It turns out that avenging one election with another isn’t going as well as Donald Trump promised.
That was the plan for the former president after he lost the 2020 Georgia election, leaned on Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to illegally intervene, and then vowed to defeat them when they refused.
Still wielding his Twitter feed at the time, Trump slammed Kemp as a “fool” and a “clown.”
He later suggested the governor, along with Raffensperger, would soon be going to jail. And he started looking for candidates to run in Georgia, not just to throw them out, but to be replaced by Trump-aligned candidates who would treat him better the next time around.
Hours after Kemp refused a demand from Trump to call a special session of the Georgia Legislature to overturn the Georgia election results, Trump headlined a rally in Valdosta and started recruiting from the stage.
“Doug, you want to run for governor in two years?” Trump asked then-Rep. Doug Collins, to the crowd’s roar. “He’d be a good-looking governor.”
Kemp and Raffensperger never backed down, despite Trump’s pressure, and for a while, it seemed like career suicide.
Although Collins didn’t run for governor, former Sen. David Perdue did. U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, who had plotted with Trump’s team for months looking for ways to overturn the election, jumped into the race against Raffensperge last March.
Herschel Walker, Trump’s longtime friend, announced he’d move back to Georgia from Texas to take on Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, too, after Trump teased him as a candidate for months.
Altogether, seven Trump-picked candidates are running in Georgia’s primary elections, including races all the way down the ballot at attorney general, insurance commissioner, and the open 10th District seat that Hice is vacating.
But with early voting starting in less than a week, the latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows Trump’s top two targets are alive and well in their GOP primaries.
The poll shows Kemp is ahead of Perdue 53% to 27%, with a 71% approval rating from GOP voters, who include plenty of Trump supporters among them.
And far from being the piece of toast that Trump predicted, Raffensperger is holding his own against Hice, 28% to 26%, with former Alpharetta Mayor David Belle Isle trailing them both.
Trump’s endorsement alone, it turns out, is not shaping up to be a guaranteed winner. The poll showed just about a quarter of GOP voters, 27%, saying they’d be “much more likely” to support a candidate he endorsed. A majority said his preference didn’t matter to them or made them less likely to vote for the candidate he picked.
But even more important, the poll shows Trump’s underlying message, that the 2020 election was stolen and his candidates will keep that from happening again, isn’t moving a majority of Republican votes either.
We have to take a minute here to establish, again, that the 2020 elections in Georgia were not stolen. A hand recount, a machine recount, a signature audit, Trump’s own attorney general and dozens of court cases — all initiated at Trump’s request — have confirmed Joe Biden’s win or dismissed the allegations from Trump’s legal teams.
And although Trump lost in 2020, Republicans won across the state in races up and down the ballot, including Hice, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andrew Clyde, and many of the biggest election deniers in the state.
Perdue has put Trump’s false claims about the 2020 elections at the center of his own so-far losing election pitch to Georgia Republicans.
“First off, let me be very clear, the election in 2020 was rigged and stolen,” Perdue said off the bat at his debate Sunday against Kemp.
He has promised to jail “whoever was responsible” for 2020 and flashed a thumbs up to a crowd at a rally in Commerce as they chanted, “Lock him up!” of Kemp.
Like Perdue, Hice has made his challenge to Raffensperger almost entirely about 2020, too.
After leveling one inaccurate charge after another against Raffensperger at a Trump event in Perry last fall, Hice said, “We’ve got incredible leadership from Mr. Trump and we need this kind of leadership again...the greatest president in our lifetime.”
The only Trump candidate so far who has not jumped headfirst into Trump’s election conspiracies is Herschel Walker. At the same rally where Hice promised to return “integrity” to Georgia, the only mention of “election integrity” Walker made was telling anyone who could not vote legally to “get legal so you can vote for Herschel Walker.”
Of all of the Trump picks, Walker is doing the best, running nearly 60 points ahead of his closest Republican rival in the AJC poll.
The AJC did not poll for the Trump-endorsed races further down the ticket, and I never predict the outcome of races before they’re over. If 2020 taught us any lessons, it’s that anything can happen in Georgia elections.
For Kemp and Raffensperger, the poll suggests that their decision to uphold Georgia’s laws and refuse Trump’s demands to overturn the election may not have been the career-ender it once seemed.
And for their challengers, simply repeating Trump’s distortions and lies about the last election is not shaping up to be enough on their own for Trump’s hand-picked Republicans to win the next one.
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