(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump publicly praised Georgia Governor Brian Kemp after years of acrimony between the two politicians in which the former president blamed the leader of a key swing state for his 2020 election loss.
“It’s great. It’s great. We work together. We’ve always worked together very well,” Trump said Friday during a stop to survey hurricane damage in Georgia, alongside Kemp, with whom he’s had a rocky public relationship since the 2020 election. He also said Kemp was doing a “fantastic job.”
Trump at a rally in August had lambasted Kemp for several minutes, calling him a “bad guy” and “disloyal” and faulting him for not acquiescing to his false theories about election fraud.
Kemp, the popular governor of a key battleground state that Trump lost in 2020, thanked Trump for coming to tour the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, but did not directly address their relationship.
The governor has an influential political network within Georgia and could play a crucial role in turning out Republicans to support Trump. However, he has kept Trump at arm’s length in recent years. He’s repeatedly criticized Trump’s continued focus on his election loss and has called on fellow Republicans to move on and focus on the future.
Trump lost Georgia — one of the seven swing states likely to decide the presidential election this year — by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020. Trump was charged in a Fulton County, Georgia, case for attempting to overturn the election results. Kemp has repeatedly expressed faith in the results, calling vote counting in his state “secure, accessible and fair.”
Trump on Friday acknowledged he lost the state in 2020, saying, “I won it easily in 2016. We actually were very close last time.”
The Republican presidential nominee is set to take his hurricane response Friday evening to Fayetteville, North Carolina — another battleground state devastated by Hurricane Helene.
The storm is the latest shakeup in a presidential race that remains neck-and-neck, with both Georgia and North Carolina showing the candidates essentially tied, according to a September Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of likely swing state voters. Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris altered their campaign plans this week to visit affected areas in what has become a political test for the dueling candidates.
Trump’s return to Georgia — after a visit to Valdosta on Monday — underscores the intensity of the campaigns’ competition in a state President Joe Biden narrowly won four years ago for the first Democratic win there since 1992. Harris visited Georgia to highlight hurricane relief efforts on Wednesday, and Biden made a trip there on Thursday amid a two-day multistate tour of the damage.
Total damage and economic loss from Helene could soar to $250 billion, having ballooned from earlier forecasts, according to estimates this week from AccuWeather Inc. Those losses would make it one of the nation’s top five costliest storms on record, with the human toll notching it as No. 2 among the deadliest tropical storms since 2000, behind Hurricane Katrina.
--With assistance from Stephanie Lai.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
