The driveway is flanked with Kemp campaign signs and lined with trees. The setting is all that a campaign is not: quiet, peaceful and out of site.
There are birdfeeders by the front door and ducks enjoying the pond. Marty Kemp said, “It’s just home.”
Her father bought the farm in Athens, Georgia the day she was born. Marty and Brian Kemp have known each other most of their lives.
“For as long as I can remember,” Marty said.
The couple was friends through grade school and high school. When they got married, they moved into the cabin on the property. Their three daughters grew up here.
“It has been a great place to raise our kids,” Brian Kemp said as he walked us around the farm. He noticed the grass getting long.
“I need to get on that tractor right now and cut that pasture,” he said.
The farm is the family home base and represents a campaign focus: rural Georgia.
“I think metro Georgians are now understanding we need to do something to help rural Georgia,” he said.
The political leanings of much of urban areas are far more liberal. It is a stark contrast to the majority of voters in rural areas. President Trump carried Georgia by 5 points through winning the rural vote.
With early commercials holding a gun and saying he’d use his truck “to round out illegals,” Kemp’s campaign has appealed to Trump’s base in an unapologetic tone.
Most Georgians know Brian Kemp from those ads. We asked his wife how they compare to the man she knows.
“I had somebody ask me that,” Marty Kemp said. “They said he was abrasive and I said, ‘No, have you ever met him?’”
She described the commercials as being “tongue and cheek.”
Georgia’s gubernatorial race has made national headlines, in part due to the extreme differences between Kemp and Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.
“This is a very polarizing climate we are in now.” Brian Kemp said.
We asked what role compromise has in governing because you never hear about compromise in campaigns.
“I don’t know if people want compromise as they want you to fight hard for their values and do the right thing for our state,” he said.
But Georgia is a state divided on what “right” is.
The final weeks of the campaign has come with division and questions about voting rights and registration.
Abrams says there is a conflict of interest with the current Secretary of State overseeing a campaign he is trying to win. The issue over absentee ballots being thrown out has gone to court.
There is a claim that part of a political strategy to make it more difficult for African Americans and minorities to vote or have their vote count.
“Their claims I can rig the election are outrageous; I wouldn’t do that anyway,” Kemp said.
The most recent 11Alive poll done on Oct. 4 shows voters evenly split: 47 percent for Kemp, 45 percent for Abrams.
RELATED | 11Alive poll: Georgia voters split on governor's race, approve of legal pot, arming teachers
We asked how Kemp would unite the people of Georgia who have been divided; especially for those further disenfranchised through the course of the election.
“The way we bridge that divide is to get in there and govern and work together,” Kemp said. “95 percent of the issues the legislature deals with are bipartisan in nature.”
Kemp said he’s done it when he was in the legislature and would do it again.
“I’ve always worked hard to do what I think is right; but I’ve always respected other people’s opinions. I just don’t necessarily think they are the right direction,” he said.
A win would take the Kemp family away from the farm, for a time, but they say it won’t take them away from what they’ve learned here.
Marty Kemp said she’s taking it in stride.
“It shouldn’t change you, it will not change us.”
