Making it worse

Brad Raffensperger has a 2020 problem. Trump keeps making it worse.

The ghosts of the 2020 election were already dividing Republicans in Georgia. The FBI’s raid in Fulton County only emboldened the secretary of state’s harshest critics.

By Alec Hernandez

Georgia Republicans won’t let Brad Raffensperger move on from 2020. At least not when President Donald Trump is still talking about it.

As Georgia’s top elections official, Raffensperger rebuked efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results, turning him into a target of attack from Trump and his allies for years. That has created a deep tear between the Georgia secretary of state and Republicans in his state, many of whom continue to echo the president’s false claims of widespread fraud.

Now, Raffensperger is running for governor — and Trump just made 2020 the top issue in the GOP primary again.

“You’re going to see some interesting things come out” in Georgia, the president said Monday in a podcast interview days after an FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office. Agents seized hundreds of boxes of ballots, and materials related to the 2020 election, thrusting the issue back into the forefront of the state’s politics.

Raffensperger once again has to defend that extensively litigated election — and this time, he needs to win the support of a majority of Republican primary voters for the state’s top post.

“The path forward is through national reform, not repetition of old arguments that don’t add up,” Raffensperger wrote Monday in a statement outlining “The Georgia Plan” for strengthening election security nationwide. The statement effectively served as his first response to the FBI’s actions.

Despite no evidence of widespread fraud, the claim lives on for Raffensperger and other Republicans who would rather talk about anything else.

Georgia’s May primary will serve as a major test of the political viability of Republicans who have stood up to Trump on the issue of elections and are now navigating competitive primaries for higher office.

Raffensperger has already proven once before that he can withstand electoral pressure, routing former Rep. Jody Hice’s Trump-backed primary challenge en route to his comfortable reelection in 2022. But he’s not an incumbent running for reelection this time, and one of his top opponents, Trump-endorsed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, has hammered the secretary over how he’s handled inquiries searching for fraud in the results.

“Those who believe elections are stolen are never going to be satisfied with anything” but an official declaration of fraud, said Jason Shepherd, a former chair of the Cobb County Republican Party who supported Raffensperger in 2022. “The Feds being involved just adds another layer.”

FBI raid puts 2020 back into the center of Georgia politics

Federal agents arrived at the Fulton County elections office last Wednesday after a federal magistrate judge authorized a warrant allowing law enforcement to seize all of the county’s ballots from the 2020 election. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche suggested that the probe was related to “election integrity.” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard later told lawmakers in a letter that Trump personally directed her to attend the raid in Georgia and that she connected some of the FBI agents who performed the raid with the president over speakerphone the next day.

In his statement Monday, Raffensperger repeatedly emphasized the security of the 2020 election and the legitimacy of the results. The document, titled “Groundhog Day Returns,” calls on Congress to pass new federal standards for elections, including voter ID verification, modernizing voter roll administration, and an expansion of citizenship verification tools.

“I urge lawmakers to focus on strengthening state administration of elections,” he wrote, “rather than rehashing the same outdated claims or worse — moving to federalize a core function of state government.”

But many of his fellow Republicans in Georgia were quick to celebrate the raid in its immediate aftermath. Reps. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) and Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) — both of whom are running to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff — posted on X in support of the FBI operation. Jones also immediately seized on the Fulton County raid to take another shot at both Raffensperger and Chris Carr, the state attorney general who also repeatedly rebuffed efforts to overturn the 2020 election and is running for governor.

“Fulton County Elections couldn’t run a bake sale. And unfortunately, our Secretary of State hasn’t fixed the corruption and our Attorney General hasn’t prosecuted it,” Jones wrote in a post on X shortly after the raid. “Today is an important step toward accountability.”

Republican candidates’ continued focus on the 2020 election as they navigate crowded competitive primaries suggests they think it continues to be a priority with their base voters. It also proves a ripe opportunity to curry favor with Trump, whose endorsement could propel them to a win.

Longtime defenders of the security of the state’s 2020 election, meanwhile, were uncharacteristically mum, including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, whose office did not respond to a request for comment about the FBI raid. Raffensperger’s campaign similarly did not respond to a series of questions about the raid or primary.

Gov race will test how far election denial has spread

The hard-right activist base of the party has only grown in recent years in influence both at the state and local levels, including on the state board of elections, which writes rules on election practices and investigates allegations of fraud.

Salleigh Grubbs, the first vice-chair of the Georgia Republican Party, was appointed to the GOP-dominated board by the lieutenant governor in the final days of 2025. Grubbs said the raid reengaged a situation in which “justice needs to be done.”

She also aired her displeasure with Raffensperger.

“As far as the secretary goes, there could have been an effort a long time ago to see a broader, more fair review of 2020 especially when there’s been legal cases pending, and I haven’t seen an effort,” she said.

Those hard-right figures have also grown in influence in the state party. Last year, party hardliners successfully passed a resolution on the floor of the state convention to bar Raffensperger from running as a Republican as he mulled a run for the U.S. Senate. State party Chair Josh McKoon later threw cold water on the plan, citing state law.

“The Republican Party in Georgia does not support Brad Raffensperger in any way, shape or form,” said Alex Johnson, chair of the far-right Georgia Republican Assembly who was involved in the convention vote. The raid can’t actually make things worse for Raffensperger, he said, because “I don’t know how that dynamic could change or get any worse for him within the Republican Party.”

But embracing Trump — and his lies about the 2020 election — is not totally without peril. Trump-endorsed primary challengers lost to both Raffensperger and Kemp in 2022, and election deniers running for governor and secretary of state in battlegrounds across the country almost uniformly lost in November that year.

Shepherd, the former Cobb County Republican chair, posited that relitigating the 2020 election could ultimately prove fatal for Republicans once they head into general elections that are certain to be highly contested.

“It almost ensures Republicans lose,” he said, “if that becomes the focus.”