Brad Raffensperger runs for Georgia governor and tries to defy Republicans who called him ‘repugnant’

Alpharetta, Georgia (CNN) — Brad Raffensperger generally avoids the explosive topic that made him famous.

As the state’s top election official, Raffensperger refused Donald Trump’s demand to “find” the votes needed to overturn the president’s 2020 loss in the Peach State. Now, as a candidate for the Republican nomination for Georgia governor, he prefers to talk about making state government leaner and lowering costs — even as Republicans either talk about their anger at him or just want him to go away.

Billionaire health care executive Rick Jackson kicked off his campaign last month with an ad that compared Raffensperger’s actions to those of Judas. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who served as a false Republican elector in 2020 and is running now with the president’s endorsement, has cast Raffensperger as a member of “Team Never Trump.”

Delegates to a state party convention last year approved a resolution that labeled him “repugnant” to the party brand and sought to bar him from seeking any office as a Republican.

“The Republican Party does not like Brad Raffensperger,” said Alex Johnson, chairman of the conservative Georgia Republican Assembly, which recently endorsed Jones. “That’s the one thing everyone is in agreement on.”

And as Trump demands election investigations, the FBI recently seized 2020 ballots from the Atlanta area, pushing the drama back into the spotlight just as the May 19 primary heats up.

Raffensperger, a soft-spoken businessman-turned-politician who survived Trump’s wrath to win reelection as secretary of state four years ago, still insists he has a viable path forward. How he fares will suggest not just the mood of the GOP in a critical swing state, but whether candidates who defy the president have a place in Trump’s Republican Party.

It’s hard to find Republicans who stood up to Trump on his false claims about elections and still have current positions in the GOP — much less who’ve secured promotions. Many have retired or lost primaries, and a few have switched parties, like former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who is running in this year’s Democratic primary for governor.

“I don’t know of a single Republican that actually believes the election was rigged in 2020, yet Donald Trump has not created the permission structure for them to actually say that out loud,” Duncan said in an interview with CNN.

So how can Raffensperger win?

“I just need to continue to be Brad,” he told CNN recently between campaign stops in suburban Atlanta. “People are looking for someone who has integrity, that will do the right thing, no matter what.”

A $5 million investment in his own bid

On the stump, the lanky 70-year-old leans into his biography as a math-loving engineer who built successful construction and manufacturing companies before entering politics in his 50s. He rose from a suburban city council seat to the state legislature and won statewide office for the first time in 2018. He’s now wrapping up his second term as secretary of state.

Raffensperger has put $5 million of his own money into the campaign so far. His team recently reserved more than $3 million in advertising that will start airing in April.

As Georgia governor, he argues, he would help deliver business-style service and efficiency to state government. Raffensperger also made public safety a priority. His eldest son, Brenton, died in 2018 of a fentanyl overdose, leaving behind a wife and children. Brenton, Raffensperger said, went through multiple bouts of sobriety and then drug use and sobriety again and served time in jail.

“The deepest loss any parent will ever have is when they lose a child,” he said softly during the interview.

His campaign is as low-key as his demeanor.

While his rivals bombarded the airwaves on a recent Tuesday, Raffensperger took his campaign pitch to the twice-monthly meeting of the Rotary Club of North Fulton.

As more than two dozen Rotarians lunched on salads, turkey sandwiches and tater tots inside Alpharetta’s Brimstone Restaurant and Tavern, Raffensperger talked up bread-and-butter issues. That included calling for a cap on soaring property taxes, the expansion of school choice options and pushing for a return to phonics to boost fourth-grade reading performance.

He barely mentioned elections, except to tout lower Election Day wait times and faster ballot tabulation. And he made a glancing — but positive — reference to Trump, praising the president for working to “reshore” manufacturing jobs from overseas. (In his interview with CNN, Raffensperger said he supports Trump and his policies.)

But the campaign appearance underscores the difficult balance Raffensperger is trying to strike.

After all, it was the public release of a recording of a phone call in which Trump implored Raffensperger to “find 11,780” votes he would need to claim victory in Georgia that catapulted Raffensperger into the national spotlight.

Raffensperger testified about his refusal to accede to Trump’s demands during a televised hearing of the January 6, 2021, committee. And he wrote a 2021 book, “Integrity Counts,” that chronicled the 2020 election drama and the threats he, his family and Georgia election workers endured.

Some went directly to the cell phone of his wife of 49 years, Tricia. Read one: “please pray. we plan for the death of you and your family every day. Im sorry.”

Raffensperger still handily beat former Georgia Rep. Jody Hice, his Trump-backed primary challenger, in 2022.

Years later, he’s reluctant to dwell on the drama of those elections as he tries to build a big enough coalition to survive the primary in May. Four years after his last race, the political landscape has shifted some.

For one thing, Trump has returned to the White House, more focused than ever on settling political scores.

“Most people have moved on,” Raffensperger said when asked about the lingering effects of 2020 on the race. “There’s a subset” of people who cling to the election fraud claims, he said.

“I try to be gentle about it, but they just don’t have the facts.”

The FBI’s recent seizure of 2020 ballots makes clear, however, that some people have not moved on. Present at Fulton County to see the execution of the search warrant was Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who has made relitigating election claims a priority.

Asked about the FBI’s seizure, Raffensperger responded mildly, saying, “I don’t see what they are going to get out of it.”

Does he have a path to the runoff?

All four major GOP candidates — Jackson, Jones, Raffensperger and Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr — recently visited a Baptist church in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta for a leadership roundtable organized by the Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition, an arm of Ralph Reed’s conservative network.

Despite the growing intensity of the battle to replace the term-limited GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, the event was free of acrimony. As Reed looked on from the audience, each candidate had equal time individually on the stage to talk about their lives and faith, reaffirm their opposition to abortion, voice support for Israel and Georgia’s Jewish population, and commit to cutting regulatory red tape.

In recent weeks, however, the GOP contest has turned into a big-spending brawl between Jackson and Jones that risks pushing both Raffensperger and Carr to the sidelines.

Jackson, the founder of a health-care staffing company, has spent more than $39 million on advertising ahead of the primary, according to AdImpact, which tracks political advertising. That’s a record for this point in a Georgia gubernatorial primary, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Jones’ camp has spent more than $13 million.

The attacks between the two have grown increasingly personal. Jones has tried to portray Jackson as disloyal to Trump, citing the billionaire’s past financial support for the campaigns of former Trump rivals for the presidency, including former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Jackson has called Jones “lazy” and sought to cast him as relying on his family’s fortune to prop up his campaign. Jackson has donated $1 million to a Trump-aligned super PAC, federal records show. He recently attended a dinner with Trump and other major donors at the president’s Mar-a-Lago private club in Florida, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Even as Jackson seeks to cultivate ties to the president, Trump has stuck by Jones, something the lieutenant governor eagerly noted at the Faith & Freedom gathering.

“I’m endorsed by President Trump, by the way, I don’t know if you all know that or not,” Jones quipped to scattered chuckles from the audience. “He’s not done it once, not twice but three times now.”

Raffensperger’s aides believe Jackson and Jones could split the MAGA-aligned vote, creating a path for him. Georgia law requires a candidate to receive more than 50% of the vote to win the primary election outright; otherwise, the top two vote-getters would compete in a June 16 runoff.

Charles Bullock, a veteran political scientist at the University of Georgia, said that’s possible. “There could be some share of the voters that say, ‘I don’t want to vote for either Jackson or Jones. They both sound like scoundrels, so Raffensperger sounds like the best bet.’”

Jay Morgan, a former executive director of the Georgia Republican Party who now runs a public affairs firm, said Raffensperger faces a tough path. A decent share of the state’s Republican electorate likely will take its cue from Trump, even if voters grow weary of the Jackson-Jones infighting, he said. And Raffensperger, he said, “is clearly the guy Trump would least like to see on the ballot.”

In interviews, some voters said they were open to Raffensperger’s ideas but not yet sold on his candidacy.

“Let’s be frank, Raffensperger is the most hated,” said Lisa Babbage, who serves as first vice chair of the Georgia Black Republican Council and listened to all four candidates at the Faith & Freedom event. “But when he told the story about his son, I couldn’t help but connect to that and truly believe that he cares.”

CNN’s David Wright contributed reporting.

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