Nearly half of Georgia Republicans wouldn’t mind a Trump takeover of the state’s elections – Democracy Docket
By Brentin Mock
A new poll finds that 44% of Republicans in Georgia approve of a federal takeover of their state’s elections, with 31% saying they strongly approve of the idea. Another 7% of Georgia Republicans are undecided about it.
Such high approval rates for an unconstitutional maneuver come as the Trump administration has taken the unprecedented steps of seizing ballots and demanding the personal information of election workers in Fulton County, where Georgia’s largest Black population votes.
Perhaps more concerning, 75% of the state’s Republicans approve of the FBI’s ballot seizure in Fulton County, with 61% approving strongly, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) poll.
The FBI raid was conducted under false reports of voter fraud and widely debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that Trump lost.
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However, the AJC poll results seem to indicate that Trump’s oft-repeated lies about the 2020 election being rigged against him have taken hold among a large swath of Republicans, as other polls have shown as well.
The survey lays bare a split among Georgia Republicans – 48% of whom said they disapproved of a federal takeover – where many appear willing to surrender state voting rights and sovereignty to serve Trump’s larger agenda of taking control of elections.
That split is seen clearly in the state’s current governor’s race where the three leading GOP candidates include two who are clamoring for Trump’s approval – Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and billionaire exec Rick Jackson, both of whom are running, in part, on trampling voting rights.
The other leading Republican candidate is current Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, who famously denied Trump’s request in 2020 to “find” nearly 12,000 votes in order to rig the state’s election outcomes in Trump’s favor.
Raffensperger was still able to get re-elected as the state’s chief elections officer in 2022. Gov. Brian Kemp was also re-elected to lead Georgia that year, despite rebuffing Trump’s demands to throw the election his way in 2020.
Both won in 2022 over Trump-endorsed candidates, suggesting there was still a strong appetite among Georgia Republicans for resisting Trump’s efforts to assert influence over the state.
However, in this year’s gubernatorial elections, the two leading candidates, Jones and Jackson, both have Raffensperger by wide margins.
Meanwhile, Georgia Democrats were almost unanimous in their opposition to a federal takeover of the state’s elections, with 94% saying they strongly disapproved in the AJC poll.
The survey, conducted by the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs, polled 1000 Republican and 1000 Democrat primary voters.
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