Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said on Monday night he will not run for president in 2024 and warned former President Donald Trump and other GOP hopefuls that they will lose the Peach State if they continue to rehash baseless claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Serving in his second term as governor, Kemp said he is “certainly not” entering the crowded Republican primary field dominated by Trump. But he had some advice for his party’s candidates.

“Quit looking back at the 2020 election. I mean, for goodness sakes, that was two-and-a-half, three years ago now,” Kemp said on CNN’s “The Source” on Monday. “The American people want to know what are you gonna do for me to help me offset the bad policies of Joe Biden.”

“I think if he continues to do that, he’s gonna lose Georgia in November,” Kemp added of Trump.

Kemp found himself a target in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, earning the former president’s ire when he declined to intervene. Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden by a little less than 12,000 votes, a key state that helped propel the now-president to victory in the Electoral College.

Trump swore in December of 2020 that “Republicans will NEVER forget this” after Kemp refused to call a special legislative session to address the conspiracies Trump and his allies were spreading about the integrity of Georgia’s elections. In the ensuing years, Trump continued to rail against Kemp and recruited former Sen. David Perdue to primary Kemp in 2022. Perdue lost by more than 50 percentage points and Kemp cruised to victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams.

Despite the animosity, Kemp said he would support Trump again if he were the 2024 Republican nominee.

“He was mad at me. I was not mad at him. I told them exactly what I could and couldn't do when it came to the election and I followed the law and the Constitution. And as I've said before, that's a lot bigger than Donald Trump. It's a lot bigger than me. It's a lot bigger than the Republican Party,” Kemp said. “But despite all of those things, I believe anybody running for president right now as a Republican, they would be better than what we're seeing with the Biden-Harris administration.”

Kemp added he knew people who couldn’t bring themselves to support Trump after his attempting to subvert the democratic results of the 2020 presidential election — on Tuesday, Trump said he was notified that he was a target of a Department of Justice investigation into his efforts — but that the stakes of the next presidential term were too high for him to not choose a Republican over a Democrat.

“The next president is going to be picking probably another Supreme Court justice and judges on the Court of Appeals and federal judgeships and dealing with strength in our military and standing up to our adversaries around the world and who would you want to be your president?” Kemp said. “And that's the question that everybody's got to ask themselves. You know, he may or may not be the nominee. So we'll wait and see.”

On the eve of Trump revealing he was the subject of a federal probe into efforts to overturn the election, Kemp lamented the slow progress in another investigation: the Fulton County district attorney’s probe into Trump’s actions in Georgia. The local prosecutor has yet to announce a charging decision, though she indicated indictments may come in August. 

"People are wondering like ‘why is this taking so long? Why haven't we had resolution?’ So I think that just sews distrust in the system, which is unfortunate,” Kemp said. “That's not what people should be feeling no matter what side of the aisle you're on. So it's frustrating, but we'll see what she comes out with and at the appropriate time.”

Trump has already been indicted and arrested twice this year in separate cases, once on state charges in New York and then on federal charges in Florida. The former president has pleaded not guilty to all charges in both cases and denied any wrongdoing. 

As for the rest of the field, Kemp said the race is stagnant and “there’s still a long, long way to go” for candidates to catch up to Trump, who leads his rivals by nearly 30% in public polling. He argued that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is the only candidate besides Trump to poll in double-digits, was dealt a tough hand by entering the race with such high expectations. Kemp predicted DeSantis would rebound after recent struggles.

“They're in it for the long haul. I think Ron was in a pretty tough spot when he got in the race. His numbers were so high before he got in, in some ways he didn't have anywhere to go,” Kemp said. 

For now, Kemp says he isn’t endorsing any candidate. His only concern is that a Republican wins next November.

“We got to have a candidate that can win and can beat Joe Biden and can win in states like Georgia,” Kemp said. “There's no path for us to win the White House if we can't win Georgia.”