Why Trump Is the Loser in a Georgia Election Rematch The former president managed to alienate Peach State Republicans by making common cause with Stacey Abrams against Gov. Brian Kemp. Barton Swaim
Ordinarily it’s a bad idea to search for national political significance in state primary elections, but these are not ordinary times.
The data points: On May 24 Republican Gov. Brian Kemp defeated former Sen. David Perdue by 52 points, and Secretary of State Brian Raffensperger bested his nearest opponent, Rep. Jody Hice, by 18 points. Both men were incumbents, but their challengers are accomplished politicians in their own right.
The remarkable thing about both races is Donald Trump’s assertive role in them. He carried on one-sided feuds with both winners and endorsed the losers. Mr. Raffensperger had insisted that Mr. Trump’s allegations about widespread voter fraud in Georgia were false, and in a 2020 postelection phone call with the president flatly rejected the idea that the secretary of state could “find” the 11,780 votes needed to deliver Georgia. Mr. Kemp later certified the election, moving Mr. Trump to call for the governor’s resignation and to say he was “ashamed” to have endorsed him in 2018. The former president’s hostility to both incumbents seemed to indicate electoral trouble for them, but they had none.
Another extraordinary data point: Mr. Raffensperger won Georgia’s 14th Congressional District—the one represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene—by 20 points. Mrs. Greene won her primary last week with 70%, and there is no more enthusiastic exponent of the “stop the steal” position. She famously wore a face mask bearing the words “TRUMP WON” to her swearing-in ceremony in 2021. That a large proportion of the 14th District’s GOP voters pulled the lever for both Mrs. Greene and Mr. Raffensperger would seem to suggest a disconnect between stated belief and practice.
Journalists in the mainstream press and liberal commentariat have spent much of the past 18 months expressing outrage and perplexity that so many Republicans—60% is the figure usually cited—don’t believe Joe Biden’s election was legitimate. The claim that an entire presidential election was thrown by means of voter fraud is difficult to square with the forcefully expressed determination to vote in an upcoming election: If you genuinely think the balloting is rigged, why vote?
My own conversations with people who would fall into that 60%, in Georgia and elsewhere, suggest that a lot depends on the meaning of “legitimate.” Was the election stolen? At a bar in Peachtree Corners, a suburb of Atlanta, I met with several Republicans whose answers fell somewhere between “of course it was” and “don’t be ridiculous.” One of them, a banker in his early 40s, had a neat formulation. “My personal position,” he said over an IPA, “is that I don’t think the election was stolen. I do think it was manipulated.”
That view might be more fully stated along these lines: Dominion voting machines might not have reversed votes, and boxes of bogus ballots might not have found their way into official tallies, but election rules were changed in the middle of the race, and Mr. Trump was in effect delegitimized by four years of media lies, bogus investigations and full-bore Democratic “resistance.” By Nov. 3, 2020, virtually any outcome would have appeared suspect.
A week after the primary I asked Mr. Kemp, at his campaign headquarters just outside Atlanta, if he thinks the stop-the-steal attitude is more an expression of rage than a thought-out commitment. “There’s definitely a hard-core group out there. They’re adamant, and they believe every video they’ve seen, every theory they’ve heard,” he said. He recounted an incident in which a woman at a regional GOP meeting criticized him for “not ordering a forensic audit of all ballots.” He spent 30 minutes explaining to the room why he had no authority to do that and why the claims about massive voter fraud they’ve heard have no evidence, only to be approached by the same woman asking why he hadn’t ordered a forensic audit of ballots. But he said even in places where fraud claims were wildest, “90%” of Georgians are “ready to move on and focus on the future.”
Maybe, but about one thing he is surely correct: “Even those people”—the true believers in a stolen election—“hate Stacey Abrams way more than they hate me.” Ms. Abrams, running unopposed, won the Democratic nomination for governor last month, setting up a rematch of the 2018 contest. She lost that race to Mr. Kemp by 54,723 votes—more than 4½ times Mr. Trump’s margin of defeat—but to this day refuses to concede.
“Trump Runs the Stacey Abrams Playbook” was the headline of a December 2020 article by Mr. Raffensperger in these pages. You’d think Mr. Trump would find the comparison invidious, but 10 months later he made it himself. “Stacey, would you like to take his place?” he asked at an October rally in a sardonic riff at Mr. Kemp’s expense. “It’s OK with me.”
With that throwaway line, which comes up again and again in discussions with the state’s GOP voters, Mr. Trump managed to associate himself, as a sore-loser election disputer, with the one person capable of igniting the ire of every Republican in the state.
Meanwhile, another development likely helped Messrs. Kemp and Raffensperger: the sudden fixation on Georgia by the progressive political class and woke corporations. Last year Major League Baseball moved the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest of a bill, passed by the Legislature in March, that returned the state’s election law mostly to pre-pandemic norms. Self-styled civil-rights groups denounced the bill as “racist.” Atlanta-based Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola Co. piled on, as did Mr. Biden, who called the law “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Those grossly misinformed fulminations implicated both Mr. Kemp, who signed the law, and Mr. Raffensperger, who supported it. By opposing both men, Mr. Trump put himself on the same side as woke corporations, a woke professional sports league and Mr. Biden. Georgia Republicans got the message.
Mr. Trump didn’t. After last week’s wins by Messrs. Kemp and Raffensperger, the former president sent an email to supporters linking to a Substack post by Emerald Robinson arguing that the election results were obviously “suspect” since the margins were uncommonly wide. (Ms. Robinson, a former Newsmax correspondent, tweeted in November that Covid vaccines “contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked.” The network declined to renew her contract.)
Ms. Robinson’s point, the one Mr. Trump wanted to reiterate, was that Georgia Republicans cheated. Left unexplained was why Mr. Kemp’s promoters, seeing their candidate 20 or 30 points ahead in the polls, would resort to fraud to make the margin 40 or 50 points. Also unclear is what good it does Mr. Trump to attack his own side if he plans to run for the presidency in 2024.
The upshot: Mr. Trump’s obsession with the Georgia recount appears to be undermining his political position at every point. John Watson, a political consultant and onetime state Republican Party chairman, related the point to me in a nice metaphor. “Georgia is a political crack pipe that Trump can’t put down, and like all addictions, it’s hurting him badly.”
Mr. Kemp has avoided direct responses to Mr. Trump’s attacks. “He’s mad at me,” the governor said shortly before the election. “I’m not mad at him.” When I asked if his primary victory suggested that the former president’s influence in the party has waned, I hoped he would say something interesting but suspected he wouldn’t. My instinct was correct: “I’m not focused on Trump . . .”
“I was afraid you would say that,” I responded, drawing a laugh from his wife, Marty, who saw what I was up to.
But the governor’s approach is wise. The chief lesson of the Georgia primaries is that it does Republican candidates no good to talk about Mr. Trump. When he lived in the White House, they felt they needed to identify themselves in relation to the president: You were either a Trumpist or a Never Trumper. That inclination began to abate the moment Mr. Trump left office. The former president still has the power to elevate candidates running in multicandidate primaries for open seats, but Georgia’s primaries suggest he has no ability to damage incumbents who ignore him.
I asked Mr. Raffensperger about the Republican need to overidentify with Mr. Trump, and he, too, answered by not answering. “Peter Drucker, the management guru, has a great book called ‘Managing Oneself,’ ” he said. “And I think we need to work harder at managing ourselves.”
Mr. Raffensperger, unlike Mr. Hice, projects a kind of patient competence that could fairly be called boring. He explains the mind-numbing issues of voting law with precision and avoids hyperbolic language. I couldn’t get him to mention Mr. Trump. “People thought Eisenhower was boring,” he remarked, seeming to read my mind. “But the 1950s were one of the greatest 10 years of prosperity for the middle class in our history. Maybe sometimes boring is good.”
What if assertions of election theft turn out to be largely emotive, or at least nonliteral? And what if candidates for high office, Democrat and Republican, stop talking about Donald Trump? We probably aren’t headed back to boring, but maybe times will soon get a little more ordinary.
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