Former President Donald Trump can’t be feeling too peachy about the Peach State this morning.
Trump’s two biggest Republican foes crushed his handpicked opponents in Tuesday’s primary election, as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp sailed to victory over former Sen. David Perdue and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defeated Rep. Jody Hice in a surprisingly lopsided result.
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Trump has spent the last year and a half trashing Kemp and especially Raffensperger, blaming the pair for his 2020 loss in Georgia and claiming they’d been disloyal for refusing to help him try to overturn the result. He convinced Hice and Perdue to run against them, confident he’d be able to crush Kemp and Perdue for rejecting his half-baked coup plans.
The results show that just the GOP base won’t automatically support a Trump-backed candidate—and that Republicans can withstand an onslaught of attacks from the former president and survive.
Early in the contest, the conventional wisdom (and polling) suggested that Raffensperger faced an uphill battle, and that Kemp would have a tough contest on his hands.
But Kemp’s win was resounding: He leads Perdue by 74%-22% with most of the vote counted, winning every county in the state. He received 80,000 more votes, and won with a larger percentage of the vote than Trump-backed Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who was running against a field of underfunded nobodies and sailed to primary victory as well.
Raffensperger leads Hice 52%-33% with most of the vote counted, which means he not only dominated in a campaign that appeared to be close but also avoided a runoff by winning an outright majority of the vote.
Their wins come at Trump’s expense—and show that the former president is far from the surefire kingmaker he was before he left office.
Trump has had Raffensperger in his sights ever since the secretary of state rejected his call to “find” enough votes to swing the state to Trump in 2020, and has publicly railed against Kemp for meeting the bare minimum of his constitutional duties as governor by certifying the 2020 election.
Trump’s overall endorsement track record looks more dismal by the week. His endorsed candidate against Idaho Gov. Brad Little lost by a 20-point margin last week, and his chosen Pennsylvania Senate candidate, Dr. Mehmet Oz, is heading to a recount against businessman David McCormick after last week’s election—far from a resounding victory for Trump. North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn lost his primary last week too, after a last-minute Trump endorsement.
Trump’s first Senate endorsement of the 2022 election cycle secured a spot in a runoff election on Tuesday… but that came only after Trump unendorsed him. Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, who lost Trump’s support a few months ago, took second place in Alabama’s Senate primaries and will face former Senate staffer Katie Boyd Britt.
Trump’s string of embarrassing losses don’t mean that MAGAism is dead, however. Kemp has enjoyed enduring popularity with the GOP base because he fought hard against any COVID restrictions in the state, and passed a controversial law that restricted voting access.
Raffensperger also met the base halfway. While he consistently said Trump was lying about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, he endorsed Kemp’s voting law changes.
Perdue was so sure he was heading towards a loss that he stopped airing ads three weeks before the actual election, saving money but likely contributing to the huge margin.
Republican voters still like Trump. They’re just increasingly sick of hearing him whine about 2020. And that’s taking a toll on Trump’s preferred candidates—and weakening his headlock on the GOP.
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