Since the 2020 election, the former president has focused on his loss to the state and two Republican politicians whom he blamed for that defeat: Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Trump personally recruited the two men’s top rivals and repeatedly proclaimed loudly that he would help them defeat them.
It didn’t work that way.
Kemp is currently leading former senator David Perdue by 52 points – not a spelling mistake – in the governor’s primary. Raffensperger is ahead of MP Jody Hice by between 52% and 33% in the state secretariat primaries, avoiding the long-awaited return in June. (And in the Republican primary in Georgia for the attorney general, the Trump-backed candidate lost by only 26% of the vote).
It is impossible to look at these results – and the attention, money and time Trump spent on the state – and see anything other than an absolute political disaster for the former president.
So what happened? After all, Trump’s endorsement has been, in general, an advantage for the candidates who have received it. While Trump’s endorsement is not a guarantee of victory, he has certainly helped candidates in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania as early as this primary season.
Some reasons for Trump’s defeat on Tuesday come to mind:
1) It’s hard to beat the headlines. While Trump has changed many of the rules that govern politics for a long time, he has not changed them all. And one of the most reliable business rules is that headlines are hard to get rid of. Although Perdue had been elected statewide, he was out of office. Kemp, on the other hand, cleverly used his powers of concern to reward friends and punish those who crossed him to support Perdue. In his career as Secretary of State, Hice performed well in his own congressional district, but ran far behind Raffensperger in the rest of the state.
2) The “big lie” is not enough: neither Perdue nor Hice had any problem running against Kemp and Raffensperger, except the idea that the headlines had not done enough to fight the false idea that the Georgia election had done. stolen from Trump. This turned out not to be enough, or even close. Republican voters may have agreed with opponents on the nature of the 2020 election, but it was not a matter of voting.
3) Voters wanted to move on: It’s been a difficult two years for Republicans in Georgia. The party not only lost the presidential race in 2020, but also lost two Senate seats in early 2021, defeats that cost Republicans control of the House. GOP voters in Georgia sent a very clear message on Tuesday: they don’t want to spend another second talking about the 2020 election.
Trump seemed, unsurprisingly, not to understand the importance of what happened in Georgia.
“A very big and successful afternoon of political endorsements,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “A great new Senate candidate, and others in Georgia.” (Trump endorsed Republican Herschel Walker in the Senate race and the former soccer star got a victory in the primaries).
Trump can turn what happened in Georgia on Tuesday the way he wants. But the facts are facts. Trump wanted to defeat Kemp and Raffensperger to show what happened to anyone who crossed him in the 2020 election. Instead, Kemp and Raffensperger proved that, at least in Georgia, the emperor had no clothes.