Georgia Trump Fans Say the
Last Election Was a Sham. Will They Vote in This One?
On Saturday, November 7th, the day that news
networks called the Presidential election for Joe Biden,
groups of Donald Trump supporters gathered in Atlanta to proclaim, without
evidence, that the result was a fraud. A couple hundred people went to the
Capitol, where Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has espoused the wild delusions of QAnon and who had just been elected to
Congress, railed against the “radical left” and promised to fight alongside
Trump to keep him in office. A smaller group assembled at the CNN Center,
including Chris Hill, the leader of a far-right group called the Georgia
Security Force Three Percent militia, who live-streamed the protest. Hill, who often brings a
rifle and a pistol to such events—in case Antifa shows up, he told me, adding, “I’ll eat them up as
appetizers and spit them out on my way to glory”—would later attend “Stop the
Steal” rallies at the governor’s mansion and at the home of Georgia’s secretary
of state, Brad Raffensperger. “I think it’s crazy for me to cast a ballot
knowing my vote won’t count,” Hill told me. “What counts is who’s doing the
counting.” Hill compared the crusade to the plight of women who have been
sexually assaulted. “If a woman says they’ve been raped, you need to give her
credibility,” he said. “But if a woman says she’s witnessed election fraud,
then you throw it out. It’s hypocrisy.”
Two days after the
protests, Georgia’s Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler,
issued a press release. Both politicians appeared headed to runoff elections,
to be held on January 5th. Loeffler, who was appointed to her seat by Georgia’s
Republican governor, Brian Kemp, had finished second in a special election that
had included nineteen other candidates, behind the Democrat Raphael Warnock.
Perdue, who was first elected in 2014, got more votes than his Democratic
opponent, Jon Ossoff—and slightly more than Trump—but fell short of the
fifty-per-cent threshold required for victory by state election law. Perdue and
Loeffler now had the chance to break ranks with a lame-duck President who lost
their state and to convey support for local Republican colleagues, including
Kemp and Raffensperger, who had overseen the election, and would soon oversee
another, in which both senators would likely take part. Instead, they called on
Raffensperger to resign. “Georgians are outraged,” they declared, “and rightly
so.”
It seemed like a dubious
strategy. The two incumbents were, in essence, asking people to participate,
again, in a process that they insist did not work the last time. I spoke with
Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who helped manage the election in Georgia and
who has lately pushed back against the unfounded allegations of fraud and
interference. “If I put on my old-fashioned political-operative hat, we all
know what happened,” he told me, of Loeffler and Perdue. “The President went to
them, and said, ‘If you don’t back me to the hilt on this and call for
Raffensperger’s resignation and Biden and all this stuff, I’m going to send out
two tweets and kill your campaign.’ ” (Loeffler and Perdue did not respond
to multiple interview requests.)
Republicans currently
hold fifty Senate seats and Democrats hold forty-eight, including two
Independents who caucus with Democrats. If Loeffler and Perdue lose, then the
Vice-President-elect, Kamala Harris, will, beginning in January, break ties
whenever the Senate votes along party lines. For this reason, Sterling still
plans to vote for Loeffler and Perdue, though he is disappointed in them. “I
have been a Republican since I was nine years old,” he said. “And I cannot, in
good conscience, give all levers of power to the Democrats at this point in
time.” But he has found it difficult to persuade some acquaintances to vote at
all. “I’ve had to argue with people I have known for twenty years,” he said. “I
had a back-and-forth on Facebook Messenger with a woman I’ve known for a long
time, who was like, ‘I’m not going to vote, because it’s not going to
matter.’ ” He has a go-to argument in these situations. “I’m not admitting
there is any theft, because there wasn’t,” he tells people. “But if you believe
that, hand on a Bible, and you believe it will continue to be stolen, then your
best bet is to make it harder for them to steal, and show up to vote.” When we
spoke, in early December, he’d become worried that Trump’s increasingly
elaborate and thoroughly discredited story that the election was stolen—and the
echoing of that fiction by Perdue, Loeffler, and others—was going to cost
Republicans the Senate.
The week after the senators called on
Raffensperger to resign, I went to the fairgrounds in Perry, two hours south of
Atlanta, to hear them speak to a hundred or so mostly white and mostly elderly
Georgians. They were joined by Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, who is widely
expected to run for President someday. A truck circled outside, bearing a message in large letters: “David Perdue and Kelly
Loeffler: Blocking COVID Relief for 200+ Days.” I watched the driver, a Black man in a Yankees cap, get hassled by
some of the people who’d come for the rally. “I’m just doing a job trying to
feed my family,” he told me. “And these old ladies out here telling me, ‘Fuck
you! Fuck you!’ ” Nearby, a man sold shirts bearing the Gadsden flag and the words “Don’t Tread On My Vote.”
Perry is in Houston County,
where Perdue, a onetime management consultant who later became the C.E.O. of a
series of companies, including Reebok and Dollar General, grew up. His father
was the county’s superintendent of schools in the years that those schools were
desegregated. One of the county’s largest employers is Robins Air Force Base,
and many in the crowd wore items signalling a connection with, or an
appreciation for, the U.S. military. I asked John Glover, a veteran of the
Second World War, what he liked about the senators. “She backed up Trump a
hundred per cent,” he said, of Loeffler. “That’s No. 1, because it helps offset
the other side, so to speak.” I asked him what he thought of reports that both
Loeffler and Perdue had made suspiciously timed stock trades following private meetings
about the coronavirus at the beginning of the year. “So much B.S.,” he said. “I’ve
got stocks myself. And I hire somebody to take care of them.” (E-mails show
that Perdue may have directed trades himself; the Department of Justice
investigated both senators but declined to pursue charges.) Glover was dubious of
November’s results but passionate about voting again. “We can’t sit on our
butts and expect to win, because we know that Stacey Abrams is pushing very hard on her people, and there’s a lot of
shenanigans going on,” he said, referring to the Democrat and former
gubernatorial candidate who has worked on voter turnout in Georgia for years.
Glover shared Trump’s frustration with Kemp. “I don’t know if they’ve got
something on him or what,” he said. “Just follow the money. It’ll lead you
right to what’s going on.”
Cotton began by
announcing that the Lord wanted the good people of Georgia to “hold the line.”
He lambasted Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Atlanta,
for an old sermon in which Warnock said, “Nobody can serve God and the
military.” Those comments were part of a Palm Sunday riff on Matthew 6:24—“No man can serve two masters”—though Cotton didn’t mention this.
Painting Warnock as an extremist is a key component of Republican strategy. Warnock and
Ossoff, the thirty-three-year-old C.E.O. of a small production company that
makes documentaries, have similar policy positions, in line with Biden and the
mainstream of the Democratic Party. But Ossoff, whom Cotton dismissed as a
“pawn for the Democrats, like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi,” has been deemed
“too dull” to caricature. As Jelani Cobb has written, “Ossoff is white, Warnock is Black, and this is still Georgia.”
Perdue compared the
election to a good war. “I think God has put us in this position, right now, to
stand up and tell the world what America is gonna be for the next fifty to a
hundred years,” he said. He talked about Democrats stacking the Supreme Court
and granting statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. “That’s four
Democrat senators,” he said. “We may never have another Republican majority in
the Senate in my lifetime! They want to then get rid of the Electoral College,
if you can believe that!” He told those gathered, “It’s not about issues
anymore,” and added, “If we win Georgia, we save America.”
Loeffler, the wealthiest
member of the Senate, began by connecting with the crowd. She grew up on
a large family farm in Illinois, “showing cattle in 4-H,” she
pointed out. “I’m so sad there’s not a cattle show going on right now,” she
said. After college, Loeffler mortgaged land that her family owned to pay for
business school, and, in 2002, she moved to Atlanta to work for the trading
company Intercontinental Exchange. Two years later, she married its founder,
Jeffrey Sprecher, who, in 2013, bought the New York Stock Exchange. I
approached him then about a possible piece in this magazine, and Loeffler, a
part owner of Atlanta’s W.N.B.A. team, suggested that we all attend a game
together. Afterward, we had fancy pizza and talked about Sprecher’s favorite
artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose triptych “Catharsis” hung above the pool table in their home, a
fifteen-thousand-square-foot mansion called Descante, which, at the time, was
the most expensive residential property in the history of Atlanta. (The Daily
Beast recently reported that, in 2016, the mansion’s appraised
value dropped by sixty per cent, for no obvious reason, saving the couple
around a hundred thousand dollars a year on their property taxes.) Loeffler
said she liked that the painting included a crown.
In Perry, Loeffler
recited the lines of attack against Warnock and Ossoff. She said, “Every
Republican wants to cover preëxisting conditions,” but also railed against
“Obamacare,” the legislation that protects that coverage. She repeated the plea
“hold the line” eight times. “The American dream is on the ballot,” she said.
“Socialism is on the other side of the ballot.” She encouraged early and
absentee voting. Neither Loeffler nor Perdue said the name Donald Trump.
The plan, it appeared, was to recapitulate
Trump’s claims about election fraud on social media and to campaign on saving
America from socialism. But the ongoing saga of those baseless claims kept
overshadowing that pitch. The day after the rally in Perry, a federal judge
named Steven D. Grimberg dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Atlanta attorney Lin
Wood alleging harm done to him as a voter, one of many preposterous lawsuits
filed by the “Stop the Steal” crowd. “The fact that Wood’s preferred candidates
did not prevail in the General Election—for whom he may have voted or to whom
he may have contributed financially—does not create a legally cognizable harm,
much less an irreparable one,” Grimberg wrote. Wood, who first received national attention
for defending Richard Jewell, and has lately represented Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kyle Rittenhouse, told his more than eight hundred thousand
Twitter followers that Georgians who believe that Trump won should refuse to vote for Loeffler and Perdue unless the senators do more to help
the President. The next day, Debbie Dooley, the head of the Atlanta Tea
Party, made a similar case. “If you have to choose between the Republican
Party or @realDonaldTrump,” she asked her twelve thousand followers, “who would
you choose?” Most who replied picked Trump. “Republican élitist establishment
folks, like Karl Rove, are vastly underestimating the anger that is out there,”
Dooley told me. “Many Trump supporters are angry enough they will sit out the
runoff.”
The night before
Thanksgiving, another lawyer, Sidney Powell—who was at the White House this past weekend—filed a lawsuit riddled with spelling errors
accusing Governor Kemp of taking a bribe from the voting company Dominion as
part of a conspiracy to throw the election to Biden. (The conspiracy somehow
included the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013.) On the
following Tuesday, a prominent QAnon conspiracist uploaded videos showing a young Dominion employee
transferring data to a computer, and claimed that it was evidence of fraud. (It
was not.) Within hours, people on the message board 4chan, where QAnon was
born, had identified the employee; one user on another pro-Trump forum shared
the employee’s name next to a gif of
a swinging noose. That afternoon, Gabriel Sterling held a press conference at the state capitol. A self-described
“process guy” who doesn’t usually attract much attention—his job title is
voting-system implementation manager—Sterling strode to the lectern and pulled
off his mask. “I’m going to do my best to keep it together,” he said. “Because
it has all gone too far. All of it.” After relating what had happened to the
Dominion employee, he said, “Mr. President, you have not condemned these
actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or
these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up. If you’re going to
take a position of leadership, show some.”