Can Brian Kemp’s Derek Dooley gamble pay off?
BREMEN — In an old red barn under a bright blue sky, Gov. Brian Kemp was back in his happy place this week, on the campaign trail in Georgia with an election on the horizon.
But for the first time in nearly two decades, Kemp isn’t running for anything. Instead, he’s backing Derek Dooley, the former University of Tennessee football coach whom Kemp hand-picked to run for the U.S. Senate.
Kemp’s decision not to run himself and to get behind Dooley, even after U.S. Reps. Buddy Carter and Mike Collins had already announced their candidacies for the race, has peeved some of his fellow Republicans, who have given plenty of anonymous quotes to national media outlets grousing about it.
“Republicans Are Mad Brian Kemp Is Standing by His Georgia Senate Endorsement,” NOTUS wrote, quoting naysayers arguing that if the governor didn’t want to run, he could at least get behind one of the Trump-aligned congressmen who did.
But the better person to blame is President Donald Trump, first for creating this year’s ugly political environment, and then failing to follow the lead of the twice-winning governor in a state Republicans know they have to win.
Kemp has made it clear he doesn’t think Carter or Collins, two self-described “MAGA warriors, can win in November against incumbent U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff. The Democrat has not only raised more than $30 million for his race — he has adeptly cast himself as a moderate-to-progressive workhorse in Washington. It’s a package Republicans know will be tough to beat.
“To me, it’s about winning,” Kemp said this week. “If you look at where Republicans have beat Democratic incumbents, it’s all been political outsiders that have done that.”
He put it more to the point for the Republicans in Bremen. Most of them came out to Muse Farms to see Kemp, the governor they’ve known for years, instead of Dooley, whom they’d never met.
“We need to get one of our Senate seats back. This could be about the last time that we’re going to be able to have the opportunity to do that,” Kemp told the group as he introduced Dooley. “And it’s my belief that we’ve got to have a different kind of candidate.”
Dooley is, indeed, a different kind of candidate. Not only has he never served in public office, but he hardly voted for 20 years before COVID came.
He was essentially unknown in Georgia when word leaked that he would be Kemp’s pick to run for Senate. He still comes off as almost apolitical to people who meet him.
But in a year when every day brings another reason to hate both politics and politicians, Dooley’s distance from both is suddenly an asset no other Republican in the race can offer this year.
He’s also making a proposition that Georgia voters haven’t heard from a Republican since the days of Johnny Isakson, the consummate nice guy and statesman who was also the last Republican to win a U.S. Senate race in Georgia, back in 2016.
That was the same year Donald Trump won Georgia for the first time. But it was Isakson’s coattails Trump likely rode in on, and not the other way around, since the senator outperformed Trump by 9 percentage points and nearly 50,000 votes.
Unlike Republicans Kelly Loeffler, David Perdue and Herschel Walker — who all ran as firebrands in the Trump years and lost their U.S. Senate races in the process — Dooley is not using his stump speech to warn about Democrats’ secret Marxist Socialist agenda or to flamboyantly praise Trump as the greatest president in American history.
Instead, Dooley talked this week about being a coach (including for losing teams) and the conversations he had for decades in kitchens and living rooms around the country with families looking for a better life.
“It doesn’t matter what race they are, or income, or what religion or politics, all these families and young people had dreams,” he said. “I was able to use a sport to help them not just be better players, but also learn how to be better people, husbands and dads and citizens.”
When it comes to politics, Dooley has a different pitch for that, too. He is clear he’s not just running against two congressmen but against Congress itself, which he says is broken and rife with careerism and corruption.
“It always starts with leadership. It starts with sending a different kind of leader back in D.C.,” he said.
Dooley has said at every opportunity that he supports Trump. But he rarely mentioned him in the speeches I watched this week. He’s clearly a conservative, but being a “MAGA warrior” was not a part of the pitch.
“We have a very diverse state, so you better have a candidate who can not only energize Republican Trump voters, but you better have somebody that can find some common ground with voters that don’t always vote Republican,” Dooley said. “I don’t care if it’s white, a suburban mom, the Black community, Hispanic, Indian, and everybody deserves to be listened to. Everybody deserves respect.”
The reaction to it all in Bremen was somewhere between pleasantly-surprised to still-deciding to bought-in for Dooley.
Nicole Downing, a mom and small business owner in nearby Buchanan, said she would “absolutely” vote for Dooley. Among other things, she appreciated his background as a coach. “If he was just a lawyer, I would think he’s just another politician,” she said.
There’s no question that Brian Kemp has taken a risk with Dooley. But with polls showing that Trump-branded Republicans could be headed for a disaster in November, it’s more likely that the bigger risk, to Kemp and to Republicans, would have been for the governor to have done nothing at all.
About the Author
Patricia Murphy is the AJC's senior political columnist. She was previously a nationally syndicated columnist for CQ Roll Call, national political reporter for the Daily Beast and Politics Daily, and wrote for The Washington Post and Garden & Gun. She graduated from Vanderbilt and holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
