'Dead in the water': Brad Raffensperger has reached ‘pariah status’ in the GOP -- here's why

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is "politically doomed" after refusing to help Donald Trump overturn the election.

"He is seeking reelection in Georgia, where a crowded field of primary candidates have lined up to dethrone a man now considered public enemy No. 1 by adherents of the MAGA movement. Almost nobody thinks he can win," HuffPost reported Thursday.

The report cited to longtime GOP strategists in the Peach State.

"He's dead in the water," Jay Williams said.

"There is no way Brad Raffensperger can win the primary," said Leo Smith. ""The reason why Brad Raffensperger is now equivocating is that he has to win a primary against a rabid Republican base that wants agreement with Trump and what they believe to have happened in the 2020 election."

Trump has made it abundantly clear he wants revenge against Republicans he views as lacking sufficient loyalty.

"The Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, together with Brad Raffensperger, allowed this Election in Georgia to be Rigged and Stolen," Trump said in a July statement. "Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger have done an absolutely terrible job of watching over Voter Integrity in Georgia. They must be held accountable!"

In September, Trump asked Raffensperger to decertify the state's 2020 election, which was won by Joe Biden.

"Raffensperger's pariah status is a blinking alert that the Republican Party has so completely morphed into a right-wing authoritarian political project that it cannot tolerate the presence of an elections official who defends the legitimacy of American elections. Republicans and Democrats in Georgia are already proceeding as though Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) ― who twice voted to contest the results of the 2020 election, referred to the Jan. 6 rally that prefaced the Capitol insurrection as a '1776 moment,' and unsurprisingly earned Trump's endorsement ― will be the GOP nominee for Georgia's secretary of state next year," HuffPost reported.

Raffensberger's tune has changed in the year since the 2020 election.

"But don't confuse him for a fair election crusader: Raffensperger is desperately trying to show that, despite last year's apostasy, he agrees with the mainstream GOP principle that only Republicans should be allowed to win elections. He embraced the state legislature's restrictive elections law that reduces voter access while allowing political partisans to purge local election boards and replace them as they see fit," HuffPost reported. "Raffensperger also pledged to continue the purges Kemp had used to remove hundreds of thousands of names from Georgia's voter rolls ― a practice that Kemp argued was meant to clear the registrations of people who hadn't recently cast ballots, but that inevitably ensnared thousands of voters who'd planned on participating in the 2018 election."

Read the full report.