Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who defied pressure from President Trump to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss there in 2020, announced on Wednesday that he was running for governor.
Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican in his second term as secretary of state, is the latest high-profile candidate to enter the 2026 race to replace Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican prevented by term limits from seeking re-election. He will join a primary field that already includes Burt Jones, the state’s lieutenant governor, and Chris Carr, its attorney general.
Mr. Raffensperger, a mild-mannered civil engineer, gained national prominence when he stood up to Mr. Trump after the 2020 election and defended its integrity despite relentless attacks from the president and his supporters. Nearly five years later, he is seeking the Republican nomination with Mr. Trump back in power, with a firm grip on the party in Georgia and nationally.
“I’m a conservative Republican, and I’m prepared to make the tough decisions,” Mr. Raffensperger said in an announcement video. “I follow the law and the Constitution, and I’ll always do the right thing for Georgia no matter what.”
Mr. Raffensperger also called for cutting taxes, adding restrictions on access to gender transition care for minors, and expanding treatment for drug addiction, a proposal that emerged from the torment his family experienced after his son’s death from a fentanyl overdose in 2018.
He also boasted of his support for state laws tightening access to voting, which were assailed by Democrats and voting rights groups.
Still, Mr. Raffensperger’s entrance in the race is the latest reminder of how the turmoil of the 2020 election continues to reverberate in Georgia and will most likely loom over the contest next year.
Geoff Duncan, who was the Republican lieutenant governor in 2020, announced this week that he, too, was running, but as a Democrat, the result of a political evolution brought about by his resistance to Mr. Trump and the alienation from the Republican Party that followed.
Mr. Duncan is competing for the Democratic nomination against Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta; Jason Esteves, who recently resigned from the State Senate; and Michael Thurmond, the former chief executive of DeKalb County, in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. beat Mr. Trump by nearly 12,000 votes in Georgia, the first time a Democrat had won the state in a presidential election in almost 30 years.
Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept that loss and his efforts to change the outcome led to a criminal investigation; a sprawling racketeering case in which Mr. Trump and a number of his allies were charged; and deep divisions within Georgia’s Republican Party.
In 2020, Mr. Raffensperger was less than two years into his first term as secretary of state. He had owned and operated a construction company, making him a multimillionaire before entering politics. He first served on the City Council in Johns Creek, an Atlanta suburb, and then in the State House of Representatives.
Soon after the election, Mr. Trump urged him to recalculate the vote count and warned that failing to do so could have legal repercussions for Mr. Raffensperger and his staff.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Mr. Trump told him in a recorded phone call.
He added: “The people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
During the call, Mr. Trump also repeated debunked claims of shredded ballots and voting machines that had been tampered with.
Mr. Raffensperger was polite but firm: He stood by the election results and insisted Mr. Trump and his allies were operating off false information. “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong,” he said.
The phone call was part of the foundation for the indictment against Mr. Trump, which was once considered a serious legal threat.
But the case became jeopardized after Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, was disqualified from the case late last year because of her romantic relationship with the lawyer she hired to help lead the prosecution. The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take up her appeal of a lower court’s decision to remove her from the case.
Lt. Gov. Jones, then a state lawmaker, was one of 16 Republicans who acted as fake electors for Mr. Trump in a bid to overturn the outcome in Georgia and nationally. A special prosecutor decided last year against indicting him for his role. He was elected lieutenant governor in 2022, and recently received Mr. Trump’s endorsement in the governor’s race.
Like Mr. Raffensperger, Mr. Carr has sought to balance his political support of Mr. Trump with his refusal to accept Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud. And also like Mr. Raffensperger, he has still incurred the wrath of Mr. Trump and his other supporters.
Yet even as Mr. Trump unleashed his fury on the Georgia Republicans he deemed insufficiently loyal, voters in the state rewarded them — or at least did not punish them — for their defiance.
Mr. Trump backed primary challengers against Mr. Raffensperger, Mr. Kemp and Mr. Carr. Mr. Raffensperger’s opponent was Jody Hice, a Republican congressman who supported overturning the election. “Unlike the current Georgia secretary of state, Jody leads out front with integrity,” Mr. Trump said in his endorsement.
Mr. Raffensperger, like the other incumbents, fended off the challenge. His campaign announcement on Wednesday echoed his victory speech in 2022, in which he said, “Not buckling under the pressure is what the people want.”
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
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