One Year Ago Today, Kemp Closes Senate Application — And Kicks Off “Fiasco” Appointment

Loeffler’s last-minute application sparked an intraparty war that lasted months and continues to damage her weakened candidacy

Atlanta — Today marks one year since Governor* Brian Kemp’s deadline to apply for an open Senate seat — and the beginning of “an all-out Republican feud” that continued to the bitter end in the November election. 

Kemp’s ”fiasco” of a Senate appointment process ultimately ended with the last-minute application of little-known “political mega-donor” Kelly Loeffler. The result? Months of Republican infighting, Twitter feuds, and backroom meetings to try (and fail) to quell GOP dissent after Republican activists called Kemp’s choice “unacceptable” and claimed Loeffler “should be disqualified.”

Now, a year after Kemp was threatened with a primary challenge by a member of his own party in 2022, Republicans are still engaged in brutal infighting over the result of the 2020 election at a time when they can least afford another round of intraparty strife.

“Governor Brian Kemp’s Senate appointment process was a ‘fiasco’ from the start, but not even he could have predicted how badly it would turn out,” said Alex Floyd, spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia. “As Republicans continue their post-Election Day infighting, Senator Kelly Loeffler remains just as vulnerable as she was the minute the hand-picked mega-donor threw her hat in the ring and kicked off an intraparty GOP civil war.”

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