Pence: Voting for Kemp sends ‘deafening message’ that GOP is the future

Former Vice President Mike Pence on Monday night rallied for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), urging voters to send a “deafening message” at the polls that the GOP is the “party of the future” while avoiding any references to former President Trump, who was simultaneously holding a virtual rally in support of Kemp’s opponent. 

“I’m here because Brian Kemp frankly is one of the most successful Republican governors in America,” Pence said in one of his most public breaks with Trump, who has called Kemp the worst governor in the country for rebuffing his pleas to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss in the state.

“When you say yes to Gov. Brian Kemp tomorrow you will send a deafening message all across America that the Republican Party is the party of the future,” Pence said.

Kemp faces former Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), whom Trump endorsed in December. Georgia’s primary will be held Tuesday.

In Kennesaw, northwest of Atlanta, Pence kept his focus on the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Stacey Abrams, whom Kemp beat for the same seat in 2018 in a bitter contest that led to an Abrams-backed lawsuit alleging voter suppression.

“There are some people who want to make this election about the past,” Pence said, not in reference to Trump, who continually harps on the 2020 election being rigged against him, but instead putting the focus on Democrats. “Stacey Abrams and Joe Biden want you to embrace the failed socialist policies of the last century.”

Pence’s rally for Kemp came the same day that Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich called the former vice president “desperate to chase his lost relevance.”

The former vice president was among a host of officials scrambling for safety on Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress’s counting of Electoral College votes affirming President Biden as the election winner. Some pro-Trump rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence” while marching through the Capitol’s hallways.

Pence at Monday’s rally kept his focus on Abrams and the Democratic Party, insisting that the “radical left wing literally lost their grip on everything that’s made this country great.”

“But you have an opportunity to say something different tomorrow,” he said.