If you drew up a list of the two dozen people most likely to become the 48th president of the United States, Gov. Brian Kemp’s name would probably be on it.

So, halfway through his second and final term as governor, Kemp has decisions to make about his political future. And while the man in the Governor’s Mansion knows things that the rest of us cannot, from polling data and donor lists to his own mindset, there is also much that nobody knows.

Let’s join the governor in thinking through the possibilities.

Before 2028, there is 2026, when Kemp’s term as governor will end, as will Jon Ossoff’s term as U.S. senator. If Kemp chooses to challenge Ossoff, he can do so knowing that no Republican of significance is likely to challenge him for the nomination. Given the current political climate in Georgia, he also knows he would probably be the favorite against Ossoff in the general election.

But ….

Historically, mid-term elections favor the party that is out of power, which in this case would be Ossoff and the Democrats. Furthermore, anyone who claims to know what the political climate will be in 2026 is a fool or thinks his audience is. That’s true in almost any era, but it’s particularly true today. These next two years could prove to be one of the most volatile, unpredictable periods in American political history.

Old coalitions are crumbling; new alliances are quietly forming. Longtime Republicans are voting for Democrats, traditional Democrats are voting for Republicans, and an influx of new voters has altered the electorate, injecting new enthusiasms and expectations.

In fact, to hear some Republican activists talk, we might be about to enter something akin to the second American Revolution, a revolution that sounds as if it might resemble the chaotic, destructive French Revolution more than the revolution of 1776. Donald Trump and his supporters proclaim grand ambitions to root out the entire establishment, and to date they don’t seem shy about breaking norms, rules and even laws if that’s what it takes to make their mission successful.

These people are not conservative in any real sense of the word, they are radical. They are intent on pushing boundaries, on finding out just how much they can get away with, and no one knows how the country as a whole is likely to respond to that attempt.

It’s possible that two years from now, Trump and his supporters will be riding high, having squelched their opposition and looking to consolidate control over the country. If that’s the situation, Kemp’s Senate candidacy would look even more promising than it does today.

However, if these next two years do not go well, if Republicans prove unable or unwilling to govern, if they turn out to be quite good at destroying things but terrible at running or rebuilding them, the political climate for Kemp and other Republicans might look quite different. Under those circumstances, why would Kemp risk a defeat in 2026 that would end his presidential ambitions for 2028?

It also raises a larger question: Does Kemp need or even want a Senate seat?

Assuming that he truly does have presidential ambitions, Kemp might decide that he’s better off campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire as a successful two-term former governor of a critical swing state, a man who is conservative but not crazy, than he would be as a sitting U.S. senator, with the taint of Washington on his clothes.

To add yet one more complication to an already complex matrix, a four-year Trump presidency that appears successful to voters – and heaven knows what that would look like – would probably push Kemp well down the list of potential 2028 contenders. In that circumstance, the GOP presidential nomination would probably go to someone deemed more loyal and frankly more subservient to Trump, with Vice President J.D. Vance leading the list. To a degree at least, Kemp’s ambitions depend upon Trump’s failures.

Again, these are all just possibilities to be weighed, plausibilities to be played out, perhaps in the mind of someone staring out a window at the terraced, late-fall landscaping at the Governor’s Mansion, someone perhaps wondering what the view might look like from a window at another executive mansion some 600 miles to the northeast.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and X.

Donald Trump ought to be the main issue in this election. He led a conspiracy to overthrow our elected government, he incited political violence on his own behalf and then refused to intervene to stop it, and he has publicly demanded that the U.S. Constitution be “terminated” – his word choice, not mine – so that he, Donald Trump, could be immediately reinstated to power.

Trump wants to abandon our allies to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin and pardon those who attacked our Capitol. He has already sacrificed a woman’s right to choose on the altar of his political ambitions, and the restraints that confined him somewhat in his first term, in terms of government personnel and law, are being dismantled in preparation for his return.

The next time, there will be no guardrails.

Given that situation, this shouldn’t be a close election, and increasingly, it’s not. In the wake of Joe Biden’s debate performance, what ought to be a referendum on Trump, his record and his dictatorial ambitions has become something else, and Democratic prospects have turned sour. In a tight election, little things matter and big things matter a lot. A physically compromised candidate, a candidate who has difficulty expressing himself clearly, is a big thing.

My own vote is set in stone, but the people whose vote is set in stone are not the people whose eyes we should try to see through. Those who will decide the outcome of the election are those not happy with either candidate, those looking for a reason to swing one way or the other. The argument that Trump is unfit for office now has a counterargument, that Biden is unfit for office, which clouds the outcome considerably.

This situation is not the creation of the media. It is not the consequence of some conspiracy. If you witnessed the debate, then you know it is the consequence of Biden’s own performance as candidate. When the likes of Nancy Pelosi are saying that Biden should drop out, without actually saying he should drop out, you know the concern is serious.

The only viable option is Kamala Harris.

In an open field, with enough time, Harris would be one of a half-dozen or more well-qualified Democratic candidates that I would want to look at closely. However, it is not an open field, time is very short, and Harris is Biden’s natural replacement. Opening the convention floor to other nominees or trying to run some half-baked “mini-primary” between now and August would multiply the existing chaos, distraction and division by a hundred-fold, and eat up time and money best spent elsewhere.

I can’t tell you with any certainty that Harris will do better than Biden would. I do know that the type of problems that Biden is exhibiting do not get better over time or under stress. If he and his staff were confident in his abilities, he would be making his case publicly, aggressively, instead of in carefully stage-managed appearances.

My bottom line is that Harris has potential upside, and this version of President Biden does not.

Voters always say they’re unhappy with the candidates presented them by the two major parties, but discontent with these recycled nominees is much higher this year than in most. In a Pew poll taken in April, 49% of voters said that if given a choice they would want to replace both Biden and Trump. Among Democrats, that number was 65%.

Would replacing Biden with Harris represent a bold choice, a risky choice? Absolutely it would. But keeping Biden under these circumstances would be at least equally dangerous. Either way, bold, risky choices are all we have left, and I distrust anyone on either side of this debate who stridently insists they know what the right answer is.

The stakes are immense, the unknowns are immense, and emotions are high.

But if the America I love is going to fall to Trumpism, I want it to go down fighting. I want a candidate who can convincingly explain the progress made under the Biden-Harris administration, who can aggressively expose Trump for the hateful, dangerous, incompetent wanna-be dictator that he is.

I fear the Joe Biden of 2024 cannot perform that duty; I have cause for hope that Kamala Harris – a former district attorney, a former state attorney general, a former U.S. senator and a vice president with four years in the rooms that matter — can.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and X.

In emotional court testimony last week, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis recounted the racist vandalism and repeated threats of violence that targeted her in the wake of Donald Trump’s indictment, attacks that drove her and her family out of their South Fulton home.

In that same proceeding, former Gov. Roy Barnes explained that he had turned down a request from Willis to serve as special prosecutor in the Trump case, explaining that he did not want to expose himself to the death threats that would certainly have come his way.

“I told DA Willis that I lived with bodyguards for four years and I didn’t like it, and I wasn’t going to live with bodyguards for the rest of my life,” Barnes testified.

These have become sadly familiar stories. Like Willis, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his family were forced by threats of violence from Trump supporters to leave their home, as were Fulton election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, falsely accused of election fraud. And it’s not just Georgia. All around the country, the rising threat of political violence has made it much more difficult to recruit part-time and volunteer election workers, as people understandably shrink from exposing themselves to such danger.

Literally, such threats are making it difficult for democracy to function.

In a recent report on “60 Minutes,” a former Wisconsin state GOP chairman told Anderson Cooper that he had agreed to sign documents as a fake elector for Trump, even though he knew there had been no fraud in the Wisconsin election and that Joe Biden had won the state legitimately, because he feared for his safety and that of his family,

“Can you imagine the repercussions on myself, my family, if it was me, Andrew Hitt, who prevented Donald Trump from winning Wisconsin?” he told Cooper.

“You’re saying you were scared?” Cooper asked.

“Absolutely,” Hitt answered.

“Scared of Trump supporters in your state?”

“It was not a safe time,” Hitt said. “If my lawyer’s right, and the only reason that Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death.”

Political violence comes in several forms, from anonymous phone threats to riots to full-fledged insurrections. Trump supporters try to minimize the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, for example, by comparing it to riots in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer.

Nobody should justify riots. A riot is dangerous, destructive of property and sometimes lives, but it is spontaneous violence, violence born of a flash of anger.

Organized violence, violence planned and committed to achieve a specific political goal, is something else entirely; it is violence with a purpose. The difference between a riot and organized violence is the difference between a fistfight and premeditated murder.

(And let’s be clear: organized violence committed to achieve a specific political goal is exactly what we witnessed on Jan. 6.)

Violence and the threat of violence have become distorting influences on our public life, and it’s important to try to understand what’s underlies it. Somehow, like that gallows built on the Capitol lawn during the insurrection, a permission structure for political violence has been constructed in this country and to dismantle it before it destroys us we need to understand how it works.

That permission structure has three main components:

1. In ordinary times, politics is a means of peacefully mediating disagreements between competing parties, but the system functions only when all parties are willing to accept that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But what happens when you grossly exaggerate the stakes, when you convince people that ordinary disputes over policy and goals are not ordinary at all, but are actually some final battle between the forces of good and evil? By creating a sense of desperation, you make people less willing to lose peacefully and more willing to consider violence.

2.) To create fertile ground for violence, you also have to convince your target audience that the political system as it exists is rigged against them to such an extent that winning is not possible, that losing is inevitable. Once someone comes to believe that losing is intolerable and that losing is also guaranteed, violence can come to seem the only option left to them.

3.) In such times, where can we find the voices of calm, the voices willing to say that the election system is not rigged, that your fellow Americans are not your biggest enemy? To the degree they exist on the internet they are drowned out by the voices of anger and hate. Such voices also don’t get much TV time because they don’t draw eyeballs. And within today’s Republican Party, anyone willing to defend the system by saying that the elections aren’t rigged, that insurrectionists are not patriots, that political violence must be punished, risks cancellation as a RINO or even worse.

In a normal political environment, the one sanctuary where you might hope to find such calming voices would be in our nation’s churches and religious institutions, but in too many cases the pulpit has become a place to stoke anger and frustration rather than assuage it. Indeed, some American “Christian” leaders have begun to take on the tone and rhetoric that we saw in the rise of Islamic extremism. “That’s not true Islam,” we were told at the time by Islamic moderates, and they were right. But this is not true Christianity either.

The best way to dismantle the permission structure for political violence is to attack it at its foundation. There is absolutely no evidence that the elections are rigged. The FBI is not the muscle behind some liberal Deep State. We have far greater enemies in the world than each other. Political violence is never acceptable. Losing an election cycle is not the end of the world, because unless we lose faith in democracy another cycle is coming.

These are not partisan statements, although the fact that many will see them as partisan is a measure of the danger we face. If community leaders, religious leaders, media figures and political leaders are not brave enough to state such obvious truths, they forfeit their right to lead you.

Because once you discredit elections and the institutions of democracy, once they are no longer viewed as trustworthy, then violence becomes the alternative means by which decisions are made. And there are people in this country who are all too comfortable with that notion.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.