Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who refused to “find” nearly 12,000 votes to overturn former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state, is projected to win reelection on Tuesday, defeating Democratic state Rep. Bee Nguyen.
Raffensperger led Nguyen 54% to 44% with 85% of votes counted. Nguyen tweeted that she had called Raffensperger to concede.
Raffensperger’s refusal to acquiesce to Trump’s anti-democratic efforts to undermine the election turned him into a massive target of the former president’s movement. The Georgia Republican and his family were subject to death threats and “sexualized” threats of violence, as he later testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
A year ago, most Georgia political experts considered Raffensperger’s reelection bid dead in the water.
Right-wing U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, who twice voted to contest the election results in Congress, launched a primary challenge and immediately earned Trump’s endorsement. And Democrats, fresh off a trio of 2020 election wins in Georgia, launched an all-out blitz to take over statewide offices that had barely eluded them in 2018.
But Raffensperger crushed Hice in the GOP primary, then defeated Nguyen ― who also rose to prominence for fighting Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the Georgia results ― in the general election.
Raffensperger’s primary victory removed Georgia from the list of races in which a Republican election denier could have become the top elections official in a key swing state. Conspiracy theorists who could put the 2024 election at risk of turning into an all-out democratic crisis won GOP nominations in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Nguyen and Democrats still attempted to paint Raffensperger as a radical, pointing to his support for SB 202, the sweeping package of voting restrictions Georgia’s GOP-controlled legislature passed in 2021, just months after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
The law targeted the voting rights of Black Georgians and other voters who had pushed Democrats across the line in 2020. In many ways, it was based on the conspiracy theories that had driven Trump’s election challenge.
The passage of SB 202 helped kick off a year in which Republican state legislatures passed dozens of new laws restricting voting rights around the country, especially in swing states that President Joe Biden won.
“Here’s the thing about Brad Raffensperger. He wants to present himself to Georgia voters as a person who stood up against Donald Trump,” Nguyen said in an October debate between the two candidates. “But the reality is following the law is the bare minimum and expected out of any elected official who took the oath of office.”
“There seems to be this idea that he is a moderate Republican, and that is not true at all,” Nguyen said at a campaign event last week, according to the Associated Press.
Nguyen promised to fight to repeal large parts of SB 202, which was most infamously known for making it illegal to provide water or food to voters as they stood in Georgia’s notoriously long lines at the polls.
The law strengthened voter ID provisions for absentee ballots, reduced the time voters had to request mail ballots and limited the number of drop boxes counties could deploy. These changes all targeted the most heavily Democratic areas of Georgia.
The law also allows any Georgian to challenge the eligibility of voters at the polls, leading to a rash of claims in the weeks before the election.
Raffensperger used the law to bolster his conservative credentials, while he leaned on his thwarting of Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election to appeal to moderate Georgians who’d helped Democrats score big victories in the state two years ago.
“Many people buckled and folded,” Raffensperger said in the debate. “I didn’t, and I won’t.”