The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
They lied about the last election. It’s not stopping.
When David Perdue announced he would challenge his former ally, Gov. Brian Kemp, in this year’s GOP primary, he put Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud at the center of his challenge.
With five days left until the May 24 primary, David Perdue stood in front of about a dozen supporters and a TV camera Thursday morning at the Covington Municipal Airport, after previously claiming the election was “rigged and stolen,” wrongly insisting that the 2020 election has never been investigated.
“I’m talking to you guys about what I know,” he said. “What I’m saying is hard evidence, if we ever get a judge or somebody in an appeal to see this, you’ll see when it comes out.”
The election results have, in fact, been the subject of multiple investigations by state officials and the subject of more than a dozen failed lawsuits, including Perdue’s own case, which was tossed out by a judge last week. The judge called it “speculation, conjecture and paranoia.”
But Perdue’s willingness to go along with Trump’s claims has won him Trump’s endorsement in Georgia, along with the support of a significant number of Trump supporters who believe the election was rigged against them, just as Trump claims.
Perdue isn’t the only
Republican on Tuesday’s ballot pushing “rigged and stolen” election conspiracies.
Every one of the 10 Trump-endorsed candidates running has repeated some or all of Trump’s debunked claims.
The highest-profile is Herschel Walker. Asked after an event Wednesday at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in Macon about whether Biden won the 2020 vote, the GOP Senate frontrunner sidestepped.
“I do think there were problems, and I think everybody else thinks there were problems, and that’s the reason now everybody is so upset,” he said.
But on the day after the 2020 elections, as former president Donald Trump was already claiming the election was stolen from him, Walker suggested in a Tweet that the entire state of Georgia recast its votes.
“Instead of us fighting and going to court, why don’t we have Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin vote again? We can have it done within a week, and maintain our democracy.”
Another early and easy pick for Trump in Georgia was U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, who is running for secretary of state against incumbent Brad Raffensperger.
Trump has had it out for Raffensperger since the infamous phone call when he told Trump, when the then-president demanded that state officials “find” the 11,000 votes he needed to overturn the Georgia results: “Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
While Trump ran into roadblocks in Georgia, Hice met with White House officials to talk about ways to overturn the election results and he has supported Trump’s false claims ever since,
including in his effort to take over the state’s election systems.
“Nobody understands the disaster of the lack of election integrity like the people of Georgia and now is our hour to take it back,” Hice told Trump on stage at a rally in Perry last year.
Below those races, Republican voters will see John Gordon running for state attorney general against incumbent AG Chris Carr, despite questions over Gordon’s eligibility to run after only just renewing his law license.
While Carr refused to join a Texas lawsuit against Georgia’s election results, Gordon told a GOP meeting last week, “Stevie Wonder could see the fraud in 2020.”
Gordon called private donations to help administer the election “a criminal enterprise” and said his first act in office would be to “open an official investigation into 2020,” which the GBI has done multiple times.
Every other Trump pick on the GOP ballot has gone along with Trump’s conspiracies to one degree or another.
State Sen. Burt Jones, running for lieutenant governor, has said he just wants “a simple investigation”
and said the state’s Dominion voting machines, purchased by lawmakers just a year ago, need to be replaced.
As the head of the Georgia state Senate, Lt. Gov. Jones would call the shots on which election law proposals could come up for a vote and which senators would write the bills.
Trump has even endorsed Patrick Witt for the low-profile post of insurance commissioner after the former Trump agency staffer moved home to Georgia to volunteer for the Stop-the-Steal legal team.
Witt is challenging John King, a former police chief and major general in the Army Reserves whose only offense, if anything, seems to be getting appointed to the job by Kemp.
Trump made several picks in House races, including Vernon Jones, an original Stop-theStealer running in the 10th Congressional District. Jones spent the weeks and months after the election pushing Trump’s false claims, insisting, “No more [expletive]. It’s time to uncover that lie!”
Were Jones to go to Congress, he would join other Georgians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Andrew Clyde, with the
power to object to the certification of electoral votes, including Georgia’s, as Greene and Clyde did.
I spent a great deal of time last week talking to voters, including Democrats who had voted early in the Republican primary this year.
They were part of a massive, 300% increase in early voting over 2020 that has skewed heavily Republican.
They said they crossed over, not because they wanted to find the weakest opponent to run against in November, but because they wanted to find the strongest defense against another assault on the elections from Donald Trump in 2024.
They felt democracy itself was on the ballot.
In so many ways, they are right.
Donald Trump is using the Georgia elections to seek revenge against the Republicans who wouldn’t help him in 2020 and to pave a smoother path in 2024.
Your vote is your choice, but choosing someone who will protect that vote, even if they don’t like the result for their party, has to be a consideration in times like these. Democracy is on the ballot.