Approximately 400 politically engaged Georgians packed The Chapel at the University of Georgia last Thursday, where Republican Governor Brian Kemp took part in an Atlanta Journal- Constitution event for its “Politically Georgia” podcast.
With his wife Marty seated in the front row, Athens native and UGA grad Kemp took the stage to face AJC “Politically Georgia” reporters Greg Bluestein, Tia Mitchell, Patricia Murphy, and Bill Nigut in a wide-ranging, town-hall-like interview.
Kemp’s first question came from Bluestein, who asked up front, despite Kemp’s often contentious relationship with Donald Trump, who did he vote for in the last presidential election?
The governor immediately turned the table, asking, “Well, who did you vote for?”
Once a smattering of laughter died down, Kemp answered he “did like a lot of other people. I went and voted in a Republican primary that didn’t matter. A Republican primary that didn’t matter at the time of course because by then Donald Trump had pretty much sewed up the nomination.”
He went on to say, “I’m definitely going to support the ticket in November,” then later added, “We have to be a party that gives people a reason to vote for us. We have to be thinking about the future. We can’t be looking in the rearview mirror.
“And then this was all pointed at winning states like Georgia, winning states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and true North Carolina true swing states. It’s my belief that swing-state voters will decide the presidential election. They are going to vote for somebody that they believe will do something for them, that will be focused on the future, that’s going to make their state and their country better.”
Later, when asked about current Republican dysfunction represented by embattled House Speaker Mike Johnson and Georgia’s own Marjorie Taylor Greene’s efforts to oust him, to his biggest applause of the evening, Kemp repeated a popular quote from a few days earlier: “I just think they need to do the damn job!”
“I mean look, I get that Republicans are split on different things. I certainly understand the frustration of a lot of people in Congress that they’re moving forward with supporting Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan and not tying that to some stuff at the (U.S.) border,” Kemp said. “I mean, they need to fix the border. The house has not moved on the border since it’s not taken up. To me, it’s political malfeasance. The Biden administration had complete control of Congress and the White House from 2020 to 2022 and did absolutely nothing to fix the border. And every governor in the country was dealing with that … and look, the American people want us to fix that problem.”
When asked about his position on abortion, particularly in light of increasingly strong pro-life positions recently adopted by other states, Kemp quickly pivoted to a message on mental health.
“What I always tell people is Georgia is a state that values life. And even if we disagree on what week, what month or whatever else on abortion, there are so many things that we agree on and that we have done in this state that values life: adoption reform, foster care reform, the reforms that we’ve worked on the last two years on mental health,” Kemp said. “This budget that we just passed is the most money we’ve ever spent in the history of the state on mental health issues … I mean, those are things that 95 percent of the people agree on. And so that’s what we’re going to continue to focus on in the future.”
Finally, sticking with the healthcare angle, Kemp was asked by Nigut about his opinions on Medicaid expansion in Georgia.
The governor answered he was not convinced of Medicaid’s viability, instead favoring his own Pathways to Coverage program that expanded lower-cost healthcare access to medically uninsured Georgians who worked at least 80 hours monthly among other requirements.
Kemp claimed his Pathways program, which the AJC said added just 3,800 clients to its roster in eight months from nearly 10 times that number who are eligible, is superior despite costing approximately $26 million so far, with only about 10 percent of that spent directly on healthcare.
Regardless, it was overall a friendly audience for the governor, who in the end deflected a question about his legacy and future in politics with a message of “just doing my job.”
“When you’re a builder like I am and you’re building a project, you’re doing a lot of things, little things every day. And then when you get finished, you got this big new building you built,” Kemp said. “And that’s kind of really how I view my government service, like with a pickup truck and a shovel if you will. I mean, I’m just trying to work hard every day.”