Gov. Brian Kemp talks about COVID-19 vaccine distribution plans at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta on Dec. 22, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
It was bill-wrangling season in the state legislature, and Gov. Brian Kemp was visiting Germany to talk economic ties when word came that the virus spreading from China into Europe could pose a serious threat for Georgia.
By early March, two people in the state had tested positive. Dozens more quickly followed, then the first death. The governor shut down the General Assembly’s legislative session, closed all the public schools and blanketed Georgia with shelter-in-place orders.
In the blink of an eye, the COVID-19 pandemic had swelled to dominate Kemp’s first two years in office as Georgia’s head of state.
“We just dealt with riding these waves as they’ve come over these last months,” Kemp said in a recent interview. “It’s been tiring and grueling, but it’s also just part of what you’ve got to do. … I’ve been working harder than I ever have in my whole life.”
Now halfway into his four-year term, Kemp has been forced to shoulder his administration’s initiatives alongside immense challenges, ranging from the devastation of COVID-19 to the passion of Black Lives Matter protests to a presidential election that has soured the governor’s most powerful ally against him.
Supporters have showered Kemp with praise, hailing the Republican for steering Georgia through storms of crisis and criticism with a captain’s grit. But his detractors see in Kemp a selfish leader concerned mostly with pleasing his own faction of voters in a divided political world – and who looks ready for a Democratic toppling in 2022.
“What is helpful for Governor Kemp is that he’s got about two years left in his term and a lot can change,” said Andra Gillespie, an Emory University political science professor. “The things that are top of mind for Georgia voters now might not be top of mind in two years.”
Gov. Brian Kemp calls for vulnerable residents to take precautions as coronavirus spreads in Georgia in March of 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Kemp, a construction businessman from Athens and former state senator, won the 2018 race for governor while serving as Georgia’s secretary of state, a controversial position that drew accusations of voter suppression during his campaign against Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams.
Buoyed by a key endorsement from President Donald Trump, Kemp campaigned on promises to punish gang members, human traffickers and undocumented immigrants, pass pay raises for teachers and pursue policies meant to boost Georgia’s economy.
For the most part, Kemp and his supporters say he’s backed up those promises. The Republican-controlled General Assembly’s last two sessions have pushed through more money to police gangs, a big chunk of his promised $5,000 teacher raise, bills to fight trafficking, changes to the state’s Medicaid system and fewer year-end tests for schools.
Kemp also persuaded lawmakers to cut budgets for state agencies twice in the 2020 session: first in March to offset a predicted economic slowdown, then again in June by about 10% after COVID-19 throttled Georgia’s tax revenues.
The budget cuts, combined with the health impacts of COVID-19, hit Kemp with a one-two punch of unpopular decision-making that most governors never face, said Charles Bullock, a University of Georgia (UGA) political science professor.
“I don’t know if anybody’s had this kind of double whammy,” Bullock said in a recent interview. “It’s not always pleasant when you tell departments and agencies that you’re cutting back. And coronavirus has certainly had its challenges.”
Gov. Brian Kemp and first lady Marty Kemp are on hand U.S. Sen. David Perdue speaks at the State Capitol for the first day of qualifying for the 2020 election on March 2, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Kemp attracted huge criticism early in the COVID-19 pandemic by imposing a stay-at-home order later than other states, then by ending that order and moving to reopen businesses before other states – all while refusing to mandate that Georgians wear masks for guarding against the airborne virus.
The governor’s mantra to “protect lives and livelihoods” soured many people in Georgia who viewed his actions as more beneficial to businesses than the general public’s health, as did his lawsuit against Atlanta city officials to block them from imposing their own local mask mandate, said Alexis Scott, a former journalist and Democratic political commentator.
“Most people I know are not happy with his tenure,” Scott said in a recent interview. “Not just because of coronavirus, but primarily because of that.”
Then protests broke out over racial injustice during summer in Atlanta and across the country after the police killing of George Floyd, as well as resurfaced anger over the February 2020 slaying of Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick. Kemp chastised the protesters for allowing violence and property destruction in their ranks, then readied the Georgia National Guard to respond.
Scott, who published Atlanta’s oldest Black newspaper for 17 years, charged Kemp with largely skirting issues that matter most for minority communities like social justice, creating the perception of a careless attitude that she thinks could bite him in an expected rematch with Abrams in the 2022 election.
“He wants to please his white constituents, so he doesn’t have anything to say about people of color because there are still more of them than us,” Scott said. “I think he’s trying to stay away from it because he knows it’s a hot iron. Everything that could hurt him is going to come back.”
Gov. Brian Kemp discusses the state’s response to protests over police brutality and racial injustice at the State Operations Center in Atlanta on June 2, 2020. (Gov. Kemp’s official Facebook page)
But while opponents call him divisive, Kemp’s supporters see the governor as a person of character and conviction who has been forced to make unpopular decisions during unusually difficult times.
In particular, Kemp’s backers see his decision to let businesses stay open when other governors have kept their states shuttered as a wise move that spared Georgia from more crippling economic impacts seen elsewhere.
“He got the crap knocked out of him for stepping forward and reopening our economy before any other governor did,” said Brian Robinson, a top deputy for former Gov. Nathan Deal and Republican political commentator. “He made a decision, he stuck with it and he was right. And Georgia is better off for it.”
While Georgia’s unemployment rate is still high at 5.7%, revenues have climbed since summer with businesses allowed to stay open, and Kemp is now set for a legislative session where he likely will not have to ask for more budget cuts, Robinson said.
The same tendency to resist the sway of popular opinion has also helped Kemp weather assaults from his own party after the Nov. 3 presidential election, which Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes in Georgia. Most recently, the president called on Kemp to resign for not stepping in to overturn the results, a move the governor dismissed as a “distraction”.
“You may disagree with his conclusions or his actions,” Robinson said of Kemp. “But he’s thoughtful. And once he makes a decision, by God, it’s carved in Stone Mountain. It’s not going to move.”
Gov. Brian Kemp speaks with reporters outside Amazon’s new warehouse in Gwinnett County on Sept. 1, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Kemp has tried to toe the line between shrugging off the president’s attacks and rallying Republican support for U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, whom the governor appointed late last year to hold retired U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson’s seat until a special election.
Loeffler fended off a challenge in November from outgoing U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, a Trump ally who Kemp passed over for the appointment, to join fellow Republican U.S. Sen. David Perdue in the Jan. 5 runoff elections against Democratic contenders Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock.
On the one hand, the fallout from Trump’s continuing attacks on a governor he once helped lift to victory has taken a toll on Kemp, who may struggle to patch up relations with loyal Trump voters in Georgia if he draws a Republican primary opponent in his bid for reelection in 2022, said UGA’s Bullock.
“What will be critical for his reelection will be to have a united Republican party,” Bullock said. “And that may be the biggest challenge over the next two years: to knit the party back.”
On the other hand, anger over Trump’s loss could weaken before voters cast ballots in 2022, leaving Kemp to run largely on how well he handles distributing COVID-19 vaccines over the next year as he seeks to overcome Democratic enthusiasm from the 2020 presidential election, which a Democratic candidate won for the first time since 1992, said Emory’s Gillespie.
“Partisanship is probably going to be a much bigger predictor of how Georgians vote [in 2022],” Gillespie said. “Everybody’s going to prepare for that margin to be razor-thin like it was this time, and Stacey Abrams is not a novice candidate. She is pretty battle-tested.”
For his part, Kemp says he’s not looking as far down the road as 2022 yet, though he did confirm that he will run for reelection. Top of the governor’s mind for now is to oversee delivery of COVID-19 vaccines. While vaccines began shipping out to Georgia hospitals and nursing homes in recent weeks, there are likely months to go before the general public will have access.
Beyond politics and posturing, Kemp said he’s just focused on preparing to manage the inevitable hiccups that will come from distributing the millions of vaccine doses needed for Georgia to finally end the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Between now and herd immunity, our focus is going to be on the virus and on the economy and keeping people safe in Georgia,” Kemp said. “That is all I’m worried about right now.”
Flanked by state lawmakers, Gov. Brian Kemp signs Georgia’s hate-crimes bill into law on June 26, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Georgia Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey (right) receives the COVID-19 vaccine as Gov. Brian Kemp (left) watches on Dec. 17, 2020. (Kemp Twitter photo)
COVID-19 vaccines are set to roll out for Georgians ages 65-years and older, police officers and firefighters in the coming weeks as hospitals, health clinics and nursing homes continue divvying up a limited supply of early doses, Gov. Brian Kemp said Thursday.
The expansion comes as vaccine providers administer shots more quickly in rural parts of Georgia than in metro areas, giving some places capacity to offer vaccines for vulnerable people besides just health-care workers and nursing home residents, said state Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey.
Officials are now aiming to open drive-thru clinics in metro Atlanta sometime next week to administer vaccines by the thousands of doses for health-care workers at a given location, rather than the lesser amounts seen at local provider clinics where storing vaccines at cold temperatures is challenging.
Nearly 62,000 vaccine doses had been administered in Georgia as of late Wednesday afternoon, according to state Department of Public Health data, which tends to lag by a day or two. Around 432,000 doses had been shipped and more than 1,000 providers are on hand to administer them.
“We will use every available resource to get the vaccine out as quickly as possible [and] to be part of the existing logistical infrastructure that we have,” Kemp said at a news conference Thursday.
The ability of some rural areas to vaccinate local health-care workers has recently left doses “sitting in freezers” while hundreds of health-care workers in more urban parts of the state are still on waiting lists for the tightly limited supply of vaccines currently available, Toomey said.
“That is unacceptable,” Toomey said. “We have lives to save. … It really made sense for us to move into this additional category for such vulnerable persons.”
The governor said it’s likely more efficient for providers in rural areas to use all their vaccines rather than send surplus doses to metro areas since fresh shipments would have already arrived by then. He said state officials are constantly tweaking distribution plans amid uncertainty over how many vaccines Georgia will get in the early stages of the nationwide rollout.
Meanwhile, Georgia heads into the New Year’s holiday with positive cases and hospitalizations from COVID-19 continuing to spike. The state has been averaging around 5,000 new positive cases daily in recent days after logging a high of nearly 8,000 cases on Christmas Eve.
Kemp urged Georgians to avoid gathering in large groups for New Year’s Eve celebrations and for young people to quarantine themselves from more vulnerable family members for a couple weeks if they plan on attending any parties.
“The virus is still here and presents as big a threat as ever,” Kemp said. “We need all Georgians to continue to act responsibly in the best interest of their loved ones and fellow citizens to limit the spread over the holiday weekend.”
More than 550,000 people in Georgia have tested positive for COVID-19 so far. As of Wednesday, the virus had killed 9,808 Georgians.
Lines were sparse outside the Cobb County Regional Library voter precinct through noon on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Georgia investigators found no evidence of fraud in an audit of more than 15,000 absentee ballots in Cobb County stemming from a probe Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger launched earlier this month.
Agents with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) called in to help conduct the audit found just two ballot envelopes with faulty signatures out of 15,118 envelopes examined late last week, GBI Director Vic Reynolds said at a news conference Wednesday.
Those ballots included one voter who signed the wrong part of the absentee oath envelope and another voter who signed the envelope for her spouse, Reynolds said. Neither instance was fraudulent.
“During the course of the audit, there were no fraudulent absentee ballots identified,” Reynolds said.
Investigators examined 10% of the roughly 150,000 mail-in ballots cast in Cobb for the Nov. 3 presidential election, marking a percentage able to verify with near-certainty the accuracy of the county’s signature-verification efforts, Reynolds added.
Absentee ballots in Georgia are verified once when a voter requests a ballot, then again on signature-bearing envelopes sent to county election boards. Those envelopes are separated from the absentee ballots to protect voters’ ballot selections and preserve voter privacy, according to state law.
The audit followed a complaint from a Cobb elections worker that processes for checking absentee signatures for the June 9 primary election seemed lax. State officials next plan to conduct a statewide study with the University of Georgia of signatures accompanying the roughly 1.3 million absentee ballots cast in the Nov. 3 election.
Raffensperger ordered the audit in part to boost confidence in the integrity of Georgia’s election system amid fraud claims from President Donald Trump and his allies that have injected doubt into the system ahead of the high-stakes U.S. Senate runoffs on Jan. 5.
Investigators in Raffensperger’s office are also working on about 130 complaints of alleged fraud in last month’s election, though state officials have repeatedly said they have found no evidence of any widespread fraud following two recounts and several tossed-out federal lawsuits.
“The Secretary of State’s office has always been focused on calling balls and strikes in elections,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “And in this case, three strikes against the voter fraud claims and they’re out.”
The audit’s results did not satisfy President Donald Trump, who lashed out at Raffensperger Wednesday on Twitter and called top-ranked Republicans in Georgia like Gov. Brian Kemp “a complete disaster” for not ordering a deeper mail-in signature audit.
Raffensperger has called on state lawmakers to change Georgia’s election laws during the upcoming 2021 legislative session by adding stricter voter ID requirements, eliminating mail-in voting without cause and giving state officials power to remove poor-performing county election managers.
Clockwise: Jon Ossoff, U.S. Sen. David Perdue, Rev. Raphael Warnock and U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler are competing for Georgia’s two Senate seats in the runoff elections on Jan. 5, 2021. (Photos by Beau Evans)
The four candidates in Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoff races have reeled in huge donations ahead of the Jan. 5 election, raising more than $340 million between them since mid-October.
The two Democratic contenders, Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, combined for the larger haul of roughly $210 million, while incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler together amassed $132 million.
The races have drawn intense national attention since the outcome will decide the balance of power in Washington, D.C. Wins by both Ossoff and Warnock would hand Democrats control of both chambers of Congress and the White House following President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the Nov. 3 general election.
The roughly $342 million total for all four candidates adds to millions of dollars more in spending on campaign television ads, mailers, social media and door-knocking by dozens of outside groups that look to make the pair of Senate races among the most expensive in American history.
Ossoff, a Democrat who owns an investigative journalism company, collected nearly $107 million during the fundraising period running from Oct. 15 to Dec. 16. His opponent, Perdue, the Republican former corporate executive, raised about $68 million within the same time.
Warnock, the Democratic senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, raised more than $103 million over the two-month filing period compared to $64 million raised by his opponent Loeffler, an Atlanta businesswoman who earlier in the race loaned $23 million of her own money to her campaign.
Each candidate still has millions more to draw down for ads and other get-out-the-vote activities as the candidates enter the final week of campaigning in the Jan. 5 runoffs.
It’s not guaranteed the big fundraising figures can secure victory for any of the campaigns. Recent polls show the races as toss-ups and expert observers are not placing any bets on the outcomes.
Democrats feel momentum on their side after Georgia voters flipped the state for a Democratic candidate for the first time since 1992 in Biden’s win over President Donald Trump. Republicans are pushing to invigorate conservative voters to block Democratic control of the federal government.
The candidates have not been the only fundraising machines in recent weeks as several political action committees rack up tens of millions of dollars to bolster their preferred parties.
Notable are two committees backed on the one hand by former gubernatorial candidate and rising Democratic star Stacey Abrams, and on the other by former President George W. Bush’s campaign guru, Republican strategist Karl Rove.
Fair Fight, the group founded by Abrams, has amassed nearly $57 million since mid-October with nearly $24 million left to spend down the stretch for the Democratic contenders.
The Georgia Battleground Fund, overseen by the National Republican Senatorial Committee with Rove leading fundraiser efforts, has brought in more than $49 million since mid-October and has more than $15 million remaining.
The three-week early voting period for the Senate runoffs that began Dec. 14 wraps up later this week.
Georgia Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey (right) gave updates on COVID-19 vaccine distribution and the worsening winter outbreak alongside Gov. Brian Kemp (left) at Emory University’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center in Atlanta on Dec. 22, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Nursing homes in Georgia began receiving the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines on Monday, bringing relief to the state’s most vulnerable group of people who have been hit hard by the virus for more than nine months.
About 39,000 doses of the vaccine made by pharmaceutical company Pfizer have shipped to elderly-care facilities as well as CVS and Walgreens pharmacies, which are partnering with the federal government to send doses directly to nursing homes, said state Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey.
Staff at nursing homes who serve as “the firewall” protecting elderly residents will likely be vaccinated first, Toomey said during a news conference at Pruitt Health’s elderly-term care facility in Gainesville.
She noted nursing-home residents account for 37% of Georgia’s deaths stemming from COVID-19, despite making up just 5% of the state’s overall positive cases.
“We hope with these vaccines we will begin to change those statistics and save lives,” Toomey said.
Toomey also announced the state has set up a new vaccine-focused hotline for Georgians to ask questions about when they will get the vaccine, what the difference is between the two brands and how the vaccines are safe. The hotline number is 1-888-357-0169.
So far, Georgia has been allocated 268,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 234,000 doses of a vaccine produced by pharmaceutical company Moderna. Health-care workers have been first in line to receive the vaccines starting earlier this month. More than 26,000 vaccines have been given as of Sunday.
Gov. Brian Kemp noted more than 95% of all elderly-care facilities in Georgia have signed up with CVS and Walgreens for the direct-distribution program, which will cut out an extra step of routing vaccines through state officials.
“We are eager to see the vaccine make its way quickly and safely to our most vulnerable and to those brave Georgians who are giving them world-class care,” Kemp said Monday in Gainesville.
The first vaccine shipments come as Georgia continues seeing COVID-19 positive cases and hospitalizations spike amid the winter holiday season. Case rates have now shot far above the prior transmission peak seen in July with around 5,000 new positive cases daily in recent days.
Kemp said 60 emergency hospital beds at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta should be ready for use by the end of this week. The state should have an 80-day stockpile of protective gear on hand by the end of this month, he added.
The governor urged Georgians to keep distancing, wash hands and limit gatherings ahead of upcoming New Year’s celebrations, especially people ages 18 to 29, who have seen the highest transmission rates in recent weeks and risk spreading the virus to more vulnerable family members.
“I’m encouraging everyone to be part of the solution, not the problem,” Kemp said.
Around 550,000 people in Georgia have tested positive for COVID-19 so far. As of Sunday, the virus had killed 9,714 Georgians.
