Enemies list

Georgia election official on Trump's enemies list takes his case to MAGA media

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been on a conservative media tour trying to shore up his cred for a tough reelection challenge.

By ZACH MONTELLARO

Georgia’s chief elections officer has stacked up appearances on conservative radio and other media in recent months — taking lumps over his break with Donald Trump in an effort to rebuild his standing in the GOP ahead of his 2022 campaign.

Brad Raffensperger has been omnipresent in the conservative press lately, ranging far into the MAGA territory where he’s been taking hits for months. The secretary of state has gone on Fox News, local talk platforms, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s Newsmax show and the radio program hosted by John Fredericks, Trump’s two-time Virginia campaign chair and the self-declared “Godzilla of Truth.”

Press access is nothing new for the talkative Raffensperger — but there’s a lot riding on his conservative media tour.

Trump branded Raffensperger as an enemy for rebuffing his asks to overturn the results of the 2020 election and later endorsed a challenger in May’s GOP primary, costing Raffensperger support among a swath of Republicans. While Raffensperger isn’t flip-flopping on Trump, he needs to reingratiate himself with the base that may be more open to his support for voter ID laws and other GOP election policies ahead of Georgia’s primaries, where he’ll need majority support to win renomination.

“They’re inviting me to come on, and so that’s all it takes,” Raffensperger told POLITICO about his recent spate of conservative media appearances. “I always believe in sitting down with anyone that wants to ask questions. And so they’re finally asking questions, so I’m finally sitting down with them.”

In January alone, Raffensperger appeared at least twice on Fox News’ dayside cable TV programs and sat for interviews on Guy Benson and Brian Kilmeade’s Fox News radio shows. The secretary of state weighed in on a debate about having a “Hormel chili cheese keg” at a Super Bowl party (he’s firmly pro-keg) on the morning drive-time show for “Atlanta’s only conservative news and talk station,” and he did an extended podcast interview with John Solomon, the onetime writer at The Hill whose columns played a role in Trump’s impeachment.

“Raffensperger knows that he can’t win this without the support of those Trump supporters. Even if he gets a few of them — enough of them — he thinks he can win,” said Scott “Rhino” Rheinhold, one of the co-hosts of The Morning Xtra, the morning show on the Atlanta talk radio station.

“And the only way to do it is to be on conservative radio and hope that he comes off as somebody who is following the state’s constitution, doing his job,” Rheinhold continued, noting the challenge of doing that when Raffensperger is facing a Trump-endorsed candidate.

Besides more MAGA-oriented shows, Raffensperger has also hit more friendly conservative confines like the podcast from The Dispatch, the outlet created by former staffers of The Weekly Standard who are routinely critical of Trump. And he also has regular appearances in mainstream press, recently carving out time for an interview on Atlanta’s NPR affiliate and scoring a coveted national TV spot on a Sunday show on CBS’s Face the Nation in January, among others.

But whichever medium he’s in, Raffensperger is not backing down from his actions during and after the 2020 election.

He regularly defends his office and the security of Georgia’s elections from right-wing conspiracy theories, saying the reason Trump lost the election was because that was the voters’ will, not because of baseless allegations of fraud.

“Our side is grieving, and we’re shocked,” he said during an affable conversation with Solomon, in which he detailed allegations of fraud that his office chased down. “But what really happened in Georgia is 28,000 Georgians skipped the presidential ballot, and yet they voted downballot. And in Republican congressional areas, Republican congressmen got 33,000 more votes than President Trump. And that’s really what happened in Georgia.”

That oft-repeated explanation has done little to placate some furious callers on the shows, who have phoned in to vent at Raffensperger. The election official has stayed measured while batting their complaints aside.

“It was misinformation of the highest order, and I’m sorry that people misled you. But it was them that misled you, not our office,” he told one caller on Fredericks’ show, who brought up the infamous “suitcase full of ballots” conspiracy.

(He repeated a variation of both these explanations during his interview with POLITICO.)

Even still, Raffensperger appears to not want to relitigate an election that is well over a year old. Instead, he tries to focus on a series of planks where there is likely more unanimity among conservatives, even those who are still furious with the secretary.

In interview after interview, he focused on a handful of ideas likely popular with Republicans: prohibiting non-citizen voting (which is already illegal under Georgia law), expanding photo ID laws, promoting Georgia’s ban on third parties collecting and returning voters’ absentee ballots and criticizing President Joe Biden and other Democrats for their since-failed push for their federal voting rights legislation.

Raffensperger said he thought those topics would resonate with Republican primary voters. “They’re looking for election integrity, election security,” he said. “They’re looking for guardrails, and I believe in guardrails — that we need to have accessibility with security.”

Rheinhold, the Atlanta radio host, was skeptical that Raffensperger would be able to win back enough hardcore Trump supporters who tune in to his show.

“No, I don’t think he’s going to be successful at all” at winning them back, he said. “They don’t trust him at all. Every day I get tweets and direct messages from listeners and Trump conservatives that just bash him and say horrible things about him.”

Indeed, Raffensperger’s falling-out with Trump — who endorsed him for secretary of state in 2018 — has shaped his 2022 race, especially the Republican primary.

Trump has already deeply involved himself in Georgia. He backed Rep. Jody Hice’s primary challenge to Raffensperger almost a year ago, and also threw his support behind former Sen. David Perdue’s primary challenge to GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, whom he also blames for his election loss.

Hice has run a campaign predicated on his support for Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election, and he is currently on a “Election Integrity Fly Around Tour” across the state. His campaign declined an interview request on Wednesday, citing a busy schedule with the tour.

Trump hosted a September 2021 rally with Hice and other endorsed candidates, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently reported that Trump is expected to host another rally for his endorsed candidates ahead of the late May primary.

Meanwhile, a late-January Quinnipiac poll of Georgia registered voters found Raffensperger’s job approval rating at 36 percent, with 38 percent disapproving. Among GOP voters, the Republican secretary of state’s numbers were actually worse than his overall totals: 33 percent approve, 44 percent disapprove. Democrats viewed him slightly more positively than not, and he was popular among independents, with 42 percent approving and 30 percent disapproving.

Raffensperger’s primary will be a significant test of Trump’s grip over the Republican electorate, on par with just about any other election in the country where the former president has targeted someone he has deemed an enemy within his own party. Yet the secretary’s supporters argue that they see signs of the former president’s stranglehold slipping.

“I do think with a significant percentage of the voting constituency in a primary … [Trump’s endorsement] continues to have weight,” said former state Rep. Brett Harrell, a longtime Georgia politician who supports Raffensperger. “[But] I am hearing more and more people gradually move on to the next election, and what the future holds.”

“So I believe that some of that support is beginning to moderate,” he continued. “Now whether it’ll be enough for a May primary? I don’t know.”

The recent Quinnipiac poll bears that out to a degree. Fifty percent of likely Republican primary voters said that Trump’s endorsement made no difference on who they’d back in a GOP primary, while 44 percent said they’d be more likely to vote for Trump’s pick and 5 percent said it made them less likely. (The poll did not run a ballot test for the secretary of state race.)

Regardless of who emerges from the Republican primary, Democrats are running hard for the seat. Democrats working on secretary of state races constantly name Georgia as one of their top targets in 2022 — especially if Hice wins the GOP nomination as part of a wave of Trump-inspired candidates running for election administration positions across the country.

Democrats have a handful of candidates vying for their nomination. State Rep. Bee Nguyen is considered the likely frontrunner at this point.

Raffensperger and his supporters point to the likely hyper-competitive general election atmosphere as an argument for why he should be renominated by Republicans, citing in part his unusual popularity from Democrats and independents.

For his part, Raffensperger called his opponents “totally unelectable” and said Republicans risked squandering the midterms with infighting.

“President Biden is giving us an opportunity for a once in a lifetime layup shot, that we can really run the score up in the November 2022 election,” he told POLITICO. “If we keep on looking in the rearview mirror, if we keep on fighting internally, we will not have the victory that I think Americans deserve. We’re going to hurt ourselves, and that’s why we need to unify.”

“There’s so many people that are like me, we’re … conservatives. We believe in honesty, we believe in dignity,” he said. “I’m very confident in where I stand. But also, I’m very confident in the goodness of my fellow Georgians.”