It’s almost impossible to overstate how bad Georgia was for Donald Trump.
There was Gov. Brain Kemp’s thrashing of David Perdue, the former senator recruited by Trump to run against him. Then there was Rep. Jody Hice, the Trump-backed candidate for secretary of state who ran so far behind incumbent Brad Raffensperger that he failed even to force Raffensperger into a runoff.
It got even uglier for Trump further down the ballot. Trump’s pick for attorney general, John Gordon, got walloped by incumbent Chris Carr, with roughly 500,000 votes separating the two. Trump’s preferred candidate for insurance commissioner, Patrick Witt, lost by a similar margin. And that’s to say nothing of two Trump-backed House candidates, Vernon Jones and Jake Evans, who were running second in their respective primaries.
Trump was not without victories — most significantly Herschel Walker in the U.S. Senate primary. But of all the states that have held primaries so far, Trump arguably had more skin in the game in Georgia than anywhere else, after losing the state in 2020 and then watching the U.S. Senate fall to Democrats there the following year.
On Tuesday, Georgia repudiated Trump once again. For the diminished, establishment wing of the Republican Party, it was proof of life.
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