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PEACHTREE CORNERS, Ga. – Last spring, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was preparing to launch his 2022 re-election campaign. He wanted to start meeting with all state county Republican committees.
Raffensperger had lost favor with a broad strip of Georgia Republicans after rejecting demands by former President Donald Trump to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. An internal GOP poll showed he could lose up to 40 points in a party primary.
On Tuesday, Raffensperger defeated his Trump-backed opponent, U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, by nearly 19 points. points. He did so by closing the gap between Republican voters, attracting Democrats who had celebrated his decision to enforce the law, and with 52 percent of the vote in a four-candidate field, avoiding the second round that even his allies predicted a few days ago .
Raffensperger, 67, won in part by courting Trump’s base with promises of stricter electoral security. But he also won by not trying to hide from his role in 2020: A simple structural engineer, he repudiated Trump’s false allegations of election fraud to anyone who listened to him.
His victory on Tuesday seemed to encourage him to offer an even more direct cardigan to the former president.
“The vast majority of Georgians are looking for honest people for an elected office,” he told a group of cameras at his election night party in the northeast suburbs of Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon. “Someone who would do their job, obey the law and look after them regardless of the personal cost of doing so.”
Added: “Defending yourself, defending the rule of law and electoral integrity, defending the truth and not giving in to pressure is what people want.”
His main opponent, Hice, did not make any public act or issue a public concession on Tuesday.
Trump, in a statement on the social media site Truth Social, proclaimed victories for his favorite 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 pressure from Trump in 2020.
Defeating Raffensperger and Kemp had become an obsession for the former president, who was frequently shown both in public and behind closed doors, according to those in Trump’s orbit. But Kemp got the victory on Tuesday over former Senator David Perdue, backed by Trump, with a staggering 52 points.
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Raffensperger’s path to redemption among Republican primary voters began about a year ago, when he received a rare invitation to speak to a local Republican Party chairman in Ben Hill County, about three hours south of ‘Atlanta. Trump had won the county with 63 percent of the vote by 2020.
More than 100 Georgians gathered at the Fitzgerald Grand Theater, the county seat. Raffensperger later learned that some had spent hours listening to him speak, not because they were admirers, but because they believed he had failed to uncover the fraud that Trump had falsely claimed had fueled Biden’s victory.
That night he told them they had no facts. “Simply put, what happened in 2020 is that 28,000 Georgians skipped the presidential race.” while voting in negative voting races, he recalled saying it to the crowd, in a speech he would deliver over and over again the following year. “You have to share the facts, and then they have to understand that I have them.”
Raffensperger drove 40,000 miles in his Ford F-150 truck, crossing the state to talk to anyone who heard him. Earlier this month, he drove almost four hours to Savannah for a Rotary lunch, and stayed the rest of the afternoon for a meeting with just over a dozen members of the local Jaycees.
Miles paid off: Raffensperger amassed large margins on Metro Atlanta, but also stayed statewide. He defeated Hice by more than 20 points in the congressional district of pro-Trump brand Marjorie Taylor Greene. Hice got some of his biggest wins in his own congressional district, but the numbers were too low to affect the margin.
“It’s a return to the centuries and a testament to an official who accepted every invitation from any group in the state or the media and went on to tell his story,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican-based strategist. in Georgia, whose firm advises on communications for the Secretary of State but was not affiliated with any of the campaigns.
Even in Ben Hill County, where all those Trump supporters had gathered last year to ask Raffensperger for answers, he won 50 percent of the vote. This news surprised Austin Futch, the GOP president who had invited Raffensperger to speak, and as a result had lost his leadership position.
“Until this morning I wouldn’t have dared to tell anyone who supported Raffensperger,” real estate agent Futch said in an interview Wednesday. “But yeah, I feel like I have a pretty good reason to say it now. Georgia has issued a referendum on Donald Trump and is staying out of Georgia. Donald Trump lost in 2020. And he has to accept that fact.”
In the weeks following the 2020 election, Raffensperger and his top aides received death threats from Trump supporters. His wife, Tricia, sent obscene text messages. Someone burst into her daughter-in-law’s house. At a party in a cozy suburban restaurant on Tuesday, two off-duty Gwinnett County police officers came to the door, hired by Raffensperger as a precaution.
These threats only made him more confident in his decision to defend the election results, Raffensperger said. He brought firmness to his situation that he cultivated for decades by designing skyscrapers and post-tensioned bridge and box beams, but this also reflects a much more scorching experience four years ago: the death of his eldest son from an overdose of fentanyl.
“I understand what I can change and what I can’t change,” Raffensperger said. “You have all these people spreading their deception and misinformation, but you are not supported by the facts.”
It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post. Both officials have long been Republicans serving in the legislature and have a long history of supporting conservative causes. They are known in Georgia and have reached this year’s election with the recognition of the name and the ability to raise millions of dollars. Raffensperger, the founder of a lucrative engineering firm, also poured in some of his own funds.
In an interview Tuesday night, Raffensperger said he had prepared four different sets of comments for the night: one if he won, one if he lost, one for a second round if he qualified first, and another for a second round if Hice did it. He was not pessimistic, he said, just practical. The speech of victory had been put in the pocket of his left flap, alone and more easily recoverable.
He still doesn’t know which Democrat he will face in the fall because the primaries are heading for a second round. Democrats have accused Raffensperger of empowering election conspirators by supporting a new strict voting law last year and defending efforts to reduce non-citizen voting.
Bee Nguyen, a Democratic state lawmaker and a favorite for the nomination, has campaigned heavily on the idea of democracy going to the polls in November. But this message will be more complicated against Raffensperger than against Hice, who was presumed not to have certified Biden’s victory in Georgia.
Raffensperger said he is unlikely to change his message for the general election. He also offered a vision of a possible next ambition, one that seemed out of reach just a few months ago: running for governor of Georgia. “My track is short,” he joked, having recently celebrated his 67th birthday.
“What I have found is that all Georgians want safe and secure elections, with the right balance of accessibility and security,” he said. “That’s where Georgia votes today.”
Lenny Bronner in Washington contributed to this report.