Soon after the 2020 presidential race, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, was given a “Democracy Action Hero” award by Arnold Schwarzenegger for standing up to President Trump’s efforts to pressure him into overturning the election results.
“You’ve proven to be a public servant, not a party servant,” Mr. Schwarzenegger, the former California governor and Hollywood star, told Mr. Raffensperger as he bestowed the honor.
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 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.
That, more than anything, explains why Mr. Raffensperger was soundly defeated on Tuesday in the Republican primary for Georgia governor. His third-place finish brings to a close, for now, a turbulent political career that saw prominent outsiders laud him as a “profile in courage,” even as he infuriated Mr. Trump’s base, whose support he needed to stay in the political game.
Mr. Raffensperger, 71, a longtime conservative, was careful not to overtly criticize Mr. Trump during his run for governor. But it mattered little, as Mr. Raffensperger finished behind two solidly pro-Trump candidates, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Rick Jackson, a billionaire health care executive.
Mr. Raffensperger’s loss adds to a growing number of Republicans who have faced a political reckoning for crossing Mr. Trump during his 10-year reign over Republican politics. It also underscores the still-powerful thrum of the 2020 election and its aftermath. One of Mr. Jackson’s first ads called Mr. Raffensperger “Judas.” That echoed Mr. Trump’s previous line of attack, in which he called Mr. Raffensperger an “enemy of the people” for failing to act on unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud.
Charles S. Bullock III, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, noted that this year, Mr. Trump largely avoided direct attacks on Mr. Raffensperger, though he endorsed Mr. Jones, an election denier.
“Still, for MAGA voters, they would remember, probably, Trump’s criticism,” Mr. Bullock said. “It puts a chunk of the Republican primary electorate out of bounds for Raffensperger.”
On election night, Charles Lutin, a 73-year-old retired doctor, was one of about two dozen supporters at the Raffensperger campaign’s watch party.
A lifelong Republican, Mr. Lutin said Mr. Raffensperger was one of the few remaining politicians he could trust.
“Some in our party are still strong enough and have enough guts,” Mr. Lutin said, “to stand up for reality and stand up against bologna.”
The candidate came out to speak on Tuesday night, hugging his wife, Tricia, at the podium. “Our message came up short, and we don’t dwell on it, we just kind of move on,” he said.
On this evening, he told supporters, the message that won was one of grievance, largely driven by Mr. Trump: “Some people were living back about six years ago, talking about 2020.”
Mr. Raffensperger, a civil engineer and former state House member, had built a conservative record. Running for secretary of state in 2018, he won on a promise “to make sure that only American citizens are voting in our elections,” even though there was no evidence that a significant number of noncitizens were doing so. Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Raffensperger that year.
Then came 2020. Few politicians, other than Mr. Trump himself, have been as defined by their actions then as Mr. Raffensperger, who, as secretary of state, was charged with overseeing Georgia elections.
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After a recording of Mr. Trump’s January 2021 phone call was leaked, the entire nation had a chance to hear Mr. Raffensperger’s calm, statistical refutation of Mr. Trump’s entreaties to “find” him enough votes to reverse his loss in Georgia.
Along with the bouquets came brickbats. From the moment audits confirmed Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia, Mr. Raffensperger, his staff and family faced relentless harassment and death threats. Members of a far-right militia group were spotted outside his house.
Earlier this month, Mr. Raffensperger received a “manifesto” deemed a “credible threat on his life.” The next day, a suspicious object disrupted a campaign event in Macon, campaign officials said.
Through the turmoil, Mr. Raffensperger did not put on “Never Trump” regalia. He was a vocal supporter of adding new voting restrictions in 2021, even if it meant ceding some of his authority over the state electoral process.
He tried to craft a political persona of principled conservatism. He published a book, “Integrity Counts,” in November 2021, and headed into a 2022 re-election campaign against a Trump-backed challenger, Jody Hice, in the primary.
Mr. Hice, a Freedom Caucus member leaving a safe House seat, made Mr. Trump’s 2020 election denialism central to his campaign.
He saw some early fund-raising success, but suffered from poor name recognition. And though Mr. Raffensperger never wavered in his defense of the 2020 election and Georgia’s election process, he routinely spoke of wanting to investigate noncitizens on the voter rolls, despite a lack of evidence that they existed in meaningful numbers.
Mr. Raffensperger surprised many by winning the primary by nearly 20 percentage points and avoiding a runoff.
Some of Mr. Trump’s allies claimed that Mr. Raffensperger was buoyed by Democrats crossing over to vote in the Republican primary, but data suggested that his win came from unpredictable swing voters.
Mr. Raffensperger’s decision to run for governor was unsurprising. The current governor, Brian Kemp, had used the secretary of state’s office as a springboard to the governor’s mansion. (Mr. Kemp, who also pushed back against Mr. Trump’s accusations of voter fraud, is leaving office because of term limits.)
But it was a crowded primary, and Chris Carr, the state attorney general, appealed to a very similar universe of voters. Mr. Jackson’s wealth allowed him to blanket the airwaves with $81 million in ads, according to AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm. Mr. Raffensperger spent just $4.5 million on ads.
Mr. Raffensperger, who had built a successful steel company, sought to lean into this aspect of his biography. Campaign news releases referred to him as a “Christian conservative businessman.” On the trail, he focused on tax reform and job creation. His campaign website promised that he would “take on the woke left.”
But he struggled to outrun the suspicion of some Republican voters, however unfounded, that he had given his blessing to an outcome that they believed was compromised.
President Trump stoked that suspicion, directing federal agencies to investigate the 2020 election. In January, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, using an affidavit that relied on some already debunked conspiracy theories, raided a warehouse outside Atlanta and seized more than 600 boxes of material from that election.
Until the end, Mr. Raffensperger’s rivals figured that he was a dog well worth kicking. In recent days, a number of them, including Lieutenant Governor Jones, had begun demanding that observers gain access to the state’s emergency operations center, where the secretary of state’s staff monitors potential threats and other problems on Election Day.
Mr. Raffensperger said there was no reason to let them in. He noted that votes were not counted in the center, but rather in Georgia’s 159 counties, under the auspices of local elections officials.
On Election Day, a judge ruled in favor of Mr. Raffensperger. He, in turn, denounced the criticism as “political theater.” Soon enough, though, Republican voters forced his exit from the stage.
Johnny Kauffman contributed reporting.
Richard Fausset, a Times reporter based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.
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