President Donald Trump has driven senators into retirement and tweeted wayward Republicans into primary defeat during four years leading the GOP. Now, as a lame duck, he’s launched a new campaign against GOP election officials who won’t bend to his will.
Trump’s drive to discredit the results of an election he lost has put him at odds with the Republican elected officials and administrators who oversaw the vote in key states — and called it what it was: a free and fair election. Being at odds with Trump doesn’t go over well in today’s Republican Party, and Trump has turned their political bases against them, even unleashing threats from his most rabid supporters.
No GOP official has caught more flak than Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fairly conventional Republican who won the job as Georgia’s top election official two years ago running as a rock-ribbed, anti-voter fraud conservative — with Trump’s endorsement. Now, after refusing strident calls from Trump and allies not to certify results that show President-elect Joe Biden carried Georgia, he’s facing down a potential primary challenge in 2022 and his family is dealing with death threats.https://e2013af35bb80840858adee9831441fd.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
“I am a Republican, and a conservative one. And I believe that I’m going to be disappointed, because I don’t believe that my candidate is going to win,” Raffensperger said in an interview this week, before Georgia certified its results. “But that said, I want 100 percent of people to have confidence in the results. I’m not gonna like it. And I’m gonna have to take that medicine, just like everyone else in my party will, but it will be an accurate count.”
Raffensperger said he will run for another term in 2022, though other Republicans “probably have notions” of beating him in a primary now, he said. “And right now, emotions are pretty high. That’ll be what it is. I’m going to do my job. And my accounting is to the Georgians that put me in office here, and really all Georgians.”