Georgia?s GOP Attorney General Primary Is The Next 'Big Lie' Battleground

But he is no less enthusiastic in his embrace of the idea that the 2020 presidential election in Georgia was stolen from Donald Trump, a lie that has become the cause célebre of the GOP and, in Georgia, of the trio of Trump-backed candidates challenging the state’s top three Republicans.“There’s no question in my mind that he won Georgia,” Gordon said in an interview a few minutes later, as he sipped a soft drink across a four-top table inside the restaurant. Joe Biden, as Carr has acknowledged, won the contest legitimately.But in Gordon’s eyes, that admission ― and Carr’s decision to back Kemp and Raffensperger’s decision to certify the election and stand by the investigations that refuted fraud claims ― makes him “totally responsible” for the outcome of the 2020 election.Along with Hice and Perdue, Gordon has turned the birthplace of the “big lie” into its next major battleground.It was in Georgia that Trump launched one of his first post-election broadsides against the results, demanding that Raffensperger “find” the roughly 12,000 votes that would have changed the outcome. I know that they are going to extraordinary lengths to try and convince people that there was no problem, when I know with my own eyes and ears and brain that there were horrendous problems.”The answer, Gordon asserts to voters, reporters and himself, lies in the sort of investigation he has promised to conduct as attorney general ― one that sounds, from his description of it, not unlike the conspiratorial Cyber Ninjas review of Biden’s victory in Maricopa County, Arizona, a shambolic process that misunderstood Arizona election law, compromised Maricopa County’s voting machines, violated ballot security protocols and found no evidence of fraud even though it was explicitly designed to find something. Large numbers of Georgians may still be undecided, and Gordon and a super PAC that supports him have unleashed a barrage of ads targeting Carr since the start of early voting in the first week of May. One spot, paid for by the super PAC, alleges that Carr “wrecks fair elections and the America First movement” and asserts that he did “nothing to stop the 2020 stolen election.”Gordon recently won a straw poll of Georgia Republican activists, and he has spent the final days of the race conducting the occasional radio hit on conservative talk shows whose hosts assert the election was stolen while he crisscrosses Georgia for meetings like Thursday’s, a monthly gathering of the Laurens County GOP. And the media, he claims, refuses to treat claims that have been repeatedly proved baseless by numerous investigations with the gravity Gordon thinks they deserve.The prevalence of the “big lie,” the GOP’s adherence to it, and recent victories for candidates like Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano, an election denier who attended the Jan. 6 insurrection and last week won the state’s GOP gubernatorial primary, have inspired fears among Democrats and democracy experts that Republicans are laying the groundwork to go farther in 2024 ― to invalidate votes and electors in states they lose and fully overturn the election, especially if Trump is on the ballot again. … I will absolutely accept the outcome of any honest election.”A victory for Carr, especially if it occurs alongside wins for Kemp and Raffensperger, will likely be seen as a thorough rebuke of Trump and the “big lie.” But the manufactured dispute over the 2020 election, and Georgia Republicans’ response to it, seems likely to dominate the remainder of the attorney general contest no matter who emerges from the primary on Tuesday.Trump’s attempt to compromise the presidential election still animates Democrats in the state, many of whom see this year’s statewide races as a chance to finish the job they started two years ago, when Biden became the first Democrat to win Georgia in nearly 30 years and Sens.