Georgians will now have a clear choice in November between a ticket that pushes stolen-election claims and one that stands up to them.
Georgians will now have a clear choice in November between a ticket that pushes stolen-election claims and one that stands up to them.
T he news out of Georgia last week was monumental, and many took notice. Governor Brian Kemp beat his Trump-backed primary opponent by 50 points and will now proceed to the general election as he seeks another term. After many counted him out, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger fought back to win his primary against another Trump-backed challenger by nearly 20 points and avoid a runoff.
While much of the coverage of the victories by Kemp, Raffensperger, and Attorney General Chris Carr has focused on what they mean for the Republican Party, what they mean for the general election deserves more attention: Georgia’s Democrats will finally have to answer for their own stolen-election claims.
Kemp, Raffensperger, and Carr all stood up to the baseless stolen-election claims pushed by Trump and his supporters. Raffensperger took the brunt of the heat and refused to back down, touring the state and appearing on even the most Trump-friendly media outlets time and time again to answer questions. He launched around 250 investigations related to the 2020 elections, around 130 of which dealt with the November general election specifically, but never found enough evidence to put in doubt the results of the presidential race. In a now-famous phone call, Raffensperger stood up to Trump himself in defense of Georgia’s elections.
Kemp has likewise repeatedly pushed back against allegations that the November 2020 election was stolen, and Carr fought for the integrity of the vote in the courts, working to beat back the false claims of Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and other Trump-affiliated figures.
Indeed, instead of bowing to pressure and leaning into Trump’s stolen-election claims, or even letting them fester unrefuted, Raffensperger, Kemp, and Carr stood up for Georgia’s elections.
On the other side of the aisle, Georgia’s Democratic ticket will be led in November 2022 by Stacey Abrams, who has become a national name by making stolen-election claims of her own.
In November 2018, Abrams refused to concede to Kemp after he defeated her in the state’s gubernatorial election, though her margin of defeat would end up being four times as large as Trump’s was in 2020. She claimed thousands of votes were suppressed and immediately filed a since-rejected lawsuit against Georgia’s election system. She later launched Fair Fight Action, which raised more than $66 million in the 2019–2020 election cycle in part through repeating her stolen-election claims. In the years since her defeat, she has used some of the very same language to cast doubt on the results of her 2018 gubernatorial bid that Trump used to question the results of his 2020 presidential bid.
The 2020 election and its aftermath notwithstanding, Abrams has still refused to concede that she lost in 2018, parroting the stolen-election claims she and Trump have made for years.
The top vote-getter in the Democratic primary for Georgia secretary of state, Bee Nguyen, recently received Abrams’s endorsement in the runoff. In December 2018, Nguyen shared on Twitter an article that claimed that because of “Georgia’s outdated, hackable voting machines,” and “merciless purging and blocking of minority voters . . . Georgia voters will never know who veritably won the [2018] gubernatorial and seventh congressional district races.”
The 2022 Democratic nominee for attorney general, Jen Jordan, likewise spread election disinformation in 2018, sharing allegations that Kemp would “cheat” to beat Abrams ahead of the vote.
Abrams has also been at the forefront of pushing lies about Georgia’s new election law, the Election Integrity Act of 2021. She called it “Jim Crow 2.0” and “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” Nguyen and Jordan pushed the same claims.
These claims also proved false, as Republicans including Kemp, Raffensperger, and Carr had said from the start they would. Record turnout in Georgia’s primary revealed the voter-suppression narrative for the lie that it was. Early-voting turnout surged to more than double both the 2018 and 2020 primary-election turnouts in Georgia — and that surge extended to the very minority voters whom Abrams and her allies had claimed would be disenfranchised by the law.
At the end of it all, even the Washington Post acknowledged that Georgia’s record turnout figures were “undercutting predictions” by Democrats that the Election Integrity Act would suppress the vote.
The upshot of all this is that Georgians will have a clear choice in November between a ticket that pushes false stolen-election claims and one that stands up to them. After years of Democratic attempts to use Trump’s claims about 2020 as evidence that the Republican Party as a whole was undermining democracy, it will be Democrats who serve as the standard-bearers of election disinformation in Georgia this fall. With Abrams at the top of the ticket and stolen-election conspiracy theorists representing Democrats in the down-ballot races, Georgia Republicans will be the clear choice for those who support honest elections and the fight to keep American democracy strong.