President Trump vowed to return to Georgia in a year and a half to campaign against Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when the pair of Republicans are up for reelection.
“There’s no place like a Trump rally, but … this is a Kelly rally and a David rally. I wouldn’t do it unless I loved them both,” Trump said on the eve of the Georgia senate runoff elections. “But I’m going to be here in a year and a half, and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state.”
.@realDonaldTrump: “There’s no place like a Trump rally but…this is a Kelly rally & a David rally. I wouldn’t do it unless I loved them both.
But I’m going to be here in a year and a half and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor & your crazy secretary of state.” pic.twitter.com/KbPTI8KP63
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) January 5, 2021
Despite Kemp and Raffensperger both being members of the Republican Party, the two Georgia officials have had rocky relationships with the president, after Trump accused them of not doing enough to investigate allegations of voting irregularities and fraud in the state.
At issue was Georgia’s Republican leadership agreeing to a consent decree that altered the state’s signature verification process, which Trump claimed “makes it impossible to check & match signatures on ballots.”
The settlement, reached in March, was the result of a Georgia Democratic Party lawsuit that argued that people of minorities had their ballots rejected more frequently than white voters.
President-elect Joe Biden narrowly won the state, setting off a string of lawsuits with accusations of fraud.
But none of those lawsuits have been successful, prompting a phone call between Trump and Raffensperger in which Trump demanded the secretary of state do more to investigate claims of fraud.
Raffensperger has continuously refused Trump’s demands, sparring in public with the president while insisting that the result of the presidential election in his state is legitimate.
“If they support a challenge of the electors for Georgia, they’re wrong, dead wrong,” Raffensperger said Monday, adding that lawmakers may decide otherwise with other states but insisting that “in Georgia, we did get it right. I’m not happy with the result, as a Republican, but it is the right result based on the numbers that we saw cast.”
