Source: Politics<\/p>\n
The former president is obsessed with defeating him next year. He\u2019s getting mauled by his own state party. Last week alone, a Republican congressman announced he\u2019d challenge in the primary and the state legislature voted to strip his office of some official powers<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n By most accounts, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger doesn\u2019t have a prayer of being reelected.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s toast,\u201d said Jay Williams, a Georgia-based Republican strategist. \u201cI don\u2019t know that there\u2019s a single elected official who would put their neck out for Brad Raffensperger right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Not everyone in state political circles is convinced Raffensperger\u2019s political plight is so grim. Some still see a path to reelection, despite the serious resistance within his own party.<\/p>\n Either way, as the GOP forges its post-Trump era identity, Raffensperger\u2019s reelection campaign is emerging as one of the earliest and most contentious test cases for the direction of the party. At issue is more than just whether critics of the former president can succeed in the party. It\u2019s whether a Republican who rejects the lie that the last election was stolen has any chance of winning another one.<\/p>\n The answer in Georgia, so far, is that it will be exceedingly difficult \u2014 if not flat-out impossible.<\/p>\n It is a remarkable turn of events for a conventional Republican politician whose down-ballot election in 2018 went largely unnoticed outside his own state. Yet after refusing to buckle to Donald Trump\u2019s requests to change the state\u2019s vote count and feuding with Trump over the former president\u2019s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, Raffensperger\u2019s reelection campaign is unfolding, improbably, as one of the most consequential of the election cycle \u2013 with implications for the GOP in every state and at all levels of government.<\/p>\n Jason Shepherd, the chair of the Republican Party in Cobb County, Georgia, said he has friends who are \u201ccompletely uninvolved in politics\u201d who tell him \u201cthere is no way they are going to vote to reelect Raffensperger.\u201d<\/p>\n That sentiment, he said, is coming from \u201cthe type of person you\u2019re almost surprised they know the name of the secretary of state.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to say there\u2019s zero chance, but at this point right now, it\u2019s nearly impossible to find anyone in the party who supports the reelection of [Raffensperger],\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Raffensperger still has more than a year to turn it around. But he is running up against the heavy weight of GOP\u2019s election fraud orthodoxy. Earlier this week, Rep. Jody Hice, a defender of Trump\u2019s effort to overturn the election, announced he\u2019s running with Trump\u2019s endorsement<\/u><\/a> to unseat Raffensperger. And the Georgia Republican Party isn\u2019t exactly sitting on the sidelines.<\/p>\n The state executive committee publicly called<\/u><\/a> this week on Raffensperger to repudiate his staff for misquoting Trump\u2019s words<\/u><\/a> in a December phone call in which Trump urged a Georgia elections official to find \u201cdishonesty\u201d in the vote in an attempt to reverse the election results.<\/p>\n The party said Raffensperger has \u201cdodged repeated attempts\u201d by committee members to discuss the issue with him.<\/p>\n Closer to home, Raffensperger failed this past weekend to get Republicans in his own precinct to elect him as a delegate to his county\u2019s upcoming Republican Party convention, said Stewart Bragg, executive director of the Georgia Republican Party. After Raffensperger wrote a letter asking to be elected, no one at the precinct meeting moved to nominate him, Bragg said.<\/p>\n In a statement, the chair of the Fulton County Republican Party, Trey Kelly, said he was unaware of any letter from Raffensperger, adding that, \u201clike many others who did not attend Saturday, he was not added to the delegate or alternate list for the county convention.\u201d A person close to Raffensperger also denied that he sent a letter seeking election.<\/p>\n His representatives otherwise declined to comment for this story, pointing to Raffensperger\u2019s past public statements.<\/p>\n Raffensperger’s official responsibilities have <\/b>also been targeted by Republicans in the state. On Thursday, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law, signed by Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, that removes the secretary of state as the state election board chair<\/u><\/a> \u2014 to be replaced by a person approved by the state legislature.<\/p>\n The law, in effect, hands control of the five-person board over to the state legislature: Two other members on the board are picked by the respective legislative chambers. The law also gives the state election board the ability to suspend county election officials, who are replaced by an individual picked by the board.<\/p>\n Raffensperger is not without a fan base. In fact, he\u2019s the most popular Republican in Georgia, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll in January<\/u><\/a> \u2014 even more than Kemp or Trump.<\/p>\n But that feat is in large part because Raffensperger is admired by Democrats, who viewed him as a truth-telling, elections administration equivalent of Dr. Anthony Fauci after the November vote. Nearly 45 percent of Republicans in the state disapprove of Raffensperger\u2019s performance, according to the poll.<\/p>\n Raffensperger has been a focal point for Trump and his supporters since shortly after the presidential election. Even as early as November, he said he was preparing for a primary challenge<\/u><\/a> because of how angry some in the state may be with him.<\/p>\n In an election cycle where secretary of state races are likely to get a near-unprecedented amount of attention<\/u><\/a>, Georgia\u2019s may be the most competitive. Not only is Raffensperger facing a Trump-backed primary challenger, Democrats will be gunning for the office in 2022 as well, enraged by the Republicans in the legislature pushing through bills that will restrict voter access to the polls and emboldened by the party\u2019s successes in the state\u2019s last election.<\/p>\n Raffensperger has joined the chorus of Republicans across the country in opposing H.R. 1, or the For the People Act, congressional Democrats’ sweeping piece of legislation that would drastically remake most aspects of federal elections, penning an op-ed in USA Today<\/u><\/a> on Friday that says the bill makes “reckless demands of Georgia\u2019s elections system.”<\/p>\n At the same time, Raffensperger has been harshly critical of the falsehoods about the 2020 election promoted by Trump and embraced by Hice, saying voters will punish Hice because of it.<\/p>\n \u201cWe saw in January what Georgia voters will do to candidates who use that rhetoric,\u201d he said in a statement shortly after Hice got into the race, alluding to the two GOP Senate runoff losses. \u201cHis recklessness is matched by his fecklessness as a congressman. Georgia Republicans seeking a candidate who’s accomplished nothing now have one.\u201d<\/p>\n Hice also isn’t Raffensperger’s only primary challenger. David Belle Isle, the former mayor of Alpharetta who Raffensperger handily defeated in a 2018 runoff for the nomination, also announced he was running again.<\/p>\n Raffensperger\u2019s newly acquired national profile means the outcome will reverberate far beyond Georgia, where Republican primaries are emerging as litmus tests on questions about voter fraud and fealty to Trump\u2019s grievances.<\/p>\n “Raffensperger is not just somebody running in a Republican primary,\u201d said Sarah Longwell, the founder of the Republican Accountability Project, an anti-Trump group working to promote non-MAGA Republicans. \u201cHe is being primaried by Jody Hice, who is somebody who has been an election truther.\u201d<\/p>\n The umbrella organization that RAP belongs to has pledged a $50 million campaign to back Republicans who voted to impeach Trump<\/u><\/a>, and a sister organization of RAP previously ran ads defending Raffensperger\u2019s handling of an election, saying he ran \u201ca \u201ctextbook election under extraordinary circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n But the issue will likely play out across the country, Longwell said. \u201cIn a Republican primary \u2014 like the Ohio Senate primary, for example \u2014 I suspect the challengers are going to be MAGA, or more MAGA, or mega MAGA. \u2026 You can definitely see that people will try to outmatch each other by the extent to which they will play up the election being stolen.\u201d<\/p>\n