Raffensperger, Who Wouldn’t Steal Election For Trump, Loses Governor Race to Two Election Denialists

In 2020, Georgia stood out: a red state in which top officials bucked President Trump’s demand to overturn his election loss. 

Tuesday’s GOP primaries suggested Georgia’s relative independence from Trump’s reactionary movement may be coming to an end. Election deniers went one and two in the GOP primary for governor, ending the gubernatorial bid for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The winning attorney general candidate, meanwhile, has vowed to defend “President Trump’s effort to enforce” existing voting laws.

Lt. Governor Burt Jones, a man who about two weeks before the election proposed the state switch to paper ballots, got the most votes in the GOP race for governor, with about 37 percent when the AP called the race. Billionaire and election denier Rick Jackson trailed by less than three percentage points as of about 9 p.m. ET. Jackson came virtually out of nowhere to place second, spending more than $83 million on his own campaign. 

Jones and Jackson will now face off in a June runoff election.

The race for secretary of state will be a runoff between Georgia State Rep. Tim Fleming and Vernon Jones, a former Democratic state rep. who switched parties in 2021 and ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022. Jones calls himself the “Black Donald Trump” and supports the president’s claims of a “rigged” 2020 election. Jones in 2020 crossed party lines to endorse Donald Trump before making the party switch the following year. An unwavering Trump supporter, Jones later ran against Trump’s political foe Gov. Brian Kemp in the 2022 GOP gubernatorial primary and had an unsuccessful run as a Republican for Congress. 

Fleming, for his part, holds staunchly conservative views and has not refuted the results of the 2020 election. Gabriel Sterling, a deputy to Raffensperger, lost the primary to succeed him.

Both gubernatorial candidates are extreme MAGA Republicans who have spread lies about the results of the 2020 election and are staunch ideological followers of President Donald Trump. 

Jones signed up as an alternate elector seeking to hand the 2020 presidency to Trump in spite of the legal results. During his campaign, he called for the Justice Department to monitor Georgia’s election. 

Georgia Republicans issued a rebuke to members of their party who display something less than full fealty to President Donald Trump, with gubernatorial candidate Brad Raffensperger placing third with less than 15% of the vote by about 9 p.m ET. Raffensperger served as Secretary of State in 2020 and refused to claim that Donald Trump won the presidential election after Trump, notoriously, called on Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to change the election results. Raffensperger’s decision to uphold the results of Georgia’s fair election made him a target throughout this primary. Jones called him “the Left’s favorite Republican.”

Georgia, on Tuesday, became the latest stop on Trump’s revenge tour against Republicans who he has found to be insufficiently loyal. It goes beyond losing an election. A week before Tuesday’s primary, Raffensperger had heightened security at a campaign event after receiving death threats.

What’s most interesting is that none of the candidates differed much in terms of policy. They all support various restrictive election measures including expanding voter ID laws and have elevated the myth of non-citizens voting en masse in federal elections. They all support taking steps to block voting by undocumented immigrants, who already cannot vote in federal elections.

Raffensperger was shrouded in exactly what has made him a MAGA foe as late as Tuesday afternoon. That’s when a Fulton County judge sided with a group of Republican officials and gave poll watchers permission to access the secretary of state’s emergency operations center. The judge then, within minutes, reversed the order and barred watchers from entering the hub. Attorney General Chris Carr, who also lost the GOP race for governor, said that because no ballot counting was conducted at the hub, election observers didn’t have the right to access it.

And the candidate for that AG’s office, which just this week sought to defend Georgia elections from what it deemed unlawful access by Republican election watchers bent on denying the validity of the state’s election administration, will be by Brian Strickland. Strickland is a state senator who has stopped short of saying the 2020 election was stolen, but has thrown the rest of his support behind Trump. 

“We should be defending President Trump’s effort to enforce the laws we have on the books now and not get in the way of that,” Strickland told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last June.

Altogether, the possibility that Georgia could elect a slate of officials who won’t challenge Trump’s authority puts the security of elections at risk nationwide. Kristin Nabers, Georgia State Director at All Voting is Local, told TPM Georgia could be just the beginning.

“I really feel like the administration is using Fulton County as a blueprint to see what they can get away with,” Nabers said. “If they’re allowed to take election materials … in any future election in a county or state where they’re preferred candidates lose?”