A day of reckoning in Georgia [Updated]

Two of Donald Trump’s biggest Republican targets in all of America — perhaps his biggest two — are up for re-nomination today in Georgia. Gov. Brian Kemp faces former Senator David Perdue. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger faces U.S. Rep. Jody Hice.

Trump thinks he won the state of Georgia in 2020,. He complains bitterly that neither Kemp nor Raffensperger did enough to overturn the vote count to the contrary. In fact, he says they did nothing.

These races present an excellent test of Trump’s influence. Unlike in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the main opponents of the candidates Trump has endorsed aren’t also singing from the Trump hymn book. And unlike in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the winner must gain a majority of the votes, if not in the initial primary than in a runoff.

Kemp appears to be well ahead of Perdue. My Georgia source, who has correctly predicted tight race after tight race in that state, tells me that the governor will avoid a runoff with around 55 percent of the vote.

Raffensperger’s race is tighter. He is heading to a runoff.

My source tends to think Hice will win the runoff. However, he adds that “one year ago I thought Brad was a dead man walking and couldn’t make a runoff.”

My source was not alone. According to the Washington Post, “few if any strategists in Georgia said Raffensperger could survive a Republican primary.” Not after reports of his hour-long phone conversation with Trump in which he steadfastly resisted the president’s demand that he pursue claims of election fraud.

How has Raffensperger upset these expectations? The Washington Post suggests he’s done it through cynicism.

The headline to its story is “Brad Raffensperger stood up to Trump. Now he’s courting Trump’s base.” But he’s not courting it by embracing Trump’s claim that he was robbed — the former president’s litmus.

The Post complains that, in a speech to the local Rotary Club in Savannah, Raffensperger

ticked through the “rumor whack-a-mole” of fraud allegations that had surfaced in Georgia and explained why they were false.

But in the next breath, the state’s top election official offered Trump voters concerned that elections could be compromised reasons to vote for him in Tuesday’s hotly contested primary: He supported legislation to tighten up the security around balloting — despite resistance from voting rights groups — and has made cracking down on noncitizen voting the No. 1 issue of his campaign. . .

The Post calls this “pragmatism.” I call it common sense.

The following two statements can both be true: (1) the Georgia election wasn’t stolen from Trump and (2) additional safeguards are needed to minimize voting fraud in Georgia and elsewhere.

The Post, like the left in general, has a strong interest in merging the two propositions. It hopes that skepticism about Trump’s voting fraud claims, and fatigue with them, will take the broader issue of election integrity off the table.

I doubt this will happen. The public can easily distinguish between Trump’s particular grievances and concerns about voter fraud in general.

The other big story out of Georgia is that voters are turning out in record numbers. Early voting was up 180 percent compared to the same point in the 2018 primary election and 149 percent over the same point in 2020.

The numbers have even significantly outpaced those posted during the 2020 general election. In that election, state officials encouraged early and mail-in voting to decrease crowding during the pandemic.

Thus, claims that the election security law enacted last year in Georgia constituted voter suppression were false. Joe Biden’s statement that the law harked back to the era of "Jim Crow" was criminally false.

The Washington Post’s article about Raffensperger, who implemented the election security law, mentions the record amount of early voting only in passing at the end of the story. It fails to mention the denunciations of that law.

This isn’t surprising inasmuch as the Post trumpeted some of the shrillest such denunciations. For example, the Post’s Greg Sargent called the law “vile.” He characterized it as a “shockingly blatant effort” to “ensure” that the high voter turnout of 2020 “never happens again.” And, of course, he claimed that African-Americans were the target of the “voter suppression.’

Where do Georgia Republican officials go to get their apology for these defamatory assertions? They won’t get it from the Washington Post, but that shouldn’t concern them if they are vindicated by the people who count — the voters of Georgia.

UPDATE: My source also says to keep an eye on the congressional race in Georgia’s Sixth District between Rich McCormick and Jake Evans. He writes:

McCormick seemed headed to victory without a runoff until a few weeks ago when Trump endorsed Evans. McCormick’s team hopes they can still win it clean tonight, but I think this one is heading to a runoff.