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(Reuters) – Republican Jody Hice, the U.S. congressman endorsed by Donald Trump who wants to become Georgia’s top election official, didn’t hesitate in summarizing his reasons for running during a debate this week.
“The ‘big lie’ of all this is that there were no problems with the last election,” he said within seconds of Monday’s debate. “The last election was an absolute disaster under Brad Raffensperger’s leadership.”
Raffensperger has been one of Trump’s most frequent targets ever since he publicly and steadfastly refused to yield to demands from the former president and his fellow Republicans to “find” enough votes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Hice’s campaign for secretary of state focused on highlighting Trump’s unfounded claims: that he actually won the presidential election in Georgia and won the White House but lost because of widespread voter fraud.
The May 24 primary will test whether Trump’s insistence that the election was rigged can still motivate Republican voters a year and a half after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Georgia’s primary is one of nearly 20 Republican primaries across the country this year in which Trump-backed candidates have echoed his false claims in a bid to become their states’ chief election supervisors, according to States United for Fair Elections, a nonpartisan advocacy group.
The trend has alarmed voting rights groups, who worry that politicians who claim unproven fraud will have the power to change the results of the 2024 election, when Trump has said he might run for president again.
Hice, a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives, attended a White House meeting in December 2020 to discuss ways to prevent Congress from certifying the presidential election on January 6, 2021, according to documents released by the House committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol that day. He voted against certifying Biden’s victory hours after the riot.
The congressman criticized steps Raffensperger has taken to facilitate voter convenience during the coronavirus pandemic, including mailing absentee ballot application forms to all registered voters and installing ballot drop boxes.
Multiple audits and recounts have confirmed that Biden won Georgia. Democratic candidates also swept the state’s two U.S. Senate seats in runoff elections in January 2021, giving the party control of both chambers of Congress.
“Jody Hice has spent the last 18 months running around the state of Georgia spreading lies and disrupting our electoral process,” Raffensperger said during Monday’s debate in Atlanta.
In a January 2021 phone call, Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” the votes needed to turn the tide. The call, which was recorded and broadcast widely on cable news channels, led state prosecutors to launch a criminal investigation into whether Trump’s request was illegal and made Raffensperger a national figure.
A special grand jury to help oversee the investigation was selected Monday.
Fierce competition
Trump has also backed other candidates running in Georgia, most notably former U.S. Sen. David Perdue, who is challenging Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. Perdue has also focused much of his campaign on re-examining the 2020 election, accusing Kemp of not doing more to overturn the results.
Kemp holds a large lead over Perdue, according to an April poll commissioned by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, but the race between Hice and Raffensperger appears tight.
As of January, Hice had raised $1.6 million, while Raffensperger had raised less than $600,000, according to campaign finance reports. The campaign is due to file its latest spending reports this week.
Jay Williams, a Georgia Republican strategist, said he didn’t think Raffensperger had a chance of winning given his public feud with Trump.
“I’ve felt for a long time that he was done, and I still feel that way,” Williams said.
Aware that many Republican voters are swayed by Trump’s repeated claims of voter fraud, Raffensperger has made election integrity a top priority. He has called for an investigation into whether hundreds of noncitizens tried to register to vote and backed Republican-backed legislation that would give law enforcement greater power to investigate voter fraud.
“He’s been very proactive, and it’s further evidence that he’s a strict law-abiding person,” said former state Sen. Chuck Clay, a former state Republican chairman.
But Raffensperger remains unpopular with conservatives like Whitfield County Republican Chair Diana Putnam.
“Real Republicans don’t sell out the Republican Party and allow our president to be cheated out of an election,” she said.
Two other Republican candidates, former Alpharetta Mayor David Bel Air and former probate and district court judge TJ Hudson, are also challenging Raffensperger from the right. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, the two leading candidates will advance to a runoff in June.
State Rep. Bee Nguyen is the leading Democratic candidate.
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