that is getting behind a Republican he thinks who win the statewide general election.

In the time since he decided not to run, the governor has spoken on multiple occasions with President Donald Trump to try to set up a Kemp-Trump endorsement for a Georgia Republican to run against Ossoff.

A double endorsement from the two most popular Republicans in Georgia would likely clear the crowded GOP field for whomever the two men got behind, letting that person focus on beating Ossoff instead. A united front would also head off the dreaded Kemp vs. Trump storyline that has dominated Georgia Republican politics almost as long as the two men have been on the scene. So far so good.

After Kemp first met with Trump to discuss the race, he told his own high-dollar donors to “keep their powder dry” as the Senate field gelled, essentially keeping the biggest pot of political money in the state away from the two top Republicans already in the race, U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter and Insurance Commissioner John King.

Separately, the governor also encouraged Derek Dooley, the former head football coach for the University of Tennessee, to run for the Senate seat instead.

Dooley is a longtime family friend and brother of Kemp’s college roommate, but he’s not an obvious political candidate. In fact, he’s never spoken publicly about politics at all since being a public figure in the world of college football. How does he feel about Trump? Republicans? Abortion? Immigration? Who knows?

While Dooley stayed out of sight and hired two of Kemp’s top political advisers to run his campaign, the governor’s obvious support for him did nothing to dissuade U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, a pro-MAGA ally of both Kemp and Trump, from moving forward with a Senate campaign of his own. The trucking company owner and son of the late Congressman Mac Collins teased his Senate run with social media posts about “kicking the tires” and “revving his engines.”

With the field against Ossoff getting more and more crowded, Kemp reached out to Collins, Carter and King on Thursday to tell them he won’t endorse any of them and will get behind Dooley instead. Within hours, King, a retired major general in the National Guard and a former police chief, dropped out.

Carter was fending off questions of whether he’d drop out, too (Answer: no). And Collins made it known he’s forging ahead.

Despite the fact that Kemp’s original goal was to avoid a conflict with Trump in the GOP primary, that may be exactly where this is headed. While Kemp told Collins he won’t support him in the GOP primary, a story about Dooley’s failure to donate to or boost Trump in the past has popped up in the Trump-friendly Washington Examiner.

Would Trump ever endorse somebody who has not been out there for him? It’s hard to imagine.

But it may also be the ticket to Dooley’s potential appeal in a battleground state like Georgia. While Collins presents himself as a hard-charging MAGA brawler, so far that recipe has not worked in a general election in Georgia for anyone other than Trump himself.

And with Ossoff aiming to put Trump’s record on the ballot in 2026, a candidate who hasn’t been a Trump protégé may be Republicans’ best chance to win a midterm election that’s shaping up to be a referendum on the president’s second term. Of course, there’s no way to say what kind of a candidate Dooley will or won’t be until he actually shows up. Meanwhile, Collins is ready to roll.

I learned a long time ago not to underestimate Kemp. From being the first governor to reopen during COVID to pushing the state through the 2020 election chaos to getting himself reelected in the face of President Donald Trump’s wrath, the two-term Republican has sidestepped catastrophe where nearly everyone, often including me, predicted defeat.

But by putting himself in the middle of the GOP primary and picking an untested political outsider in the process, Kemp is taking another huge risk. Being a political newcomer in a crowded GOP Senate field worked for then-businessman David Perdue in 2014. But Kemp’s 2019 appointment of equally outside-the-box pick of Kelly Loeffler years later didn’t work as well.

After all of his behind-the-scenes moves in the race against Ossoff, a win or a loss in the Senate race will be chalked up as a win or loss for Kemp, too. The governor may not be on the ballot in 2026, but so far, he’s running the race.