The Republican secretary of state, who refused the former president’s demands that he overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, prevailed in a GOP primary Tuesday that few thought he could win.
PEACHTREE CORNERS, Ga. — Last spring, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was ready to launch his 2022 reelection campaign. He wanted to start by meeting with every county Republican committee in the state. No one would have him. Raffensperger had lost favor with a broad swath of Georgia Republicans after refusing former president Donald Trump’s demands that he reverse Joe Biden’s 2020 win. An internal GOP poll showed that he could lose by as many as 40 points in a party primary. On Tuesday, Raffensperger defeated his Trump-backed opponent, U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, by nearly 19 points. He did it by closing the gap among Republican voters, attracting Democrats who had celebrated his decision to uphold the law and, with 52 percent of the vote in a four-candidate field, avoiding the runoff that even his allies were predicting just days ago. Raffensperger, 67, won in part by courting Trump’s base with promises of stricter election security. But he also won by not trying to hide from his role in 2020: A plain-spoken structural engineer, he repudiated Trump’s false claims of election fraud to anyone who would listen. His victory Tuesday seemed to embolden him to offer an even more direct rebuke of the former president.
“The vast majority of Georgians are looking at honest people for elected office,” he told a clutch of cameras at his election night party in the northeastern suburbs of Atlanta late Tuesday. “Someone who would do their job, follow the law and look out for them regardless of the personal cost to do so.”
He added: “Standing for you, standing for the rule of law and election integrity, standing for the truth and not buckling under the pressure, is what people want.”
His main opponent, Hice, did not hold a public event or issue a public concession Tuesday. Trump, in a statement on the social media site Truth Social, trumpeted victories for his preferred candidates in Arkansas, Alabama, Texas and in the Senate contest in Georgia. The former president omitted any reference to Raffensperger or Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who also resisted Trump’s 2020 pressure. Defeating Raffensperger and Kemp had become an obsession for the former president, one displayed frequently both in public and behind closed doors, according to those in Trump’s orbit. But Kemp cruised to victory Tuesday over the Trump-backed former senator David Perdue by an astonishing 52 points. Donald Trump recalibrates his standing in GOP after primary setbacks
Raffensperger’s path to redemption among Republican primary voters began about a year ago, when he received a rare invitation to speak from a local Republican Party chairman in Ben Hill County, about three hours south of Atlanta.
