In Marietta, Kemp tells supporters to work 'like we're five points behind'

Nov. 4—MARIETTA — Brian Kemp isn't taking anything for granted.

That was the incumbent governor's message to a group of more than 100 supporters at Williamson Brothers Bar-B-Q Thursday, five days out from Election Day, as polls show him leading Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams. The Republican seeking a second term closed his 15-minute speech by telling the crowd to "keep working like we're five points behind."

Abrams and U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Georgia, had told Democrats at a Marietta campaign event Tuesday to ignore pundits who doubt her.

"They may not believe the polls, I don't care about the polls," Kemp told reporters after speaking. "The polls are gonna be this coming Tuesday ... We are not resting on our laurels."

Kemp said his team was employing nontraditional outreach methods and campaigning in bluer areas. Responding to a question from a Latino media outlet, he said the Republicans running for state legislative seats this year are more diverse than in the past, cited his appointment of Insurance Commissioner John King as the state's first Latino statewide official, and said Georgia is "the state that values hard work, no matter what your background is."

Among the attendees was Harikrishna Bhatt, an Indian-American businessman who told the Journal that Kemp's management of the COVID-19 pandemic benefitted all business owners.

"All businesspeople are working," said Bhatt, who owns a small shopping center in Kennesaw. "Otherwise a lot of unemployment happens."

Kemp in his remarks leaned heavily on his laissez-faire approach to the pandemic, saying Georgia's low unemployment rate and budget surplus are the result of reopening the state early, despite criticism from Democrats and the national media.

"Well I wasn't listening to them. I was listening to you," Kemp said. "I was listening to people like Sawyer Williamson, and other restaurant people that were telling me, 'We can't keep doing this, we're gonna lose everything we got.'"

The state's flush financial position has enabled Kemp to suspend the gas tax and issue a $1.1 billion tax refund. If reelected, he promised to refund another $1 billion to homeowners, via property tax relief grants. Surging property values in Cobb County led to a 12.3% growth in the tax digest in 2022, meaning higher tax bills for homeowners.

Abrams has her own plans for how she would spend the state's budget surplus. Kemp argued that if she had been governor during the pandemic, that surplus wouldn't exist, because she would have instituted economy-crippling shutdowns.

"We know that Stacey Abrams would take the policies that we're seeing in Washington, D.C., and bring them right here if she were your governor," Kemp said.

The governor also spent $1 billion on $350 cash payments to economically disadvantaged Georgians. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Axios reported Thursday that the program's rollout has been fraught with issues, such as stolen funds, suspended cards and declined transactions.

Kemp dismissed the report as "a typical AJC story just a few days before the election."

"Now look, anytime the government is giving out large amounts of money, you're gonna have fraud and abuse and theft," Kemp told media. "But that's a lot different than hacking or other things that have been alleged. So I'm very confident with what we're doing."

Kemp also connected pandemic shutdowns to crime. Educators, he said, told him during COVID that kids who would normally be engaged in sports or theater were acting up, or being recruited into street gangs.

Marietta resident Bob Furney said he supported the governor for getting kids back in school.

"He's taken a lot of slings and arrows from pretty much everybody on the planet, left and right. And he's done the right thing," Furney said.

Kemp hammered the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress over inflation, especially the price of gas and food. Those issues are paramount for Furney.

"I'm recently retired. So I'm seeing my investments go down and my costs go up. ... He reduced the gas tax temporarily. He's given money back on the surplus, instead of spending it on something else," Furney said.

West Cobb resident Stacey Bannister agreed.

"Love the lower taxes. Love the fact that he's given the money back to us. It's our money to begin with. Love the fact that he opened the state, and he took heat from everybody. And we (Bannister and her husband) would go around traveling, and none of the places that we traveled were as open as our state was," she said.

Bhatt argued that Georgia has continued to grow because of the policies of Kemp and other Republicans.

"We can keep this rolling," the governor told the crowd. "Because people around the country, around the world, they know the state of Georgia now, they know we have a good business-friendly environment. They know we have great education programs that are turning out the workforce of the future. They know that we fight for people to have economic opportunity, no matter what their zip code or their neighborhood."