Election Day in the US state of Georgia was seen as a major test of ex-President Donald Trump’s influence over Republicans — and voters sent the party a clear signal.
Donald Trump had imagined things differently: In the Republican primaries in the US state of Georgia on Tuesday, the candidates David Perdue and Jody Hice, who were supported by the former US President, clearly lost to Governor Brian Kemp and his Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The United States will hold midterm congressional elections and a series of gubernatorial elections in November. In the party’s internal primaries, Trump, who is still very popular with the conservative base, is testing his power and vigorously promoting his candidates while at the same time railing against their opponents.
On election day, he described the 75-year-old Perdue, for whose campaign he had donated $2.5 million, as “a conservative fighter who is not afraid of the radical left”. Kemp, on the other hand, “abandoned Georgia” and allowed “massive voter fraud.” “Kemp is a very weak governor,” Trump wrote in a statement.
A huge damper for Donald Trump
Trump had hoped to make an example of Kemp and Raffensperger: He wanted to show all other Republicans with political ambitions what happens when they oppose him. After the presidential election in November 2020, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden, the governor refused to ignore the results in Georgia and to declare the then president the winner there. And Raffensperger was also the election officer in Georgia in 2020 as “Secretary of State” and, despite Trump’s personal telephone intervention, finally ratified the election results after counting them three times. Perdue, on the other hand, had presented himself as a close Trump ally in his campaign against Kemp and repeatedly repeated his lie about the “stolen election”.
But to Trump’s chagrin, Kemp and Raffensperger are now proving that Republican candidates apparently don’t have as much to fear from him as he would like. “It’s a clear warning sign of how Republican voters view the former president’s crusade to punish those unwilling to subvert the will of voters in 2020,” the Associated Press news agency said .
And the US news site “Politico” writes: “One cannot emphasize enough how bad Georgia was for Donald Trump.” Jody Hice was so far behind Raffensperger that he was not even able to force the incumbent into a runoff. Further down the ballot, Trump said it was even “uglier.” Trump’s favorites for Attorney General and Insurance Commissioner, John Gordon and Patrick Witt, were beaten hands down. Not to mention the two ex-president-backed House candidates, Vernon Jones and Jake Evans, who finished second in their respective primaries.
“Georgia underscores one of Trump’s big problems if he runs again,” Republican communications strategist Brendan Buck tweeted. “Obviously he won’t be able to let go of the nonsense of 2020 and nobody wants to hear his whining about it anymore.”
“This is the revenge of all throats”
For the remaining Trump critics among the Republicans, the results from Georgia are a good sign: “If there is a cosmic political karma, then Brian Kemp deserves every bit of it. It’s the revenge of all throats,” quotes “Politico” John Watson, former Georgia GOP chairman. And Jason Shepherd, a former party leader in Georgia’s Cobb County Borough, called the election results “a sweeping rejection of Donald Trump’s brand of politics.”
“He was consistently unsuccessful,” former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie condemned Trump’s “vendetta tour” against what he called Republican gubernatorial nominees. “He’s winless.”
Republican primary elections were also held in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Minnesota and Texas on Tuesday. In primaries in other states in recent weeks, candidates supported by Trump have had some successes, but there have also been defeats for the ex-president’s camp.
According to polls, a large majority of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was rigged. However, Kemp and Raffensperger’s huge success in Georgia shows that Trump’s favorite topic may not be a particularly important electoral concern for them.
Sources: “Politico”, Associated Press, Brendan Buck on Twitter
