Politics

Brad Raffensperger navigates his party’s MAGA reality

Published

2 months ago

May 10, 2026

VININGS, Ga. — Brad Raffensperger is fighting to save his political future as MAGA takes hold of the Georgia GOP.

The secretary of state rose to national prominence by defying President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but he is carefully trying to avoid the anti-Trump lane while he runs for governor.

Instead, he’s running an old-school campaign aimed at an old-school Republican Party: He’s holding low-key events compared with his GOP opponents’ flashier rallies, and he’s focusing on bread-and-butter issues, rather than harping on election security. At one Atlanta-area rotary club gathering in April, Raffensperger was all too happy to tout his business background and his pledge to cap property taxes. Everywhere he goes, he drops the word conservative.

“I have my own lane, and I feel good where we are,” Raffensperger told Blue Light News after the event. “It’s the lane about being a Christian conservative businessman who’s built a business from scratch.”

At its core, Raffensperger’s candidacy is a test of whether the party’s non-MAGA guard can hold on in one of the nation’s premiere battleground states. He’s defied expectations before, fending off a Trump-backed candidate in 2022 to keep his current position. But 2026 poses a new challenge, as Georgia’s GOP has increasingly shunned its small government roots in favor of aligning with the populist right.

Raffensperger speaks with attendees at a campaign event with the Vinings Rotary Club at a Copeland’s of New Orleans in Atlanta, on April 8, 2026.

Raffensperger maintains he has a path to victory. Asked whether Trump’s grip on the party is complicating it, he deflected: “I’m doing just fine. I’m going to be in the run-off.”

But the reality is Raffensperger is still struggling to break through in the governor’s race, polling at a consistent third place behind Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and billionaire Rick Jackson ahead of the May 19 primary. Republican strategists and officials in the state were widely skeptical of Raffensperger’s chances of success.

“This is the party of Trump today — like it or not, it is — and I find it very difficult to see someone being able to be anti-Trump in a Republican primary and be successful,” said Casey Cagle, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor from 2007 to 2019. He’s experienced the rise of the MAGA base firsthand and has since tacked further to the right.

“The base has grown far, far greater to the right than what it was in my day,” said Cagle, who is supporting Jones in the governor’s race. “The core of the Republican Party has moved far away from the Chamber of Commerce mindset.”

Before February of this year, Raffensperger seemed poised to draw enough support in the primary to keep Jones under the 50 percent threshold he needed to trigger a run-off election. Then Jackson upended the race with his bombastic spending and MAGA pandering, pushing Raffensperger further down in the polls.

Gubernatorial candidates Rick Jackson, left, and Burt Jones interact at the Atlanta Press Club Loudermilk-Young Republican primary election debate in Atlanta, on April 27, 2026.

Even if the secretary of state were to make a run-off against either Jones or Jackson, his chances of actually winning the nomination are still slim, said GOP strategist Jeremy Brand, who has worked on Gov. Brian Kemp-aligned committees and is unaffiliated in the governor’s race.

“It’d be incredibly tough,” Brand said. “The edge in a run-off where voters are traditionally more conservative, that are willing to come back out again, I think the odds go to the more conservative candidate.”

2020 election woes

Raffensperger has been battling his own party on various fronts since he first stood up to Trump.

A faction of the Georgia GOP tried to bar him from seeking office again on the Republican ticket. And local party leaders recently broke with precedent to allow the RNC to eschew its neutrality and spend resources on backing Jones in the primary. The MAGA base that failed to oust Raffensperger in 2022 is trying again to end his political career — along with others deemed insufficiently loyal to the president.

Attorney General Chris Carr, like Raffensperger, is also mounting a bid for governor and previously defeated a Trump-backed challenger in 2022. But he’s polling even lower than the secretary of state. And Gabriel Sterling, a former top Raffensperger lieutenant, is locked in a noisy primary in his bid for secretary of state as he faces off against a former Democrat-turned-MAGA acolyte and a GOP state representative who once served as Kemp’s top aide.

The 2020 election has continued to be a key litmus test in Georgia, especially as Trump continues to air his grievances over his loss. Several recounts and extensive litigation have only proven Raffensperger’s case that former President Joe Biden fairly defeated Trump in 2020. But many voters and candidates continue to question the truth of the results in a show of loyalty to the president, further isolating the secretary from the increasingly conservative Republican base.

“I voted for Trump. I wish he’d have won. I think he did win, I’m one of those people,” said Bruce Brooker, 72, outside a Jones campaign event in rural Atkinson County earlier this month.

People vote in Atlanta on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020.

An April POLITICO Poll found that most respondents who plan to vote for Republicans this midterm are still skeptical: Nearly 40 percent say the 2020 election was stolen, while 25 percent don’t believe it was but have questions about the election’s legitimacy. Just 25 percent say the election wasn’t stolen.

Raffensperger continues to defend his work and the integrity of Georgia’s elections at large — “I’m really proud because we made elections more secure” — and is quick to highlight the changes he and state Republicans made in their 2021 overhaul of how the state conducts elections, which drew ire from Democrats and the MLB alike.

Still, several Georgia Republicans say he’s struggling to play catch-up as the base shifts away from his technocratic approach to politics.

“Brad stands in stark conflict to a party that is at the activist level very much aligned with President Trump, when Raffensperger is anything but,” said one former longtime state GOP official, granted anonymity to speak openly about evolving party dynamics. “His candidacy will be and is a test to determine if that lane still exists in the Georgia Republican Party apparatus.”

Raffensperger’s path forward

On a recent afternoon, Raffensperger, clad in a navy suit and striped red tie, headlined the Vinings-Cumberland Rotary Club’s weekly meeting, shaking hands and chatting with voters before taking his place behind the lectern at the front of the room. The state’s legislative session had ended barely a week earlier.

“What I thought I’d do is tell you where we are right now. We just finished up my last session,” he told the audience, ticking through accomplishments: streamlining professional licensing processes, securing an agreement to have money returned to victims of a local Ponzi scheme, and improving systems to make Georgia elections “free, fair and fast.”

It wasn’t the kind of red meat fodder that Republican politics thrive on in the Trump era, but the type of accolades that resonate with the kind of voters at the meeting, held just over the border from Atlanta’s city limits in suburban Cobb County.

Raffensperger prepares to deliver remarks at a campaign event with the Vinings Rotary Club at a Copeland’s of New Orleans in Atlanta, on April 8, 2026.

Cobb County is one of several former Republican bastions surrounding metro Atlanta that have flipped blue as the Trump-styled GOP turned off suburban voters. Once the homebase for conservative stalwart former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the county voted overwhelmingly for former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 despite her statewide loss to Trump.

It’s still home to plenty of business-focused Republican voters who are not keen on the president — then-Sen. Marco Rubio carried the county over Trump during the 2016 GOP primaries, and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley performed nearly twice as well in the county compared to her statewide returns against the president in 2024. These are the voters Raffensperger is focused on, content to let Jones and Jackson battle it out for the MAGA class.

Jason Shepherd, the former Cobb County Republican chair, said the low-key civic group events have “been the hallmark of Brad Raffensperger’s success” and an emblem of the party’s business-focused past. It’s in sharp contrast with the attention-grabbing rallies that have defined Trump’s dominance of Republican politics.

Raffensperger’s quieter approach has previously served him well, when he overcame a 2022 primary challenge from former Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) who ran with the president’s endorsement. This time is different: Then, he held the power of incumbency and benefited from Trump’s influence waning temporarily in the aftermath of Jan. 6 and his 2020 election defeat.

Now, Trump, back in power, has reaffirmed his iron grip on the party and Raffensperger is up against two MAGA candidates pining for the base’s attention. Add to that the fact he’s being massively outspent: His $4 million has been dwarfed by Jackson’s whopping $61 million and Jones’ $26 million in expenditures, according to an AdImpact analysis.

The Jones and Carr campaigns were quick to dismiss claims that the secretary of state had a path to the run-off and an eventual win. A spokesperson for Jackson did not respond to a request for comment.

If Raffensperger were to lose the primary, his loss would become another nail in the coffin for an old-school GOP that continues to resist MAGA. But his insistence that his lane — and version of the Republican Party — still exists is, for his closest allies, a testament to his persistence.

“Brad Raffensperger never really stopped from 2022 on,” said Sterling, the Raffensperger ally who’s running for secretary of state and has also faced MAGA’s ire for refusing to overturn election results. “He could have set up a foundation, gone around the country and just talked about democracy and he would have been applauded. Instead he chose to go into the battle and fight.”

Politics

We should be exalting this major American milestone. Instead we’ve got Trump’s Great American Fair.

Published

25 minutes ago

July 3, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Christmas. 3, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

This piece is part of“America in the balance: the fight for our history and future,”a special series from MS NOW that explores where we are as a nation as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

One of my first fond memories was watching a patriotic pageant on TV, celebrating a major American anniversary, led by a president who, as a candidate, promised to “Make America Great Again.”

It was July 4, 1986, and the Statue of Liberty was turning 100.

Two years earlier President Ronald Reagan had appointed Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca to helm a foundation that would raise private funds, in coordination with the National Park Service, to restore Lady Liberty in time for its centennial. France’s fantastic gift of a few hundred tons of copper, granite and steel had been looking the worse for wear after a century of weathering the elements in New York Harbor — and “Liberty Weekend” was a ubiquitous, nationally televised four-day event featuring A-list performers and tall ships parading through the harbor, culminating in a massive fireworks display.

It wasn’t just because I was so young that the moment resonated. This was a pervasive American happening, celebrated by millions no matter their party.

I was just a little kid, and I hadn’t yet formed a political identity. Given a few more years to read up on the topic, I’m sure I would have had strong opinions about Reagan and the divisive politics of his movement, to say nothing of the jingoistic, late-Cold War era style of rah-rah American patriotism.

But it wasn’t just because I was so young that the moment resonated. This was a pervasive American happening, celebrated by millions no matter their party. And looking back on it, the messaging seems pretty unobjectionable: America is a land of opportunity, appreciative of its allies, welcoming of the “poor…huddled masses yearning to be free,” confident that the uniquely American melting pot is not only a good thing, it’s our thing.

Liberty Weekend also featured a helpful reminder for why we were all celebrating a statue, and why Americans felt so patriotic about it. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Standing before the ghostly red-brick ruins of historic Ellis Island, [Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren] Burger swore in 267 people from 109 countries with a solemn oath of allegiance to this melting-pot nation of immigrants.”

I remember thinking at the time that, with any luck, I’d be alive to witness the next big, round American anniversary, the semiquincentennial — which would surely be an even more awesome and universally patriotic celebration of America’s best and most enduring values.

Well, that time has come. America’s 250th birthday is here and the president is yet another Republican who promised to make America great again.

But instead of a near-universal event celebrating the miraculous success of a nation proud to be made of immigrants, we have Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, which kicked off on June 24 with a sparsely attended and barely watched opening ceremony featuring a military band playing cartoonish “patriotic” tunes like “Real American (Hulk Hogan’s WWE theme).”

Remarking on the many performers who dropped out of the event weeks ago — once it was evident that it would be a hyperpartisan political rally rather than a celebration for all Americans — Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy praised the military band as “way better than those libtards that canceled on us.” (Duffy, a father of nine, has a child with Down’s syndrome, who was onstage as he expressed his version of patriotism.) And rather than even pay lip service to uniting the country, Trump’s low-energy speech rambled through his rote menu of culture war red meat, liberally peppered with falsehoods and braggadocio about the war he started, swiftly lost and now seems helpless to bring to an end.

The day after Trump’s fair kicked off, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s move to revoke temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people from Haiti and thousands from Syria who fled their war-torn countries. The architect of Trump’s war on immigrants, Stephen Miller, told reporters that same day, “One way or another, this nation has to end birthright citizenship.” (That dream of Miller’s was crushed on Tuesday when the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration’s executive order to end birthright citizenshipallowing a nation founded by immigrants to breathe a sigh of relief, at least for now.)

I’m not trying to put rose-colored glasses on the Reagan era, but when it came time to celebrate America on a grand scale — to express a universal version of patriotism — Ellis Island was the backdrop, and the swearing in of new American citizens was the ceremonial coup de grace. Trump’s celebration is only of himself, and all he could offer the few attendees was fear and hatred for “the other.”

It would have been nice for America’s 250th birthday to have been celebrated with class, fellowship and optimism — like Liberty Weekend 40 years ago. Instead, the semiquincentennial looks to be a limp and dreary nonevent, attended by extraordinarily fewunifying no one and mostly ignored even by its target audience.

Say what you will about Reagan, but he understood far better than Trump what really makes America great.

Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW.

Politics

How sports diplomacy for a dead empire built a World Cup underdog

Published

30 minutes ago

July 3, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

If you want to trace Cape Verde’s emergence as a soccer power, you might go back to 2009, when the country beat Portugal on its way to a gold medal at the Jogos de Lusofonia.

The Lusofonia Games were a junior varsity Olympics for remnants of a common empire, an effort by the 12-country Association of Olympic Committees of Portuguese-Speaking Countries to mimic the Commonwealth Games or Jeux de la Francophonie, an upstart competition for former French colonies. On its face, all of these competitions were an experiment in geographically unlikely camaraderie — could tae kwon do artists from Equatorial Guinea bond with East Timorese ping-pong players? — but beneath, they were an exercise of raw global sports politics.

ACOLOP, as the association is known by its Portuguese abbreviation, was created in 2004 and hosted its first, nine-sport Jogos de Lusofonia the next year in Macau, the Chinese region that was a Portuguese colony until 1999. Around the business meetings that accompanied the second games in Lisbon, the conversation among the national Olympic officials who ran ACOLOP focused on Brazil’s effort then underway to claim both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics for Rio de Janeiro, the first in South America. Both successful bids were built on a Portuguese-speaking coalition that crossed the traditional geographical bases within FIFA and the International Olympic Committee.

The next Lusofonia Games were held in 2014 in Goa, the Indian city where Portuguese traders planted their flag in the 16th century. Then the games stopped, leaving behind a series of canceled plans for follow-up encounters and an archipelago of never-updated web pages.

“To be honest, I think the games ended,” João Malha, a Lisbon-based sports communications specialist who served as press officer for the 2009 games, told Blue Light News. “At least, I’ve never heard anything about them since Covid.”

Their legacy roars to life again this week, when Cape Verde enters the knockout rounds in its first World Cup, the smallest country ever to reach that stage.

This era of competitive Cape Verde soccer — which has twice reached the quarterfinals of the African Cup of Nations — can be traced to the 2009 Lusofonia Games in Lisbon. The under-21 Cape Verdean side began with a bang: a 1-0 victory over host Portugal, from which the small Atlantic island nation had won its independence in 1975. It then stampeded through the five-country, round-robin tournament, defeating Mozambique and drawing against Angola en route to the country’s only gold medal, a task made admittedly easier by the fact that Brazil didn’t compete in soccer even as it was the leading medalist across the games.

For those of us who were at the José Gomes Stadium, the most eye-catching player on the pitch that month for Cape Verde was Ianique “Stopira” Tavares, a 21-year-old left back who rampaged down the opposition flank. Three years later Stopira — nicknamed for a French great — moved to a Hungarian club where he spent most of his career. He retired in 2023 and then reversed himself a year later so he could help Cape Verde qualify for the World Cup.

Stopira’s return was a success by any measure, marked by critical goals at every stage despite never having been much of a goal-scorer prior to his retirement. His winner helped second-tier Torreense defeat heavyweights Sporting Clube de Portugal in Portugal’s Taça cup final, becoming the first non-top flight club to reach the UEFA Europa League in its current incarnation. And last October, Stopira scored the most celebrated goal in his country’s history — an extra-time strike which sealed the win over Eswatini that sent Cape Verde to a World Cup for the first time.

Today, the team faces Argentina, and 38-year-old Stopira is likely to start on the bench, as he did in the three group-stage matches. But for at least one more day Stopira’s Cape Verde stands where the Jogos da Lusofonia imagined the country belonged: as a sporting peer to Portugal and Brazil.

Politics

Trump holds the golden tickets

Published

45 minutes ago

July 3, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

When FIFA President Gianni Infantino visited the Oval Office last August, he presented President Donald Trump with a giant oversized ticket to the World Cup final.

It turns out 10 real ones accompany it, raising anticipation around the White House for a much-coveted invitation to the July 19 match at MetLife Stadium, not far from Trump’s golf club in northern New Jersey.

Two people who have attended sporting events with Trump, granted anonymity to speculate on a sensitive matter, say they expect the coveted seats to go to family members and a handful of West Wing aides. Those on the hunt for an invitation might find White House FIFA World Cup Task Force czar Andrew Giuliani helpful, according to one of the people we spoke to, but he might steer inquiries to FIFA.com or to the White House Cabinet Affairs to adjudicate.

Trump’s latest financial disclosure report reveals this is something of a standard gift from Infantino, who also gave Trump 10 tickets to the final match of last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup, also at MetLife Stadium. Trump valued them at a combined $15,000 — tickets to the World Cup final will almost certainly be worth many multiples of that.