At risk of face-planting again, I should say. After losing the state in 2020, he went back in January 2021 to assure Republican voters there that their elections are rigged. That’s how we got Senators Ossoff and Warnock.

Trump doesn’t care about losing those Senate seats. But given how much political capital he’s invested in taking revenge on Brian Kemp for refusing to overturn Georgia’s election, he does care about the gubernatorial race. A lot.

And if you believe Trafalgar, a pollster respected by Republicans, Kemp is perilously close to a majority in the primary against Trump’s handpicked challenger, David Perdue.

#GAGov @trafalgar_group #GOP primary #poll exclusively on @FOX5Atlanta shows tightening race w/increased awareness (current 58%) of #Perdue #Trumpendorsement.

49.1% @BrianKempGA
39.5% @DavidPerdueGA
3% @KandissTaylor
0.7% Garcia
7.7% Und

See Report: https://t.co/DZZw1pefjQ pic.twitter.com/sTQZ2rek8Y

— Robert C. Cahaly (@RobertCahaly) February 16, 2022

Caveats: The primary is still three months away. Trump hasn’t campaigned in the state for Perdue yet and is likely to drive votes to the challenger when he does. Trump is also sitting on a mountain of cash he raised over the past year and could shovel some of it to anti-Kemp outside groups to knock the incumbent down. If Perdue can hold Kemp below 50 percent in the primary, he’d advance to a runoff and would have all-in support from MAGAworld, giving him a solid chance of winning. Perdue’s not out of contention by any stretch.

But even so, I would have never guessed that Kemp would be leading this race, let alone on the cusp of winning a majority, given all the venom Trump has directed at him over the past year. If you’re looking for evidence that Trump’s grip on the party is slipping, this is the election to watch. More from CNN:

Perdue, a former US senator, has so far raised a fraction of what Kemp has in his campaign war chest. Very few Republican elected officials, operatives, donors and activists in Georgia have abandoned Kemp in favor of Perdue. And limited public polling hasn’t been promising, either.

“I think Perdue is on life support and knows it,” said one neutral GOP operative who requested anonymity to speak freely. “The Kemp momentum is palpable.”…

“I’m sure that President Trump still has the expectation that when he endorses someone, they are going to win by 30 points, but we might be moving into a time when that doesn’t happen anymore,” said the person close to Perdue. “A Trump endorsement doesn’t guarantee a runaway victory anymore.”…

One top GOP operative noted that Perdue has not yet put his own money into the race, which has raised questions inside Trump’s orbit about his level of commitment. A second person, who is close to Trump, said the former President has told people he is aware Perdue’s effort has been underwhelming. Trump has also noted, according to this person, that he has yet to do a rally on Perdue’s behalf.

Another surprise is how many Republican state officials have endorsed Kemp. Normally that’d be a no-brainer given how much influence an incumbent governor has over legislation, but if a Perdue victory in the primary seemed assured, more GOPers would be scrambling to side with him and the former president. The fact that they’re not suggests either they think Trump’s endorsement ain’t what it used to be or Kemp deserves their support as a moral matter for having done the right thing in 2020. Or both.

It’ll be fascinating to see how different Trump enemies fare in their primaries. They’re not all alike, after all; I’d argue that there are three tiers. Tier one consists of outspoken, consistent Trump critics. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney, the people who’ve crossed Trump multiple times and aren’t about to apologize for it. Kinzinger is retiring and Cheney is all but guaranteed to lose her reelection bid, evidence that being in tier one means your career is almost certainly over. (Romney is an exception because he hails from a state with a unique political history and has enough stature in his own right as to make him — probably — untouchable.)

Tier two consists of Republicans who supported impeachment but have mostly kept their heads down since then and not challenged Trump repeatedly. Some, like Anthony Gonzalez, have thrown in the towel and decided to retire rather than face a primary. But others, like Lisa Murkowski and Jaime Herrera Beutler, are fighting on. Can you vote to remove Trump from office and still survive in the Republican Party? We’ll find out this summer. My guess is that the results in this tier will be a mixed bag, with some GOPers holding on against Trump’s challengers and others succumbing.

Tier three consists of Republicans who crossed Trump somehow over the election short of voting for impeachment and have also kept their heads down ever since, taking care not to present themselves as Trump enemies in the same way that tier-two Republicans like Murkowski sometimes do. This is Brian Kemp’s tier. Kemp infuriated Trump by certifying the results of Georgia’s election after multiple recounts but he’s never attacked Trump. On the contrary, he’s absorbed Trump’s many attacks with aplomb. He’s also been shrewd about doing what he can to re-ingratiate himself to Georgia’s voters on electoral matters, signing the state’s election reform bill into law last summer.

The tier-three Republicans are the ones most likely to survive. Especially since Republican voters’ patience with Trump’s 2020 obsession appears to be waning:

Quinnipiac Poll — do you agree w/ Trump claim that Pence could’ve overturned 2020 election or w/ Pence’s argument he couldn’t?

Agree w/ Trump— 17% overall, 36% GOP, 3% Dem, 15% independents

Agree w/ Pence— 72% overall, 52% GOP, 93% Dem, 74% independenthttps://t.co/RLcYX3ZH3c pic.twitter.com/pPQIMIkUiR

— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) February 16, 2022

A separate poll from Morning Consult released yesterday found 50 percent of Republicans want to move on from discussing Trump’s claims of election fraud versus 37 percent who want to continue. (Weirdly, 53 percent of Republicans are okay with Trump himself still talking about it.) The Kemp/Perdue primary in Georgia is really nothing more or less than a referendum on whether Kemp certifying Biden’s victory in 2020 should disqualify him from being governor. If it’s true that Republican voters are getting tired of the “stop the steal” nonsense then Kemp is in a promising position to win that referendum. Maybe GOP voters want to signal that it’s time to move on.

Politico has a nice look today at the spirit of “self-hate” and “RINO-hunting” that’s about to engulf Republicans as an unprecedented number of incumbents face primary challenges from the right, sometimes with multiple candidates jumping in against them. This comment from an Arizona Republican nails it: “This is a different midterm. From a Republican Party perspective, it’s what does a post-Trump presidency Republican Party look like?” One of the most suspenseful questions in American politics is how Trump will react if the outcomes in this summer’s primaries look less Trumpy than he was hoping. What if most of the tier-two and tier-three Republicans hold on and win? Will Trump endorse any of them in the general election against Democrats? Or will he actually stoop to alleging that the primaries his candidates lost were rigged, an idea that could poison GOP turnout in the general election? I know how I’d bet. Especially in Georgia.