Brian Kemp blows up GOP’s hope for new Georgia midterm map

Georgia was once reliably Republican, with the GOP enjoying a clear advantage in statewide races. But these days, Georgia is an unpredictable swing state known for nail-biting elections. The Peach State has a conservative Republican two-term governor, Brian Kemp, but both of its U.S. senators are Democrats. And when Donald Trump won Georgia in 2024 (after losing it to Joe Biden in 2020), his margin of victory over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris was only 2 percent.

GOP and Democratic strategists will be very close attention to Georgia as the 2026 midterms draw closer. And early Friday morning, May 1, the Atlanta Journal Constitution's Greg Bluestein reported that Kemp "won't cancel Georgia’s May 19 primary or rush to impose new political maps on this year's elections after the U.S. Supreme Court weakened a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act."

According to Bluestein, the conservative governor "also signaled that he could still call lawmakers back to Atlanta to redraw Georgia’s congressional and legislative boundaries."

"The governor told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais 'restores fairness to our redistricting process and allows states to pass electoral maps that reflect the will of the voters, not the will of federal judges,'" Bluestein reports. "But he added that it's too late to reconfigure the maps before the midterms, with Georgians already headed to the polls and the May 19 primary less than three weeks away."

Issued in late April, the U.S. Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais ruling is fueling some heated debates in American women. Many liberals and progressives are attacking the decision as racially discriminatory; some are even equating it with racist Jim Crow segregation laws of the 1940s and 1950s.

Liberal Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia), a Protestant minister, argued, "Make no mistake: this ruling harkens back to the darkest days of the Jim Crow era."

But quite a few conservatives and libertarians are applauding the ruling as a victory for fairness.

Conservative Republican Kemp told the AJC, "Voting is already underway for the 2026 elections. But it's clear that Callais requires Georgia to adopt new electoral maps before the 2028 election cycle."

Bluestein notes, "Lawmakers from both parties still expect Kemp to summon them back before his term ends in January for a simple reason: Conservatives want to lock in new maps while they still have a Republican governor to sign them. With every statewide office on the ballot this year, they know there is no guarantee the next governor will bless a GOP-drawn map."

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