ATLANTA — An anti-Trump Republican advocacy group recently organized a focus group of G.O.P voters in Georgia to get their take on perhaps the most competitive and consequential primary election in the state. They heard a lot of indecision.Most of the voters, convened by the group, the Republican Accountability Project, knew little about the race between Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and his leading challenger, Representative Jody Hice. Mr. Raffensperger seemed to get the benefit of the doubt — until the voters were reminded of the back story.As the state official responsible for certifying the 2020 presidential election results, Mr. Raffensperger rejected President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat. Mr. Trump recruited Mr. Hice to seek revenge.“Go Jody, I guess?” said one voter.Three out of six others agreed.The exchange offered a glimpse into why the Republican primary race for the office that oversees elections remains a dogfight just days from Election Day, on May 24. Two years after Mr. Trump lost Georgia by the slimmest of margins and Democrats captured both of the state’s open Senate seats, wounds from the 2020 election have still not completely healed for some partisans.But marshaling that residual anger to unseat an incumbent is not an easy feat. Mr. Raffensperger has worked to win back Republicans by casting himself as a defender of “election integrity,” even as he has spent hours debunking a laundry list of false claims about the 2020 election. Some voters’ memories and passions have faded. Many never had strong opinions about their secretary of state.It all has made the race one of the purest tests yet of whether the 2020 election lie can be weaponized to win elections. While polls have shown that leagues of Republican voters in Georgia and elsewhere largely embraced the fiction that the 2020 election was “stolen” in its immediate aftermath, it is not clear those concerns alone, or Mr. Trump’s personal vendetta, are enough to drive voters’ choices.“I think 2020 was really a turning point in how closely people looked at things,” said Salleigh Grubbs, chairwoman of the Cobb County Republican Party. “Before, people might not have even realized that the secretary of state was in charge of running the elections for the state. But now they’re keenly aware of it.”Mr. Hice is one of more than a dozen candidates running for secretary of state under the America First banner, alongside others in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan and Ohio. They share an unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump and a belief that the 2020 election was marred. Some are calling for a law enforcement arm to more aggressively prosecute violators of election laws.ImageRepresentative Jody Hice, who is running to be Georgia’s secretary of state, at an event of Atlanta Young Republicans on Thursday.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York TimesPolls show large numbers of undecided voters in the race, with Mr. Hice and Mr. Raffensperger neck and neck, each with about one-third of the vote. Both campaigns are braced for a runoff.Mr. Trump’s attempt at payback for 2020 in Georgia is floundering in the state’s other marquee primary on Tuesday. Former Senator David Perdue, his pick to challenge Gov. Brian Kemp after the governor refused to overturn the election results, is trailing Mr. Kemp in polls and fund-raising. Mr. Trump has hardly weighed in publicly on Mr. Perdue’s prospects since hosting a “tele-rally” for the former senator in April. His former vice president, Mike Pence, is set to visit the state to campaign for Mr. Kemp on the eve of the primary election.Mr. Kemp has been adept at using his office to win over skeptical Republicans, passing a slew of conservative policies on elections, law enforcement and education. For voters still enthralled with false claims of fraud, Mr. Kemp can point to the Election Integrity Act of 2021, which limits provisions like ballot drop boxes and mobile voting centers.“When voters see that kind of activity around the concern they have, it just becomes difficult to drive an argument that people who are in office are being inattentive to the issue,” said Brad Alexander, an Atlanta-based political consultant and Raffensperger supporter, who was among several who argued that the potency of the “stolen” election debate has started to wane.In January, 43 percent of Georgia Republican voters said they were confident that the November elections would be fair and accurate, according to a University of Georgia poll. By April, that number had increased to nearly 60 percent. And a record number of voters have already participated in the state’s primary elections, topping more than 700,000 voters on the final day of early voting.Mr. Hice, a By: Maya King
Title: In Georgia, a G.O.P. Primary Tests the Power of a Trump Vendetta
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/us/politics/georgia-republican-primary-secretary-of-state.html
Published Date: Fri, 20 May 2022 19:22:38 +0000
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