DEMOREST — For much of his second term, Gov. Brian Kemp has been the most popular Republican politician in Georgia, a status that helped him muscle his agenda through the Legislature and carve out a national profile independent of Donald Trump.

Now he faces a different test: whether he can transfer that popularity to someone else. The latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows how difficult that has proven.

Kemp’s political brand remains exceptionally strong with GOP voters. His job approval among Republican primary voters stands at 85%, including 55% who strongly approve. He even fares decently with Democrats, with 42% approval.

But former football coach Derek Dooley, Kemp’s hand-picked candidate for U.S. Senate, has yet to convert that alliance into broad voter support ahead of the May 19 primary.

Even after months of joint campaign stops with the governor across the state, the same AJC poll of likely GOP voters shows Dooley at 11%, neck and neck with U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter for a spot in a likely runoff and well behind front-runner U.S. Rep. Mike Collins.

The numbers point to a familiar problem for Kemp, who ruled out a Senate run of his own against incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff after months of deliberation, leaving a fractured field that has yet to consolidate around a single candidate.

Kemp remains a dominant figure in Georgia politics, but his power as a kingmaker is still unproven. A weak Dooley showing will inevitably revive memories of Kelly Loeffler, another Kemp Senate recruit who failed to win a full term in 2020.

Kemp is confident it won’t come to that. His case for Dooley has always been straightforward.

“It takes an outsider that doesn’t have to worry about defending their political record or other things to stay on offense, to tell people the real story about these guys and the real story about Jon Ossoff,” the governor said at a Cartersville stop. “That’s what I think Derek Dooley can do.”

His opponents are sharpening their own arguments.

Carter is trying to tap into a vein of MAGA fury with Kemp dating to his now-dormant feud with Trump over the 2020 election. He argues Republicans are squandering an opportunity to redraw the political map ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Collins, meanwhile, contends that only he can thread the needle between what he describes as Georgia’s two dominant Republican factions: MAGA loyalists and what he calls the “Atlanta suburban crowd.”

“They just want somebody to go to Washington and get something done for them,” he said at a Covington event.

On the trail again

Kemp was the party’s top recruit to challenge Ossoff, who is both one of the most formidable incumbents on the ballot this year — Republicans have long fretted about their chances — and the only one defending a seat in a state Trump captured in 2024.

But when Kemp passed on a run and recruited Dooley instead, the field splintered. His calls for Republicans to unify behind Dooley have not worked. Trump has stayed on the sidelines despite pleas from all three GOP contenders and their allies.

That has left Kemp as the highest-profile Republican in Georgia to take sides. He has taken to the trail with relish, joining Dooley at dozens of stops over the past month.

At a café in the northeast Georgia town of Demorest last week, Kemp made clear just how deep the bond between the two families runs.

He grew up visiting the home of Dooley’s father, longtime University of Georgia football coach Vince Dooley, and was college roommates with Derek’s older brother Daniel, who joined the campaign for this leg of the tour.

Kemp jokes that he spent as much time at the Dooley house growing up in Athens as he did at his own. His wife, Marty Kemp, an Athens native herself who is also a fixture on the campaign trail, is close to the family.

“You need somebody that’s not scared of hard work. You need somebody that has high integrity, somebody’s going to get the job done,” Kemp said. “We know Derek’s qualities and the Dooley family qualities to do that.”

He then ceded the spotlight to Dooley, who urged attendees to sign his five-part contract, which includes promises of term limits, holding regular town halls and a ban on congressional stock trading.

Dooley’s main argument, though, is that Ossoff is salivating to deploy his growing war chest against whichever Washington lawmaker emerges from the primary. He specifically calls out Collins’ “divisive social media posts” and the pending House Ethics investigation into whether his congressional office misused taxpayer funds.

Dooley speaks at a campaign stop at Farmview Market in Madison on May 8, 2026, as Kemp and his wife Marty look on. (Arvin Temkar/AJC)

“His whole goal is to use that money to keep them on defense, all the while not allowing the spotlight to get on him. Well, he can’t do those things to me,” Dooley said of the Democrat. “We’re going on offense on him.”

Up in the air

Most voters in the AJC poll remain undecided, and many on the trail are openly conflicted. Tom Cook of Acworth said he doesn’t think Dooley has “demonstrated loyalty to the state of Georgia” after spending his coaching career elsewhere. The Kemp endorsement doesn’t move him, either.

“I’m not really a big Kemp fan anymore. I was initially, and when it came down to him against Stacey Abrams, there was no debate,” he said, adding that he is still stung by Kemp’s refusal to heed Trump’s demands to overturn the 2020 results.

Others come away impressed. At a stop near Canton, retiree Pete Dumpis said he hadn’t attended a campaign event in person since 1978, when he watched a Californian named Ronald Reagan speak. He said Dooley nearly matched the memory.

“He’s the real deal. This guy is going to win,” Dumpis said. “He’s talking from the heart. And his outsider message matters. He’s going to deliver and keep his word.”

Brad Bennett, an insurance executive in Cobb County, views Kemp as someone who “betrayed” Trump and wants a hard-liner as the party’s Senate nominee.

“We are just really tired of milquetoast politicians,” he lamented after a stop in Acworth.

That’s the opening Collins wants to drive through.

He says that whoever the nominee is will need to walk a careful line in a race that’s “winnable with the right candidate.” He argues he alone strikes the right balance between Carter, a veteran lawmaker, and Dooley, who was so disconnected from politics that he did not vote in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.