MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) — On a crisp fall morning, eager volunteers flocked to Atlanta’s leafy suburban neighborhood to knock on doors and try to persuade reluctant and skeptical conservatives to register for next month’s midterm elections.
It’s arduous work everywhere, but particularly crucial in the Georgia battlefield, as Donald Trump’s lies about a rigged 2020 election have created a new constituency of vote-bucklers — some fear their votes will go uncounted in November.
Sending the group on a vote-hunting mission was an unlikely emissary — former Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who initially aided the defeated president’s efforts to reverse Joe Biden’s victory but is now working to dress him in blue jeans and a plaid country shirt to bring voters back to the polls.
“We saw it firsthand in our elections,” Loeffler said of the demolition during an interview outside the Cobb County Republican Party headquarters, where volunteers were gathering last Saturday.
Loeffler told The Associated Press how she lost her seat to Democrat Raphael Warnock in January 2021 after more than 330,000 Republicans who voted in the 2020 presidential election failed to cast ballots in the January 2021 runoff. Now, as Warnock meets Republican Herschel Walker in a race that could determine the balance of power in the US Senate, Loeffler tries to prevent a repeat.
“This effort is about amplifying the voices of Georgia, taking back our state and saying we won’t be silenced,” Loeffler said, cheering on the volunteers before sending them off. “We know that people are more likely to vote when they feel their vote counts.”
It is a unique mission with an uncertain prospect in November, the first national election after Trump’s repeated attacks on the US electoral system and the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to certify Biden’s election to stop.
And it comes as Republicans in Georgia and across the country are trying to hold together a fragile coalition of voters — those who accept Trump’s cheating allegation and those who reject it.
“That reflects a real tension in the Republican Party’s message,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, a Washington-based think tank specializing in democracy issues.
“It can be self-defeating to say the election is rigged when you actually have to get people to vote.”
Voters seem eager to cast their ballots this fall. A new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center of Public Affairs Research found that 71% of registered voters believe America’s future is at stake if they vote this year. However, the poll also found that a large portion of Republicans, 58%, still believe Biden’s election was illegitimate.
Brian Robinson, a GOP strategist, said Georgians have backed away from Trump’s claims, judging by primary victories this year for Brad Raffensperger, the embattled Secretary of State Trump, who unsuccessfully pleaded to find “11,780” votes, and the incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who drew Trump’s ire for standing by the state’s results.
“Georgia voters have come a long way from the 2020 election in almost every way, and at that point have largely dismissed claims that fraud marred the election outcome,” Robinson said.
But Democrats say Republicans are trying to have it both ways, courting what one strategist called MAGAs and moderates, and referencing Trump’s Make America Great Again supporters. While Loeffler touts Georgia’s new election law as preventing fraud, Democrats argue the GOP-led bill was unnecessary, a reaction to Trump’s lies about 2020.
Loeffler is in many ways an imperfect ambassador who initially denied the 2020 election results. She has taken the stage at Trump rallies as he spread his claims about stolen presidential elections. She asked Raffensperger to resign over his handling of the vote. Loeffler promised Trump rally voters she would object to the counting of the congressional election and cheered for the crowd, only to abandon the effort hours after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Loeffler, a wealthy former businesswoman who remains close to Trump, has invested more than $2 million in Greater Georgia, and her partner Citizens for Greater Georgia is getting the Republican election effort. She models her work in part after Democrat Stacey Abrams, the gubernatorial candidate whose striving for the right to vote catapulted her into a national figure in her rematch against Kemp.
“I’ve said from day one when I began this effort, we can’t let the left in our state have a monopoly on voter registration,” Loeffler said of the group she founded after her defeat.
The mixed group of Greater Georgia volunteers broke into a handclapping chant of “We will knock you!” – a nod to the Queen song – – in a cul-de-sac in Marietta before splitting up into smaller groups to tour the well-appointed middle-class homes.
Trump voter Lisa Buxton said she joined Loeffler’s efforts because she was tired of “throwing things at my TV” in the year after the former president’s defeat.
Buxton said she is saddened by Trump’s loss and has started her own women’s church group, Christians Taking Action and Prayer, around voting and electoral strategies.
“Our motto is, we know what happened. We know what is in the past. We’re moving forward,” she said.
When asked if Biden was the legitimate president, she paused for a long time.
“He’s sitting in the chair,” she said. “The electoral college said he was there. So he is there. This is where I am. I’m not going down that rabbit hole because I might jump up and down and scream a whole lot.
The challenge of reaching skeptical voters before the deadline last weekend was clear. Georgia already has high voter registration, and volunteers that day were mostly met with residents who didn’t open their door or had moved on – literally and politically.
Homeowner Scott Davenport said the neighborhood used to be all Republican, but the days are long gone when he put a giant Newt Gingrich sign on his lawn in support of the former GOP House Speaker.
Davenport, a father of two adult daughters who works in commercial real estate, said he started voting for the Democrats in the Trump era. He said the Republican Party’s rhetoric on race issues and their rejection of the 2020 election results was not what he signed up for.
“I didn’t leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me,” he said, raking leaves as touts who didn’t have him on their priority list skipped his house. “For me, they just went too far.”
