The Battle for Georgia’s Soul Is Heating Up...And Trump Wants an Loyalist in Place for 2022.
Brad Raffensperger’s job as Secretary of State looks precarious.
Trump and the GOP are gunning for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who has become the unofficial national punching bag for everything that “went wrong” during the 2020 election. Raffensperger is now facing a primary from a Trump-backed lackey, Jodi Hice, a right-wing talk radio host turned current House GOP member, who likely sees the race as a potential stepping stone to an eventual run for governor. (Hice made waves and raised enduring questions about his own intelligence when he argued that D.C. doesn’t deserve statehood because it doesn’t have a car dealership. It does, on H. Street, just blocks from where he works.)
Hice accuses Raffensperger of inaction in the face of election fraud, and of allowing “cracks in the integrity of our elections,” according to a statement this week put out by Hice’s office. These “cracks” are things of which Hice says, “I wholeheartedly believe individuals took advantage of in 2020.”
For his part, Hice is an election “truther,” believing in all manner of already debunked conspiracies and continuing to push the idea that there was massive, widespread fraud and that the election was stolen. CNN’s fact-checkers had to unwind several of his statements on television recently, including that 700,000 people in Georgia voted illegally (this falsehood is based on the fact that 10 percent of people in that state move each year and their addresses don’t match voter rolls when they do); that a burst water main at a precinct allowed for monitors to be shoved out and votes to be illegally counted (in fact an overflowing urinal forced election workers to leave for the night, and the monitors and press left after they saw the workers leave); and that there was statewide ballot harvesting, meaning third parties submitting ballots for others (even though Georgia law allows family members but not unrelated parties to do so, and there is no evidence of unrelated third party submissions happening).
Raffensperger won his race in 2018 handily and is still popular in the state, though far more among Democrats than Republicans. That could make for a bruising primary challenge from Hice, one where the test of GOP loyalty now will be whether and how much you support the former president’s false claims about the election. The general consensus is that Raffensperger is so hated by the party loyalists for not backing up Trump’s efforts that he will be humiliated in the primary. “He’s toast,” Jay Williams, a Georgia-based GOP strategist, told Politico. “I don’t know that there’s a single elected official who would put their neck out for Brad Raffensperger right now.”
On the other hand, the Republican Accountability Project, an in-party foil to Trump and those who support him, has taken notice and is intending to support Raffensperger in the race against Hice and any other far-right, pro-Trump followers. Other anti-Trump GOP organizations such as The Lincoln Project are likely to step in as well.
The stakes remain very high because even though the new voter suppression bill in Georgia removes the Secretary of State from the State Board of Elections (a direct slap at Raffensperger), the position still has enormous sway over how elections are run. The Secretary of State in Georgia is responsible overall for voter registration, certification of results, and investigations into alleged election fraud. Should a Trump loyalist be installed in Raffensperger’s place, Trump’s infamous phone calls the Secretary of State to “find votes” for him in Georgia would find a far more receptive ear.
While the politirati are buzzing about the match-up, ordinary Georgians may not be that focused on it yet—or even know who Jodi Hice is outside his district. Another year separates today from primary season in 2022. By then, the MAGA versus establishment fights will be playing out everywhere. For now, name recognition might be the most important factor helping Raffensperger. Observed pundit Sarah Longwell, (publisher of The Bulwark) in a tweet about Raffensperger’s chances, “In a recent focus group in GA I asked what people thought of him and his challenger Jody Hice. The most MAGA person in the group said Raff was handsome and she hadn’t heard of the woman running against him.”