When voters go to the polls Tuesday, they’ll be picking candidates, of course. But they’ll also be sending a message to Donald Trump about whether his efforts to deny and overturn the last election in Georgia could be easier the next time around.
Trump has made the 2022 elections in Georgia his business. He’s picked a slate of 10 candidates up and down the ballot-- from governor to House races to insurance commissioner-- and made allegiance to him and his 2020 election conspiracies his only criteria.
Republicans competed for his nod. Many are on the ballot.
When David Perdue announced he would challenge his former ally, Gov. Brian Kemp, in this year’s GOP primary, he declared his and Trump’s elections “rigged and stolen” and put Trump’s false claims of election fraud at the center of his challenge.
With five days left until the May 24 primary, he stood in front of about a dozen supporters and a TV camera Thursday morning at the Covington Municipal Airport and insisted that the 2020 election has never been investigated.
“I’m talking to you guys about what I know,” he said. “What I’m saying is hard evidence, if we ever get a judge or somebody in an appeal to see this, you’ll see when it comes out.”
The election results have, in fact, been the subject of multiple investigations by state officials and the subject of more than a dozen failed lawsuits, including Perdue’s own case, which was tossed out by a judge last week. The judge called it “speculation, conjecture and paranoia.”
Trump’s pick in the Senate race, Herschel Walker, has sidestepped questions about 2020. Asked after an event Wednesday at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in Macon about whether Biden won, Walker said, “I do think there were problems, and I think everybody else thinks there were problems, and that’s the reason now everybody is so upset.”
But on the day after the 2020 elections, as Trump claimed fraud, Walker suggested in a Tweet that the entire state of Georgia recast its votes.
“Instead of us fighting and going to court, why don’t we have Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin vote again? We can have it done within a week, and maintain our democracy.”
Another early and easy pick for Trump in Georgia was U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, who is running for Secretary of State against incumbent Brad Raffensperger.
Trump has had it out for Raffensperger since the infamous phone call when he told Trump, when the then-president demanded that state officials “find” the 11,000 votes he needed to overturn the Georgia results. “Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong,” Raffensperger told Trump.
While Trump ran into roadblocks in Georgia, Hice met with White House officials to talk about ways to overturn the election results and has supported Trump’s claims ever since, including in his effort to take over the state’s election systems.
“Nobody understands the disaster of the lack of election integrity like the people of Georgia and now is our hour to take it back,” Hice told Trump on stage at a rally for Trump in Perry last year.
Below those races, Republican voters will see John Gordon running for state attorney general against incumbent AG, Chris Carr, despite questions over Gordon’s eligibility to run after only just renewing his law license.
While Carr refused to join a Texas lawsuit against Georgia’s own results, Gordon told a GOP meeting last week, “Stevie Wonder could see the fraud in 2020.”
As AG, Gordon said his first act would be to open a new investigation into 2020 and prosecute “the people responsible,” including possibly jailing whomever that might be.
Every other Trump pick on the GOP ballot has gone along with Trump’s conspiracies to one degree or another.
State Sen. Burt Jones, running for lieutenant governor, has said he just wants “a simple investigation” and said the state’s Dominion voting machines, purchased by lawmakers just a year ago, need to be replaced.
As the head of the Georgia state Senate, Jones would call the shots on which election law proposals could come up for a vote and which fellow senators would write the bills.
And all the way down at Insurance Commissioner, Trump endorsed Patrick Witt after the former Trump agency staffer moved home to Georgia to volunteer for the Stop-the-Steal legal team.
Witt is challenging incumbent John King, a former police chief and Major General in the Army Reserves whose only offense, if anything, seems to be getting appointed to the job by Kemp.
Vernon Jones, an original Stop-the-Stealer running in the 10th Congressional District, won Trump’s endorsement in the district where Jones now lives. Jones spent the months after the elections pushing Trump lines like, “No more [expletive]. It’s time to uncover that lie!”
Were Jones to go to Congress, he would join other Georgians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Andrew Clyde, with the power to object to the certification of electoral votes, including Georgia’s, as Greene and Clyde did.
Your vote is your choice, but choosing someone who will protect that vote, even if they don’t like the result for their party, is part of the choice you’re making this year.
The results will send Trump a message on Election Night that even he won’t be able to deny.
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