The internet fervor over Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s last campaign ad hadn’t even had a chance to die down before his release of a new one Wednesday.
Kemp, a perpetually scowling Republican candidate for governor, most recently made news for pointing a shotgun at a teenager to make a point about … something.
Kemp appears to relish the free media coverage. “It’s driving the liberal media crazy,” he told Fox News earlier this month, adding: “People, they love that.”
“I’ve got a big truck, just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take them home myself,” Kemp says in his latest ad, slamming the door on a downright compensatory Ford F350. “Yep, I just said that.”
The Hill on Thursday noted a poll late last month showing Kemp trailing in the Republican gubernatorial primary.
But Kemp has made a serious and well-financed effort to appeal to Georgia’s Trump voters, aping Trump’s rhetoric (“Georgia First”) and saying that “Trump is right” about deporting undocumented immigrants.
In his first campaign ad, Kemp promised to create a state-wide database of undocumented people to “track and immediately deport all criminal aliens so our kids don’t become the next victims.”
In February of last year, Georgia settled a lawsuit with the NAACP and other advocacy over Kemp’s alleged disenfranchisement of minority voters. The groups had argued that minority voter registration applicants were far likelier to be rejected than white applicants over to small discrepancies on registration forms.
