Georgia Secretary of State Says GOP Didn't 'Read the Tea Leaves' Ahead of Trump 2020 Loss

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has faith in the state's ability to conduct a fair election so when it comes to former President Donald Trump's 2020 loss, he believes the only people Republicans—and the former president—have to blame are themselves.

Trump lost Georgia in November by less than a point, a surprise to some given the turnout for his rallies and his 2016 margin of victory. While Trump sees his loss in Georgia as an impossible outcome, Raffensperger blamed the loss on Republicans' failure to see that Georgia was trending blue.

"Stacey Abrams lost in 2018 by only 55,000 votes. I won in a runoff. People didn't read the tea leaves," Raffensperger told Newsweek.

Raffensperger likened Georgia to the competitiveness of North Carolina, a battleground state where Republican presidents often win, but not by a wide margin in recent years. North Carolina also has a Democratic governor and while both their senators are Republican, neither won their seat in a landslide victory. The same, Raffensperger said, is true for Georgia.

After seeing Abrams nearly win her gubernatorial race, Raffensperger sent to a runoff and Democrats' flipping a House seat, the Georgia secretary of state said Republicans should have been prepared for a hard battle in 2020. He argued that Democrats had a better ground game ahead of the election than Republicans and they took advantage of mail-in voting, something Trump railed against, potentially causing him the election.

"Traditionally, no-excuse absentee ballots had been a Republican strength in Georgia, not a weakness, and they could have remained so in 2020," Raffensperger wrote in his book, Integrity Counts. "Republicans typically listen to their leadership, and their leader was telling them not to vote absentee."

In his book, Raffensberger calls this a "risky strategy," in part because Georgia Republicans expected Trump to win. Trump only lost the state by about 12,000 votes and with 2,000 new COVID-19 cases a day at the time, Raffensperger said it's possible people who planned to vote in person couldn't because they contracted COVID-19 or were exposed and had to quarantine.

Georgia became a key target of Trump's post-election fight and he went after Raffensperger personally. Much of Trump's gripes with the election centered on his Tuesday night lead that narrowed as mail-in ballots were counted, disproportionately going in favor of President Joe Biden.

While Trump took issue with the implementation of widespread mail-in voting, Raffensperger defended the practice for evening the field. During the 2020 election, Georgia sent every voter an absentee ballot request form in anticipation of an increase in absentee voting because of the pandemic. He explained in his book that if the state didn't send the forms out, it was likely that political organizations and some county election boards would, creating a potential "huge disparity" in voters' access to polls.

Georgia's not the only state that had a close election in 2020 and Biden's victory came down to half a percentage point in Arizona. It's likely the 2024 election will also be close, given that America isn't a landslide country anymore, and Raffensperger, who voted for Trump twice, didn't back him as the candidate to help the GOP reclaim the White House.

Trump's been teasing a White House run since leaving office and when asked if Raffensperger would vote for him a third time, he didn't give a definitive yes or no. The Georgia secretary of state said the GOP needs a candidate who can build a "strong coalition" of a majority of voters.

"So we have to look forward, we can't look backwards. There are so many things our nation is looking for, and we need someone who is looking to run an exciting campaign," Raffensperger told Newsweek. "When the student is ready the teacher will appear and when the teacher appears you'll see Republicans win elections."