It was some time in early 2021, weeks after the January 6 riot at the Capitol, when a Republican source from Georgia told me what was then practically banal, conventional wisdom: Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state who had defied Donald Trump’s demand to change Georgia’s election results, had no political future.
Raffensperger had, along with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, earned the wrath of the losing president and his MAGA base. Peach State Republicans were mad: mad that Trump had lost the state to Joe Biden, mad that both of its Republican senators had lost their runoff elections and handed control of the U.S. Senate to the Democratic Party, mad that Raffensperger and Kemp didn’t do anything to stop what Trump claimed was a stolen election. The question was not whether Raffensperger would announce he was not running for reelection in 2022, but when.
Instead, Raffensperger stayed in the race, defending his refusal to go along with Trump’s orders while otherwise running as a standard-issue conservative. Despite being labeled an “enemy of the people” by Trump, he went on to win a hard-fought Republican primary against a pro-Trump candidate. And in November 2020, he won reelection alongside the widely popular Kemp, who also vanquished a Trump-backed primary challenger.
And this week, the 70-year-old Raffensperger announced he would be running for his party’s nomination for governor to succeed the term-limited Kemp. With considerable personal wealth, universal name recognition, and a conservative record, the man most political analysts and operatives had left for politically dead has an actual chance to become the next governor of one of the most politically important states in the country.
That doesn’t mean it will be easy: Raffensperger is hardly assured of a primary victory. His opponents are Burt Jones, the MAGA-aligned lieutenant governor whom Trump has already endorsed, and state Attorney General Chris Carr, a protege of the late Sen. Johnny Isakson who, like Raffensperger, appeals to a more traditional Republican voter.
It’s hard to game things out this far in advance of the May 2026 primary. Raffensperger could have enough money from both his own coffers and an extensive donor network to push Carr out of contention. Or both he and the attorney general could find themselves splitting the votes of the share of the electorate unswayed by the Trump endorsement, giving Jones the clearest path to the nomination. Or the deep pockets of both Jones and Raffensperger could lead both of their campaigns to beat up on each other and allow Carr to rise above the noise.
But more intriguing than the horse race is what this emerging dynamic in Georgia suggests for the future of the Republican Party nationwide. The party has remade itself in Donald Trump’s image over the last decade: From the party infrastructure and donor network to its guiding ideology and issue priorities to the preferences of its core voters, as everyone knows, Trump owns the GOP. What the resilience of Brad Raffensperger presupposes is … maybe he doesn’t?
To be fair, it may just be that something is different about Georgia, a battleground state where statewide elections are actually competitive. Unlike some of its neighbors, the state’s demographic makeup means Republicans cannot nominate just anyone with Trumpian credentials and a pulse and expect to win. (Just ask Herschel Walker.) Not only did Biden win the state in 2020, but both of the state’s senators are currently Democrats. And despite an unbroken chain of GOP governors since 2003, Republican operatives in Georgia brace every four years for their good fortune to run out.
The state’s suburban population, particularly in the Atlanta metro area, is larger, more highly educated, and more liberal than that of most of its Southern neighbors, so Republicans can’t simply count on running up their votes in rural Georgia. Winning statewide for Republicans means retaining a foothold in the Atlanta suburbs, a task that Trump’s influence has made more difficult. Middle-class Republican-leaning voters with college degrees may like a lot of Trump’s policy agenda, but the stench of his “Stop the Steal” fanaticism still lingers—and that can be enough to cost associated Republican candidates a couple percentage points.
Multiple Republican operatives in Georgia tell me they worry that if voters nominate Jones—whose first response to Raffensperger’s entry was to criticize the secretary of state for disloyalty to Trump over the 2020 election—Democrats are in a far better position to win back the governor’s mansion for the first time this century. Republicans have no room for error if they want to win the sophisticated swing voters in Georgia who prefer conservative policies but blanch at Trump and his pale imitators.
“In Georgia, you gotta be better,” one GOP operative in the state told me. “You can’t just have an R by your name. You gotta have a B, too. For ‘better.’”
As we approach the twilight of Trump’s political career, it’s possible the sun may also set on Trump’s political empire within the GOP. Given the president’s poor approval ratings and the country’s shaky economic outlook, it’s not only likely the average American will sour on Trump by the end of his second term—Republican voters may be looking for something different for their champion, too.
Raffensperger’s career since its supposed nadir in 2021 is a reminder that even within a political party, competition and differentiation are strengths, and nothing in politics moves in a straight line.
