How Georgia’s pro-Trump election chief became the bane of the GOP

Even with the presidential race certified, the pressure is not on the GOP Secretary of State. The Jan. 5 runoff election for the two U.S. Senate seats will determine which party controls the Senate, meaning all eyes in politics will remain on Georgia until then.

While Raffensperger’s refusal to respond to Trump’s questionable demands won him applause from many across the country, it has had the opposite effect among Republicans in Georgia, some of whom say the 65-year-old. the soft-spoken who once had ambitions to run for governor wrote his own political obituary.

“If you can find someone who is 18 and has the pulse to say they support Donald Trump, they will beat Brad in the primary in 2022,” a former Republican elected official and longtime Georgia activist said. “I don’t see how he can survive politically.”

A GOP agent who spoke to CNN wondered if Raffensperger – a successful businessman who spent an unprecedented $ 3 million of his own money on his 2018 run – would even run for re-election in two years.

Even so, Raffensperger kept his head up high and insisted that his obligations to the public required him to tell uncomfortable truths to his fellow Republicans.

“I was a supporter of President Trump, one of the first supporters of both (in) our financial resources and also vocal in 2016 and then also in 2020,” Raffensperger told CNN on Friday. “But at the end of the day, our office has to make sure the elections are fair and accurate, and that’s what we did.”

Friendly fire on Republicans

Trump tells a very different story. For him, the elections in Georgia were fraudulent, plagued by missing votes and questionable counts.

Of the states where the Trump campaign disputes the results, Georgia is the only state where the top election official (Raffensperger) is a Republican.

This caused an unusual amount of friendly fire.

On November 9, Republican Georgian Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler called on Raffensperger to step down on unspecific charges of “failures” and questions about the integrity of the election. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who previously served as secretary of state, stopped by before calling for his successor to resign. But he echoed calls from Perdue, Loeffler and Trump to investigate possible fraud.

Raffensperger fired back publicly, defending the conduct of the election and saying he would not quit his job. He did, however, agree to a manual recount two days later, on November 11.

For Eric Tanenblatt, a GOP veteran in Atlanta who is close to Loeffler, given the pressure on him, Raffensperger had little choice but to bow to some of the early demands.

“I will say that at the time this happened the temperature was pretty high,” Tanenblatt said. “There were a lot of people in the state, Republicans, Trump supporters, who thought there were real problems.”

Perdue and Loeffler are both in the run-off election in January, and Republicans in Georgia are hypersensitive to upholding Trump’s loyalty and reaping the political benefits of his electoral base.

Fall guy for the GOP

The intense focus on Raffensperger comes at a precarious time for Republicans in Georgia. Although the party dominates state-level control, occupying all state offices and majorities in both houses of the general assembly, Biden’s victory there carries a hint of danger to the GOP. from Georgia. It was the first time in nearly three decades that a Democratic presidential candidate had won Georgia, and Republicans’ margins of victory have narrowed in recent cycles. Now that Republican scrutiny of the US Senate hangs on the outcome of January’s two ballots, the spotlight on the Republican Party in Georgia is hot.

So maybe it’s no surprise that the besieged Republicans are turning around on their own.

“The GOP wants a fall guy for Georgia, and (Raffensperger) will be,” said Erick Erickson, an Atlanta-based WSB radio talker and longtime conservative activist.

Tanenblatt, the GOP agent in Atlanta, said Raffensperger was a victim of the national attention he had garnered since the election.

“When you’re a secretary of state in a state and all of a sudden you become a nationally known figure in a feud with the president of the United States, that doesn’t put you in a positive light,” Tanenblatt said.

Raffensperger entered the 2020 election with high expectations, but also baggage during his first two years in office. In the June primary elections, Democratic and Liberal activists blamed him for long lines and faulty machines, especially in majority minority counties and constituencies. Some Republicans, on the other hand, were bothered that Raffensperger had for the first time allowed counties to use drop boxes for mail-in ballots during the primary.

“The June primaries were very messy on election day, very long lines, people were very upset,” said the former GOP elected. “People are very upset about putting your vote in a drop box. People feel it’s not safe.”

In the days after the primaries, Raffensperger hinted that the problems were with a few county election officials, not the secretary of state’s office.

Raffensperger’s demarche on mail-in ballots also angered many state Republicans. In March, his office mailed nearly 7 million unsolicited postal ballot requests to registered voters, catching many Republican leaders in the state by surprise.

As Raffensperger tried to run an election amid the pandemic – anticipating more mail-in ballots than ever before – his actions failed to inspire the confidence of many Republicans in the state, according to the former government official. GOP of Georgia.

The former official told CNN that Raffensperger had failed to communicate effectively. “You are in an environment where people are nervous,” said the former official. “There is this great number of mail ballots, and now it’s based on these ballots. [that Biden wins]. “

Raffensperger has continued to defend his performance and remains committed to the idea that the election was conducted fairly and offered a warning to those who accused otherwise without evidence.

“I think we really need to be aware of what we’re telling people, that we don’t really need to spin people,” he told CNN on Friday. “We just haven’t found anything system-wide, systemic, that has reached a level that would reverse the results we have today that Vice President Biden carried the state of Georgia. “