'Bastion of wingnuts': How the MAGA faction has left Georgia's GOP 'warped and wrecked'

The Republican party in one of America's central election battlegrounds has gotten so extreme its core activists – and even many of its elected officials – have been cast off, leaving it a "bastion of wingnuts, spiraling into chaos and irrelevance," the New York Times wrote Monday.

The GOP in Georgia has "gone so far down the MAGA rabbit hole that many of its officeholders – including Gov. Brian Kemp, who romped to re-election last year despite being targeted for removal by Donald Trump — are steering clear of it as if it’s their gassy grandpa at Sunday supper," wrote Michelle Cottle.

"What’s happening in Georgia is a cautionary tale for pluralism, an example of how the soul of a party can become warped and wrecked when its leadership veers toward narrow extremism."

The demise started when Georgia's GOP chairman, David Shafer, backed Trump-supported challengers in last year's primary to unseat Republicans who hadn't backed the ex-president's claims that the 2020 election had been stolen. Other Georgia politicians emerged as anti-Trump, and a schism appeared, Cottle wrote.

The slide into chaos, she added, was helped to hit full speed with the passing of a bill in 2021 that let officials and election challengers form leadership PACs that aren't subject to fundraising limits.

That meant Republicans “don’t have to play nice in the sandbox with a group that is sometimes at odds with them,” she wrote.

Gov. Brian Kemp, seen as a leader standing up to Trump, has announced he's skipping next month's state party convention. He has also suggested don't waste their money on party spending, saying, "We can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported

The party central, however, is very much in the Trump camp. Chairman David Shafer has been named in the Fulton County investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and "the party culture has become steeped in the paranoid politics of MAGA and election denial," wrote Cottle.

"And in the current environment, “everyone must pledge their undying loyalty to Donald Trump above all else,” says Jay Morgan, who was an executive director of the state party in the 1980s."

“Right now, it’s largely a place disconnected from reality,” Cole Muzio, president of Frontline Policy Action, a conservative advocacy group, told Cottle.

Among party-backed candidates winning recent elections at county and district levels are Kandiss Taylor, the new chairwoman of the First Congressional District who ran for governor last year as "the only candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal.” She won just over 3 percent of the primary vote, announced that the vote was fixed and refused to concede.

"After election deniers failed to gain control of statewide offices across the nation in 2022, many of them refocused their efforts farther down the food chain," wrote Cottle. And that development means they are taking control of the core of the party.

She added, "Letting them oversee any aspect of the electoral process seems like a poor idea.If this development persists, Republicans more interested in the party’s future than in relitigating its past might want to look at how Kemp & Company have been trying to address their intraparty problems — and what more could and should be done to insulate not only the party’s less-extreme candidates, but also the democratic system, from these fringe forces.

"There are risks that come with ticking off election deniers and other Trumpian dead-enders. But the greater risk to the overall party, and the nation, would be declining to do so.