Top Trump-backed Candidates Crushed by Mainstream Republicans in Key Georgia Primaries

The former president sparked what political pundits characterized as a ‘civil war’ inside the Republican Party in the Peach State earlier this year, backing candidates endorsing his “Stop the Steal” message accusing senior GOP state officials of going along with Democrats to rob him of victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the pair of Georgia Republicans who turned down Donald Trump’s repeated calls to find evidence of electoral fraud during the 2020 election, have bested their pro-Trump challengers in Tuesday’s Republican primaries, putting a dent in the former president’s reputation as a GOP kingmaker.

Raffensperger received over 52.3 percent of the vote, according to the Associated Press, besting challenger Representative Jody Hice, who got 33.4 percent. Two other challengers, David Belle Isle and T.J. Hudson, received less than 10 percent apiece.

Kemp defeated former Senator David Perdue 73.7 percent to 21.8 percent, according to AP data.

Perdue and Hice were heavily endorsed by Trump, and supported the former president’s allegations that the 2020 election was “stolen”, and that Kemp, Raffensperger and other senior Georgia Republican officials failed to address the alleged fraud.

Trump spent months in late 2020 and early 2021 attacking Kemp and Raffensperger, calling the governor a “clown” and a “fool” who got “played” by Democrats, demanding his resignation, and suggesting that he would win “easily and quickly” if authorities approved a signature verification mechanism to account for “large scale discrepancies” in the vote.

Georgia was one of six battleground states in the 2020 campaign where Mr. Trump’s campaign alleged widespread fraud through ballot stuffing, rigged voting machines, and the use of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots to pump up Mr. Biden’s numbers in late night vote dumps.

Federal courts have refused to air the Trump campaign’s claims, and in December 2020 the Supreme Court slapped down a push by the State of Texas to investigate the election fraud allegations in other states. The former president and his supporters have continued to push their “Stop the Steal” claims, and along with Georgia, have investigated suspected “fraud” in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona.

Kemp and Raffensperger will face off against Democratic challengers, yet to be determined, in the November mid-terms.

It wasn’t all bad news for the Trump wing of the GOP in Georgia on Tuesday night, with Trump-backed candidate Herschel Walker winning the GOP Senate Primary, setting him up for a faceoff with incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock.