Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was projected as the winner of the race over Democratic challenger Bee Nguyen, according to The Associated Press.
Primaried in May by the Trump-supported Jody Hice, Raffensperger won by 200,000 votes with a 52 to 34 margin of victory. He would have won without Democratic support, but the 75,000 votes from Democrats who crossed party lines in Georgia’s open primary to vote for him allowed him to avoid a runoff.
In a controversial move this primary cycle, Democratic-aligned PACs backed Trump-supported candidates under the theory that they would prove easier for a Democrat to beat in November.
That wasn’t the case with Raffensperger. Democrats voted partly to protect themselves from a Trump-backed Republican they deemed more extreme but also to reward Raffensperger for his performance at a critical time.
That complicated matters for Nguyen. The child of immigrants who escaped Vietnam on a boat, Nguyen, a state representative, had to nuance her attacks on her opponent.
“Some folks believe my opponent is a hero,” she told Forsyth County Democrats in September. “And I admit I breathed a sigh of relief when he did not find an extra 11,780 votes. But should the bar for an elected official be that low?”
“In the words of Stacey Abrams, ‘Not committing treason does not make you a hero.’”
But Raffensperger was able to win both a primary against a Trump-supported candidate and a general election against Nguyen.
Elected to the post in 2018, he had faced enormous pressure before, during, and after the 2020 election. President Donald Trump lost Georgia and its critical electoral votes—and in an hourlong recorded telephone call on Jan. 2, 2021, he asked Raffensperger “to find 11,780 votes”—the margin he lost by—which he implied should be easy to find amid numerous irregularities and claims of voter fraud in the state. That call would become part of the evidence for Trump’s second impeachment and eventual exoneration.
After 2020, Raffensperger spoke in public often to civic groups telling disgruntled Republicans that the election wasn’t rigged and that his office had followed the law. In June, he testified in Washington before the House’s committee exploring the Jan. 6, 2021, disturbance at the Capitol.
Nguyen was often the most prominent speaker at Democratic rallies after Abrams, who rose to prominence with her narrow defeat to Brian Kemp in 2018 and her protests of his aggressive purging of the state’s voter rolls while Secretary of State.
Nguyen and Abrams said the subsequent passage of Georgia’s Election Integrity Act on Raffensperger’s watch constituted “Jim Crow 2.0.” The law tightened up on absentee ballots, and the widespread usage of untended dropboxes that critics charged encouraged election fraud.
“The Republicans and Mr. Raffensperger have made it harder for Georgians to vote,” Nguyen said at her only debate with him on Oct. 18 in Atlanta.
Abrams and most Democratic candidates in Georgia ran hard on the “voter suppression” plank. But even as Nguyen spoke at the debate, Georgians were setting records in early voting, which began the previous day. Raffensperger, Kemp, and other Republicans could cite that as proof that the reforms made it “easy to vote and hard to cheat.”
