Politically speaking, no single person in recent history has cost the Georgia Republican Party more than Donald Trump.
After losing the state in 2020 (along with the presidency), Trump's grousing over the supposedly "stolen" election was followed by a pair of runoff losses for two Republican senators, handing control of the U.S. Senate to Democrats. Trump followed up in 2022 by fueling an intraparty feud in an effort to oust Georgia's popular incumbent governor, Brian Kemp, who ignored Trump's election lies and certified the state's 2020 results. Trump's retaliation effort failed, but Trump didn't stop there: He also handpicked the verbally challenged, violence-prone former footballer Herschel Walker to reclaim one of the Senate seats he helped gift to Democrats the previous cycle. Walker fumbled and Democrats actually picked up a Senate seat in '22 cycle rather than forfeiting control of the upper chamber.
Trump's disastrous meddling in the Peach State has left the Republican Party in tatters. Earlier this year, Kemp told a gathering of high-dollar donors, “[W]e can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future." Kemp followed up in June by skipping the state's GOP convention where Trump was the headliner.
This week's racketeering indictment of Trump and 18 of his cronies for trying to overturn Georgia's election has only deepened the rift between Republican officials leading the state government and the state's activist grassroots controlling the party.
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After Trump sent out a statement promising to release a "Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT" proving 2020 election fraud in the state, Kemp subtweeted the claim, writing, "The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward - under oath - and prove anything in a court of law."
Kemp added, "The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that must be our focus."
Kemp's tweet now has nearly 15 million views. Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—who fielded Trump's now-infamous order to "find" 11,780 votes after Trump lost by one fewer vote than that—and former GOP Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan have also pushed back this week against Trump's false claims.
Now free from the constraints of public office, Duncan has practically been a one-man wrecking ball knocking down Trump's lies. He testified to the grand jury earlier this week, gave gobs of interviews, and penned a Washington Post op-ed.
“In the aftermath of the 2020 election, I earned Trump’s wrath for refusing to go along with his cockamamie schemes to overturn the election he lost because of his own lack of effort,” Duncan wrote.
In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Greg Bluestein, Duncan called Trump "the worst candidate ever, in the history of the party."
On CNN, Duncan said Trump "sucked the soul" from the Republican Party.
"He's taken everything from us, and it is our turn to take it back," Duncan said, "but if we make this about the three-ring circus of Donald Trump, we will lose, lose, and lose again.”
That's a healthy week of telling Trump to pound sand.
But more to the point, all of this is a very long way of saying Trump has shredded the Georgia GOP, turning Republican against Republican and upending the coalition of voters who dependably voted Republican for decades until Trump blew his reelection in 2020.
If Trump is ultimately the 2024 Republican nominee, he will be an incredibly weak and divisive candidate in the state, which is damn close to being a must-get if he intends to retake control of the White House.
If a Republican nominee were to lose Georgia again, for instance, they would need to take some combination of Arizona, Wisconsin, and either Michigan or Pennsylvania to reach 270 in the electoral college. And that assumes Republicans keep every other state and jurisdiction they won in 2020.
Not only did Trump lose every one of the aforementioned states in 2020, Democrats control the governor's mansion in every one of them, which simply makes the prospects of executing such a sweep even harder than in 2020.
In short, Trump's got a Georgia problem and, by extension, so does the Republican Party.