Brad Raffensperger said Trump lost Georgia because he got ‘outworked’

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Tuesday that President Trump’s complaints about Georgia mask the real reason he lost the state — he and the Republican Party got “outworked” by Democrats.

Mr. Raffensperger said Republican House candidates combined won 33,000 more votes than Mr. Trump, who lost the state to President-elect Joseph R. Biden by 12,000 votes. And in the Atlanta metropolitan area, Sen. David Perdue, a Republican, ran 19,000 votes ahead of Mr. Trump, suggesting the issue wasn’t fraud but voters who uniquely rejected the president’s reelection bid.

“The job of a political party, in this case the Republican Party is to raise money and get out the vote. They got outworked,” the secretary said in an online forum hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Perhaps more than any other official he’s been in the crosshairs of Republicans in the wake of the election. He’s a Republican, but those within his own party told him to step down.

He has rebuffed those demands, and on Tuesday said he remains a “conservative Republican, and that hasn’t changed” — though he ducked the offer by moderator Yamiche Alcindor, a PBS reporter, to say whether he regretted his vote for Mr. Trump.

The president has insisted he is the winner of the election, but says fraud and other malfeasance have denied him his victory. His team has filed dozens of legal challenges, but they’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful in those cases, with judges spanning the country and the ideological spectrum saying he hasn’t proved his case.

“Tremendous evidence pouring in on voter fraud,” the president tweeted on Tuesday. “There has never been anything like this in our Country!”

His team has filed dozens of legal challenges, but they’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful in those cases, with judges spanning the country and the ideological spectrum saying he hasn’t proved his case.

Those findings have done little to change the minds of Mr. Trump’s core supporters, who side with him in saying the election was stolen.

Mr. Raffensperger was joined in the forum Tuesday by the secretaries of state for Pennsylvania and Michigan — both Democrats — and by the elections director of Wisconsin, a non-partisan position, to talk about the 2020 vote and the aftermath.

They characterized the disconnect between claims by Mr. Trump’s supporters and the reality of the election as a matter of expertise and experience.

“For most people, the election process is new and mysterious to them every four years,” said Meagan Wolfe, director of Wisconsin’s Election Commission.

Mr. Raffensperger said he felt like he was playing the whack-a-mole game in shooting down rumors, but said each of the objections raised by Mr. Trump or other objectors has been refuted with evidence.

“There’s no truth to anything, everything they’ve said, we have the facts on our side,” he declared.

He pointed out that Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia in 2018, also questioned the results after she lost her election that year.

Indeed, the Survey of the Performance of American Elections, run by the MIT Election Data & Science Lab, shows the losing party is usually more ready to be suspect of the results of an election, with Republicans generally more suspicious.

In 2012, when President Barack Obama won reelection, 84% of Democrats were confident the outcome was correct. That dipped to 69% when Mr. Trump won in 2016, but soared to 93% this year. By contrast, just 44% of Republicans were confident of the vote in 2012, rising to 80% in Mr. Trump’s victory, plummeting to just 23% this time.

Despite Mr. Trump’s warnings about mail-in voting, support for the idea rose in 2020 compared to 2016, according to the SPAE. That was powered chiefly by Democrats embracing the idea.

A bigger surprise, though, was a rise in support for photo ID among Democrats.

Party leaders are generally opposed to asking voters to show ID, and indeed have proposed legislation in Congress to eliminate state ID rules. But voters overall — including rank-and-file Democrats — find the prospect of showing ID appealing.