Gov. Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams, who would like to replace him, met Sunday night for one of the last major televised debates of the 2022 midterm election cycle, and the Georgia showdown delivered an hour heavy on substance and light on political fireworks and viral moments.
Mr. Kemp, a Republican who narrowly defeated Ms. Abrams, a Democrat, in 2018, holds a durable lead of 5 to 10 percentage points in public and private polling, a status that was evident throughout their discussion.
Mr. Kemp took few chances, stuck to his talking points about how Ms. Abrams has spent the years since their last contest and tried to sell Georgia voters on how good they have things now.
Ms. Abrams, as she has done throughout her campaign, pressed a message that prosperity in Mr. Kemp’s Georgia has not been shared equally. Under an Abrams administration, she said, Black people and women would have more input into their relationship with the government — or in the case of abortion rights, pushing the government away from any relationship at all.
Here are four takeaways from Sunday’s debate:
Abrams tried to catch up.
With just about all of Ms. Abrams’s arguments against Mr. Kemp well worn by now — she has been making parts of them fairly consistently since their 2018 race — she sought a new approach to chip away at Mr. Kemp’s advantage in the race and remind her supporters that the election isn’t over.
So she turned to Herschel Walker, seeking to tie Mr. Kemp to Georgia’s Republican Senate nominee. Mr. Walker’s campaign has been plagued by a host of revelations about his past: that despite opposing abortion rights, he pushed women with whom he’d had relationships to undergo abortions and that he had physically attacked women and family members — accusations Georgians are seeing nonstop in television advertising.
During a segment discussing new restrictions on abortion that Mr. Kemp signed into law, Ms. Abrams accused him of refusing to defend women.
“And yet he defended Herschel Walker, saying that he didn’t want to be involved” in Mr. Walker’s personal life, she said. She added, “But he doesn’t mind being involved in the personal lives and the personal medical choices of the women in Georgia. What’s the difference? Well, I would say the equipment.”
Kemp: Check my record.
Ms. Abrams criticized Mr. Kemp for a majority of the policy decisions during his term as governor, like ignoring public health guidance to keep businesses open at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and supporting a law that allows the purchase of firearms without a permit. But Mr. Kemp dismissed her arguments with an I’m-rubber-and-you’re-glue argument.
“This debate’s going to be a lot like the last one,” he said early on, before delivering a line he’d repeat throughout the hour. “Ms. Abrams is going to attack my record because she doesn’t want to talk about her own record.”
The refrain is a common one from Mr. Kemp and one he used against his Republican primary opponent, David Perdue. It also underlines a key feature of Mr. Kemp’s re-election campaign, which has focused largely on his first term. And while Ms. Abrams has a policy record dating back to her years as State House minority leader, hers did not include policymaking from the governor’s mansion.
She recognized that fact in her rebuttal before reading off a laundry list of his policies she disagreed with: “I have not been in office for the last four years.”
Long answers led to fewer fireworks.
Hosted by the Atlanta TV station WSB, the debate was meant to be heavy on policy and light on drama — and policy heavy it was. The format gave each candidate 90 seconds — as opposed to 60 or even 45 in some other debates — to answer each question, with rebuttals that often lasted just as long.
It was also a performance in which both candidates kept within the rules. There were no interruptions or interjections and at no point in the hourlong debate did the moderators have to remind either candidate of the agreed-upon time limits.
That gave the candidates ample time to articulate their views and gave Georgia’s voters one of the clearest opportunities to judge for themselves the candidates’ policy and stylistic differences.
The moderators also left the job of policing fact from fiction to the candidates themselves — a responsibility both Mr. Kemp and Ms. Abrams did not hesitate to accept. The questions posed were open-ended, allowing a robust discussion but not one in which the moderators challenged the candidates on their own past positions and statements.
Two candidates who disagree on everything.
There is virtually no overlap in Ms. Abrams’s and Mr. Kemp’s views on the issues most animating the race. Those stark differences came into full view during their back-and-forth on firearms, abortion, the state’s election laws and use of the state’s budget.
Mr. Kemp argued that universal access to guns would allow more people in Georgia to protect themselves. Ms. Abrams said that logic would put more people in danger and increase the likelihood of mass shootings.
Ms. Abrams has loudly criticized the state’s newly instituted law outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy — Mr. Kemp signed and defended the law. And on the state’s more than $6 billion state budget surplus, Mr. Kemp said he supported allocating the funds for tax relief while Ms. Abrams has proposed using it to fund an array of state programs.
The differences highlighted the candidates’ contrasting partisan instincts and put a clear choice between the two on display for an electorate that is very closely divided.
