Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who has come under fire from former President Donald Trump after the November election, said Wednesday that he's not concerned that he could lose his own reelection bid in 2022 if Trump actively endorses a challenger for the seat over him.
"I'm going to win," the Republican governor told CNBC's "Squawk Box" Wednesday. "We have a great record. Our unemployment rate is lower than the national average. As I said, we have record investment in our state in the first half of the fiscal year. We have added jobs, we have been open the whole time, we have given 1.1 million vaccines in the last 25 days."
Just this week, Trump told Newsmax TV that Kemp's performance as governor was "sad" because of "what he did for the Republican Party and to the Republican Party and to the state of Georgia, which is a great state."
Kemp on Wednesday acknowledged that there are Republicans still angry about the election, but the state is addressing issues concerning voter integrity and security, and "we need all voters to have confidence in that."
Meanwhile, bills are moving forward that are "addressing problems that we had in the last election cycle," said Kemp.
"We need to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat and have secure, fair, and accessible elections," said Kemp. This will include mandating photo ID requirement for absentee ballots, like the one that has been in place since 2006 for voting in person, said Kemp.
"It will be a lot easier to deal with that than the signature process that we have now," he said. "It also concerned people that they couldn't get close enough to watch the process, to make sure it was done correctly, and you had people suing to try to allow ballots to come in a long time after what the legislature said."
He added that he worked "very hard" for Trump and was disappointed that he lost and that the two Republican candidates for Senate also lost their runoff races.
"A lot of these ideas that the president had, I supported, and I worked hard to let people know that," Kemp said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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