Georgia election results: Trump foe Brian Kemp wins primary as Herschel Walker secures GOP Senate nom

Brian Kemp is headed for a rematch with Stacey Abrams after winning his primary on Tuesday against David Perdue, an ex-senator who enjoyed the endorsement of former President Donald Trump in his bid to unseat the governor.

But who is the one-term governor whose conservative bonafides were enough to outweigh an endorsement from the GOP’s supposed kingmaker?

Read more from The Independent’s John Bowden:

Texas’s attorney general is doubling down on his call for teachers and other school officials to carry firearms after a deadly mass shooting at an elementary school in his state rocked the nation on Tuesday.

Ken Paxton responded to the news as his primary campaign ended in a victory over his challenger, George P Bush.

“The reality is we don’t have the resources to have law enforcement at every school,” he said. “It takes time for law enforcement, no matter how prepared, no matter how good they are to get there. So having the right training for some of these people at the school is the best hope.”

Read more in The Independent from Eric Garcia:

Herschel Walker is headed to a November showdown with Sen Raphael Warnock, the state’s first Black US senator, after easily winning the state’s Republican Senate primary on Tuesday.

A three-time Heisman winner who first met Donald Trump in the 80s, Mr Walker is far from your typical senator.

Learn more about his unique background in this profile from The Independent:

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is once again the GOP’s nominee for the 14th congressional district of Georgia after easily winning her primary on Tuesday.

She avoided making enemies in the state’s Republican congressional delegation, and enjoyed a national profile as an acolyte of Donald Trump and frequent purveyor of his falsehoods about the 2020 election.

Ms Greene now heads for the general election in a district redrawn to include more Democratic areas than before.

Read more in The Independent from John Bowden:

Democrat Stacey Abrams, who has become a nationwide leader in the battle against restrictions on voting rights, is the Democratic nominee to challenge Brian Kemp for the governorship of Georgia, putting the two in a rematch after Mr Kemp bested the then-secretary of state in an extremely narrow race in 2018.

As Mr Kemp pivots away from attacking David Perdue to focus on her, Ms Abrams is under fire for comments that Republicans say show she holds the state of Georgia in disdain and simply views the governor’s mansion as a stepping stone to the White House.

In fact, Ms Abrams was talking about the state’s extremely poor record on health outcomes, standards of living and incarceration. Here’s what she actually said:

Graig Graziosi has the story.

The sight of Mike Pence campaigning for Brian Kemp, whom Donald Trump disdained for declining to endorse his lies about the 2020 election, was accompanied by a New York Times interview in which the ex-vice president clearly left open the door to a 2024 presidential campaign.

Asked during a phone-in appearance about the possibility that he could be challenged by his own former deputy, Mr Trump went into a typically free-flowing rant about Mr Pence’s refusal to illegally overturn the election in Congress on 6 January 2021. Have a listen below...

As he celebrated his victory in the Georgia Senate primary, Herschel Walker was asked by CNN’s Manu Raju whether the Texas elementary school shooting indicates it is time for new gun safety laws. His answer was not just generic but also strikingly incoherent – the kind of mumbling statement that has some Republicans worried about his viability in November.

Despite his un-endorsement by Donald Trump, congressman Mo Brooks has lived to fight another day in Alabama’s GOP Senate primary. He was a dogged ally of the former president right to the last, even speaking at the 6 January rally outside the White House, but when he began to sink in the polls and suggested that Republicans should move on from the Trumpist fixation on the 2020 election, Mr Trump hung him out to dry.

Mr Brooks initially responded by telling tales out of school, describing how he had had to explain to Mr Trump that there was no legal way for him to be reinstalled as president and that he should stop clinging to the idea. However, Mr Brooks continued to campaign using the ex-president’s prior approving words about him, and he managed a last-minute rebound.

“Two months ago, the experts declared our campaign was dead in the water,” he said in his victory speech last night. “Today, I guess, call me Lazarus.”

Brad Raffensperger’s surprisingly strong victory in Georgia last night means that Donald Trump has failed to satisfy one of his deepest post-2020 grudges. But as Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report points out, that Mr Raffensperger has survived doesn’t mean Georgia’s GOP voters have taken a turn away from the right...

Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar, an anti-abortion Democrat who has been supported by the House leadership despite his politics, says he has triumphed in his runoff race against progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros, albeit by less than 200 votes.

However, even with more than 95 per cent of the vote counted, the race has not been officially called yet.

Mr Cuellar’s views on abortion and his relative conservatism on gun rights have earned him the intense disdain of left-wing leaders, including within his own party.