She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: It was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers. Donald Trump would lose the election - of this she was sure - but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under six points. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.Ĭonway, the campaign’s manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood, considering she was about to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. Instead, Kemp and Raffensperger showed that, in Georgia at least, the emperor had no clothes.On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Trump wanted to beat Kemp and Raffensperger to show what happens to anyone who crossed him in the 2020 election. Trump can spin what happened in Georgia on Tuesday any way he wants. “A great new Senatorial Candidate, and others, in Georgia.” (Trump endorsed Republican Herschel Walker in the Senate race, and the former football star cruised to a primary victory.) “A very big and successful evening of political Endorsements,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. Trump seemed, unsurprisingly, to not grasp the import of what happened in Georgia. GOP voters in Georgia sent a very clear message on Tuesday: They don’t want to spend another second talking about the 2020 election. The party not only lost the presidential race in 2020, but lost two Senate seats in early 2021 – defeats that cost Republicans control of the chamber. Republican voters may well have agreed with the challengers on the nature of the 2020 election, but it wasn’t a voting issue.ģ) Voters wanted to move on: It’s been a rough two years for Republicans in Georgia. That turned out to not be enough – or even close to enough. In the secretary of state race, Hice performed relatively well in his own congressional district, but ran well behind Raffensperger in the rest of the state.Ģ) The “big lie” isn’t enough: Neither Perdue nor Hice had any issues on which to run against Kemp and Raffensperger other than the notion that the incumbents hadn’t done enough to fight the false idea that the election in Georgia had been stolen from Trump. Kemp, on the other hand, smartly used his powers of incumbency to reward friends and punish those who crossed him to support Perdue. While Perdue had been elected statewide, he was out of office. And one of the most dependable rules in the business is that incumbents are hard to knock off. While Trump has changed a lot of the longtime rules governing politics, he hasn’t changed all of them. While a Trump endorsement isn’t a guarantor of victory, he has, without doubt, helped candidates in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania already this primary season.Ī few reasons for Trump’s defeats on Tuesday jump to mind:ġ) It’s hard to beat incumbents. So, what happened? After all, Trump’s endorsement has, generally speaking, been a boon to candidates who have received it. THE POINT - NOW ON YOUTUBE! In each episode of his weekly YouTube show, Chris Cillizza will delve a little deeper into the surreal world of politics. It’s impossible to look at those results – and the attention, money and time that Trump dedicated to the state – and see anything other than an utter political disaster for the former President. (And in Georgia’s Republican primary for attorney general, the Trump-endorsed candidate lost with just 26% of the vote.) Jody Hice 52% to 33% in the secretary of state primary, avoiding an expected June runoff. David Perdue by 52 – not a typo – points in the gubernatorial primary. Trump personally recruited primary challengers to both men and loudly and repeatedly proclaimed that he would help defeat them.

Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Since the 2020 election, the former President has been fixated on his loss in the state and two Republican politicians who he blamed for that defeat: Gov. There’s no two ways of analyzing what happened Tuesday in Georgia: Donald Trump lost.

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