When Brian Kemp’s top donors huddled with the Georgia governor and his lieutenants at Atlanta’s Capital City Club earlier this year, they had reason to worry that his political career was about to come to an end.

Former President Donald Trump had spent the previous year savaging the Republican governor for refusing to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, and he was bent on ousting the governor from office, recruiting and endorsing Kemp’s primary opponent. Few Republicans in recent years had survived Trump’s wrath. But the Kemp team reassured the nearly 200 well-heeled contributors in attendance they had a plan.

“We’re going to go fucking scorched-earth,” Kemp adviser Jay Walker told the group, according to a person with direct knowledge of the remarks. Walker projected confidence: “When you got your foot on someone’s neck, you don’t take it off until the race is over, or they’ve run out of oxygen.”

Kemp’s don’t-give-an-inch strategy paid off Tuesday with a lopsided win over former Republican Sen. David Perdue, for whom Trump campaigned, appeared in TV ads and spent millions of his carefully guarded PAC dollars. The loss underscored the political limits of the former president’s relentless grievance campaign over 2020 — and the power governors have at their disposal to resist Trump’s meddling.