Trump’s presence in the state comes 18 months after he pressed Georgia’s Foreign Minister Brad Rafensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, a debate now being investigated in Atlanta. The defeat, which made Trump the first Republican candidate for the presidency to lose the state in 28 years, continues to rank the former president and has backed state MP Jodi Hayes in his challenge to Rafensperger. He also backed other candidates in the state against the incumbent Republicans, including David Perdue against incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp. It follows a similar pattern in other states where Trump has held or plans to hold rallies as a way to show support for Republican candidates who have offered their allegiance to him. Herschel Walker, a former U.S. Senate nominee, is expected to attend Saturday’s rally at Commerce, 70 miles northeast of Atlanta and one of the state’s most conservative areas. Perdue; and congressional candidate Vernon Jones, a former Democratic nominee who began calling himself “Black Donald Trump” after changing parties. But Trump is playing a high-stakes game, and the success of his candidates in Georgia’s May primary is uncertain. Walker is slightly ahead of Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in the medals of the RealClearPolitics poll, but Jones, who rejected his candidacy for governor in February, faces a full Republican field for his conservative, 10-year-old Conservative covers part of eastern Georgia. Trump’s choice of governor, Perdue, faces an even more complicated struggle. He struggled to raise money for the campaign, following incumbent Brian Kemp by 11 points, according to a Fox News poll. Perdue has backed Trump’s false line for a “stolen” 2020 election and has begun to claim that his defeat by Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, to whom he conceded in January, was also problematic. “Most people in Georgia know that something unfortunate happened in November 2020,” radio host Bryan Pritchard told reporters. “I’ll just say it, Brian. In my election and in the election of the president, they stole them. The evidence is convincing now. “ The Perdue-Kemp contest represents a personal grudge against Trump, which erupted when Kemp refused to support his attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election result. Trump has also sought to undermine the governor by backing Patrick Witt, who has backed Trump’s election campaign against John King, Georgia’s first Latin-American constitutional official. Witt is running against King in the Republican primary for state security. But the bigger question is how far Trump’s influence in shaping Georgia’s republican policy extends. For some, the power of the former president is diminishing in the state. “He will not help the Trump-backed candidates when he comes in on Saturday,” conservative commentator Martha Zoller told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week. “It will be negative and backward – and it is not what the voters want.” Some Republican pollsters said that while Trump’s ratification was coveted, he had reduced his influence by going far below the ballot or supporting candidates who had been delayed from entering with little public recognition or campaign mechanism.
