CBS News projects Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp wins his bid for a second term, fending off a challenge from Democrat Stacey Abrams in a rematch of their 2018 race.
In the 2020 presidential election, Georgia flipped blue for the first time since 1992. Former President Donald Trump blamed Kemp for not doing enough to change the outcome of the election, and pledged "to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state." Trump backed former Sen. David Perdue to take on Kemp, but Kemp, who was backed by former Vice President Mike Pence, comfortably survived the challenge in the May primary.
Abrams, a voting rights advocate and former state lawmaker, would have made history as Georgia's first Black governor and the first Black woman to serve as governor in the U.S.
The race
Abrams is relying on support largely from voters in Georgia's Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas, while Kemp is looking to the state's heavily Republican counties.
This is the first gubernatorial rematch Georgia has seen in decades. Kemp and Abrams ran against each other in 2018, when Kemp, who had been Georgia's secretary of state for eight years and served in the state Senate for four, narrowly defeated Abrams by about 55,000 votes.
Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia state House of Representatives, acknowledged at the time that Kemp had won but refused to concede, referencing what she called the "erosion of democracy" amid rising concerns about voter suppression and election mismanagement. Kemp categorically denied those claims.
After her 2018 loss, Abrams founded Fair Fight Action, a nonprofit organization that advocates for voting rights and aims to address voter suppression nationwide. The organization played a key role in President Biden's general election campaign and Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock's runoff campaigns in Georgia.
Abrams announced her decision to run again last December, driven, she said by the desire to ensure that "opportunity and success in Georgia shouldn't be determined by your zip code, background or access to power."
At the time, Kemp tweeted that if Abrams were to win, "Georgia would have shut down, students would have been barred from their classrooms, and woke politics would be the law of the land and the lesson plan in our schools."
Throughout the race, Kemp led Abrams in polling. A CBS News Battleground Tracker poll from September showed Kemp with a six-point margin over Abrams.
As governor, Kemp instituted policies that allowed Georgia to become one of the first U.S. states to reopen after the initial pandemic lockdown in 2020 and consequently shouldered part of the blame when Georgia's COVID-19 cases rose and later, its low vaccination rates.
Citing his track record as governor, Abrams said at a debate in October that "the most dangerous thing facing Georgia is four more years of Brian Kemp." Meanwhile, Kemp blamed Abrams for supporting Mr. Biden's policies that for resulted in policies that are hurting Georgia.