Since he became president in 2017, no state has underscored the former president’s political struggles like Georgia.
Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

Kemp won in a walk, beating Perdue, the former senator, with 73.7 percent of the vote. The governor ran strongest in and around Atlanta, breaking 80 percent in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, along with the populous close-in suburbs of Cobb and DeKalb counties.

While Cobb and DeKalb are both counties that contain Atlanta suburbs, they have historically voted differently thanks to demographics. DeKalb is majority-Black and has long been dominated by Democrats.

Cobb, north and west of Atlanta, has been historically Republican: Romney won it with 55.4 percent of the vote in 2012.

But since then, Republicans have been in freefall in Cobb: Trump captured only 46.7 percent of the vote there in 2016, then dropped further to 42 percent in 2020. Walker, in losing the Dec. 2022 runoff to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, won only 40.4 percent.

It’s a place that could be the epicenter of any credible challenge to Trump in the spring GOP primary. Trump lost only four counties in Georgia during the 2016 primary, and Cobb, Fulton and DeKalb were three of them. (Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida carried those three, along with Clarke County, home to the college town of Athens.)

There is one other way in which Georgia could prove challenging for Trump. Despite his hold on the national GOP, party leaders in the state have proven unafraid of challenging the former president. Kemp on Tuesday directly refuted Trump’s continued assertions that the 2020 election was stolen.

“For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward — under oath — and prove anything in a court of law,” Kemp wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor.”