Within minutes of the news breaking this week that Brian Kemp, the popular second-term Republican governor of Georgia, would not run for the United States Senate, the incumbent Democrat seemed to breathe a sigh of relief via an email fundraising appeal.
The email opens with a photo of a smiling little boy, the future Sen. Jon Ossoff, and his dad. “You may be wondering how this kid on his father’s shoulders … ended up here,” reads the email. The next photo shows the 38-year-old Georgia Democrat standing at the podium at a political rally, looking cool, confident, and relaxed.
And that’s how Ossoff should be feeling, given the threat Kemp posed to his reelection. Only days before, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution released a poll showing the governor leading Ossoff by 3 points in a hypothetical match-up for the 2026 Senate race. Against all the other potential Republican candidates, Ossoff holds commanding leads, including a 17-point advantage against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Kemp’s victory over Ossoff wouldn’t have been a sure thing, but he was certainly the GOP’s best chance to wrest control of one of Georgia’s Senate seats, both of which have been in Democratic hands since 2021. Yet no amount of appeals from Sen. John Thune, the majority leader, nor other senators, donors, or party bigwigs could convince Kemp to spend the final two years of his term in Atlanta running for a new job in Washington. As the AJC’s Greg Bluestein reported, Kemp told friends and allies on Monday that he just wasn’t all-in on being a senator.
There’s no doubt some strategy at work here—better to run for president in 2028, as Kemp may do, as a successful former governor of a key swing state than as a mere freshman senator. But there are other factors, from the perception that not much gets done in the Senate these days to Kemp’s age (he’ll turn 62 this fall) that made the at least six-year commitment of a full term unattractive.
“If this were 2002 or 2004, maybe things would be different,” a Republican familiar with Kemp’s thinking told me. Embedded in that explanation is perhaps the biggest reason Kemp begged off the Senate run: Donald Trump and the current political ecosystem that crowds out everything but the Republican president. In Georgia, Ossoff will almost certainly run a campaign aimed squarely at Trump to galvanize his base and peel off independents exhausted by tariffs and GOP control of government. The only option for a Republican challenger would be to stand by the president and defend his record. For Kemp, that would have been a bridge too far.
Indeed, Kemp is only the latest Republican governor during the Trump era to have made a similar calculation about taking the leap into the Senate. Republicans twice tried to recruit Arizona’s Doug Ducey, another popular two-term governor, to run for that swing state’s Senate seat, striking out in both 2022 and 2024. Gov. Phil Scott, the only Republican to have won multiple statewide elections in Vermont in the last decade, declined to run when a Senate seat opened in 2022. Earlier this year, former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker ruled out running for the Senate in 2026.
Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu is familiar with the pitch from Washington Republicans, who practically begged him to run in 2022 before he said no. A few weeks ago Sununu (whose brother, John, served a term in the Senate during the George W. Bush administration), also closed the door on running next year for New Hampshire’s open Senate seat, despite overtures from Thune and others in Senate GOP leadership.
In a text message to me this week, Sununu praised Thune and Sen. Tim Scott, who is chairing the Senate Republican campaign arm, for doing a “terrific job bringing a refreshed approach.” But their pitch held little appeal to the 50-year-old Republican, who spent eight years running the Granite State.
“It is a fundamentally very different job than a governor and would undoubtedly be a frustrating 12 years for any former state executive trying to get stuff done,” Sununu told me, referring to two full six-year Senate terms. “For me and my family, we need to spend time focusing on making some money and putting our kids through college.”
The only Republican governor in the past few years to make the leap to the Senate is Jim Justice of West Virginia, who from his time in Charleston has been a staunch ally of the current president and was recruited to run against the conservative Democrat Joe Manchin in 2024. (Manchin ended up leaving the Democratic Party and announcing his retirement from the Senate.)
Indeed, what unites all the Republican governors, including Kemp, who have recently passed on the Senate is their independence from the Trump brand. That’s a precious commodity, a resource not to be expended for a spot on politics’ current B team: a pliant, do-nothing Congress. At the same time, that autonomy can also be a clear impediment to moving up within the party.
Take Larry Hogan of Maryland, whose moderate politics and willingness to distance himself from Trump helped him cruise to reelection in 2018 to become the first two-term Republican governor of his state in 60 years. And while Hogan rebuffed the push to have him challenge freshman Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland in 2022, he decided two years later to run for an open Senate seat during the presidential year of 2024. During his campaign, Hogan went to extraordinary lengths to differentiate himself from Trump—ending up in the absurd position of touting Trump’s grudging endorsement of his candidacy (an endorsement Hogan insisted he didn’t want). In the end, the race wasn’t even close, with Hogan losing to a replacement-level Democrat, Angela Alsobrooks.
Small wonder that blue- and purple-state Republican governors look at those kinds of contortions, which members of Congress must perform on a daily basis, and say “no thanks.”
