With all of the big wins MAGA realized over the past month, this one may have escaped your attention. Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a squishy Republican, saw his campaign for governor go down in flames on May 19, another primary victim of President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
Before we get to the major gloating required at a moment like this, let’s do some housekeeping and cover the most recent developments.
As our editor and Georgia native Chris Queen reported on election night before the results were finalized, “In the governor’s race, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones (R-Ga.) is vying against a slew of competitors, led by pretend-conservative businessman Rick Jackson, who keeps trying to portray himself as a Trumpian candidate even though President Donald Trump endorsed Jones. The rest of the GOP field includes Attorney General Chris Carr and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.”
Now, let’s go to Politico for the breakdown: “Billionaire Rick Jackson and Lt. Gov. Burt Jones advanced to a runoff election for the GOP nomination for Georgia governor — locking out Raffensperger, who rose to prominence defending Georgia’s 2020 election results but struggled to gain traction among his party’s increasingly MAGA base.”
Politico reported that Jones took 38.4%, while Jackson realized 32.5% of the vote, both making the cut for a runoff. Raffensperger won only 15% of the Republican vote, taking third and seeing an end to his gubernatorial ambitions.
If your memory is sketchy, it’s all about to come back to you. Raffensperger is the one who had that phone call with President Trump in January 2021 that was used as a basis to impeach Trump on his way out the door after his first term.
I normally don’t like to quote the New York Times, but when you see how much it loved Raffensperger, you can feel the righteousness in his defeat.
Mr. Raffensperger’s steadfastness in the face of Mr. Trump’s arm-twisting – including a now-infamous January 2021 phone call in which the president told Mr. Raffensperger to ‘find’ enough votes for him to win – transformed the mild-mannered politician into a darling of the liberals and anti-Trump conservatives around the country. But Georgia’s Republican voters have for years considered Mr. Raffensperger a villain who enabled Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss, the Times reported.
Hey, if the shoe fits.
Raffensperger found himself at the center of all the chaos the Democrats created around the 2020 presidential election. As Georgia's secretary of state, he was in charge of statewide election operations, which were controversial in their own right. Do you remember all the “miscommunication” that happened in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena on Nov. 3, 2020?
That was the Fulton County ballot-counting site, where late at night, some observers and the media were led to believe that counting had been halted. Meanwhile, a small group of ballot counters continued to count ballots that had been in boxes under tables in the facility. Here’s what that looked like.
Georgia law requires ballot counting to be open to the public, press, and party observers – not conducted in a half‑empty arena after everyone is told to go home.
— Cause of America (@CauseAmerica) May 19, 2026
Yet in the now‑infamous State Farm Arena footage, we see workers restart counting once observers are gone, and… pic.twitter.com/gY23VQ4GHp
Around 10:30 p.m., staff in the facility started to pack up, assuming counting would pause for the night and pick up again the next morning. We’re now told that it had nothing to do with reports of a water leak in the building. If that’s the case, 10:30 is awfully early to stop counting ballots in a hotly contested presidential race.
So Republican observers, reporters, and others left the building after they were told work was winding down. Later news reports said that Georgia investigators said poll monitors were not “officially” told to leave, and if they were credentialed, they could have remained. I’m sorry, but this still gets me sick to think about it.
So after the large group left the building, some election supervisors decided to continue processing ballots, with fewer press and fewer or no Republican observers around. Reports are that they continued scanning ballots until 1 a.m. After an investigation of all of this, conducted by Raffensperger’s office, it was determined that there was no wrongdoing.
In the end, Joe Biden won the state of Georgia by the narrowest of margins – 11,779 votes.
And so, when Trump talked to Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, by phone, he allegedly asked Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes,” which the Democrats claimed was an attempt to cheat in the election. Republicans said it was Trump’s characteristic sarcasm, focusing on how Biden could campaign from his basement, and after so much chaos that favored the Biden campaign, he’d win the state, which was key to winning the election. Others said that in the context of post-election audits and recounts, such phrasing was common on both sides of a given race.
Raffensperger certified the election in favor of Biden. His staff had recorded that call with Trump, and somehow the audio recording found its way to a number of media outlets, including the Washington Post. Go figure.
On Jan. 13, 2021, Trump was impeached for the second time, reportedly over January 6. That said, Democrats in the House used the call as evidence of an alleged effort to overturn the 2020 election. The article of impeachment specifically noted that call with Raffensperger.
As we know now, the call with Raffensperger came up time and again as the Democrats tried to bury Trump permanently from public life. Weeks after the election, Raffensperger penned an op-ed in USA Today that provided his alternate view of reality.
By all accounts, Georgia had a wildly successful and smooth election. We finally defeated voting lines and put behind us Fulton County’s now notorious reputation for disastrous elections. This should be something for Georgians to celebrate, whether their favored presidential candidate won or lost. For those wondering, mine lost — my family voted for him, donated to him and are now being thrown under the bus by him, Raffensperger wrote.
Trump did not forget. He used the shenanigans from 2020 to drive him, and we now know that he didn’t waste a minute from 2020 to 2024 to plan his comeback, and more importantly, his program to rid the country and the party of people who’ve worked against him and the MAGA movement. Raffensperger was high on that list. And now it happened.
The New York Times, when reporting on Raffensperger’s latest defeat, quoted one of the country’s most obnoxious RINOs, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who saluted Raffensperger for trying to put the final nail in Trump’s political coffin back in 2021.
“You’ve proven to be a public servant, not a party servant,” Schwarzenegger said as he gave Raffensperger the “Democracy Action Hero” award. Well, if it’s any consolation for the newly retired Raffensperger, if you’re a leftist, everyone gets a trophy. Hey Brad, enjoy yours in your well-earned retirement.
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