Georgia Trump Fans Say the Last Election Was a Sham. Will They Vote in This One?

By Charles Bethea, The New Yorker

26 December 20

n Saturday, November 7th, the day that news networks called the Presidential election for Joe Biden, groups of Donald Trump supporters gathered in Atlanta to proclaim, without evidence, that the result was a fraud. A couple hundred people went to the Capitol, where Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has espoused the wild delusions of QAnon and who had just been elected to Congress, railed against the “radical left” and promised to fight alongside Trump to keep him in office. A smaller group assembled at the CNN Center, including Chris Hill, the leader of a far-right group called the Georgia Security Force Three Percent militia, who live-streamed the protest. Hill, who often brings a rifle and a pistol to such events—in case Antifa shows up, he told me, adding, “I’ll eat them up as appetizers and spit them out on my way to glory”—would later attend “Stop the Steal” rallies at the governor’s mansion and at the home of Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. “I think it’s crazy for me to cast a ballot knowing my vote won’t count,” Hill told me. “What counts is who’s doing the counting.” Hill compared the crusade to the plight of women who have been sexually assaulted. “If a woman says they’ve been raped, you need to give her credibility,” he said. “But if a woman says she’s witnessed election fraud, then you throw it out. It’s hypocrisy.”

Two days after the protests, Georgia’s Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, issued a press release. Both politicians appeared headed to runoff elections, to be held on January 5th. Loeffler, who was appointed to her seat by Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, had finished second in a special election that had included nineteen other candidates, behind the Democrat Raphael Warnock. Perdue, who was first elected in 2014, got more votes than his Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff—and slightly more than Trump—but fell short of the fifty-per-cent threshold required for victory by state election law. Perdue and Loeffler now had the chance to break ranks with a lame-duck President who lost their state and to convey support for local Republican colleagues, including Kemp and Raffensperger, who had overseen the election, and would soon oversee another, in which both senators would likely take part. Instead, they called on Raffensperger to resign. “Georgians are outraged,” they declared, “and rightly so.”

It seemed like a dubious strategy. The two incumbents were, in essence, asking people to participate, again, in a process that they insist did not work the last time. I spoke with Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who helped manage the election in Georgia and who has lately pushed back against the unfounded allegations of fraud and interference. “If I put on my old-fashioned political-operative hat, we all know what happened,” he told me, of Loeffler and Perdue. “The President went to them, and said, ‘If you don’t back me to the hilt on this and call for Raffensperger’s resignation and Biden and all this stuff, I’m going to send out two tweets and kill your campaign.’ ” (Loeffler and Perdue did not respond to multiple interview requests.)

Republicans currently hold fifty Senate seats and Democrats hold forty-eight, including two Independents who caucus with Democrats. If Loeffler and Perdue lose, then the Vice-President-elect, Kamala Harris, will, beginning in January, break ties whenever the Senate votes along party lines. For this reason, Sterling still plans to vote for Loeffler and Perdue, though he is disappointed in them. “I have been a Republican since I was nine years old,” he said. “And I cannot, in good conscience, give all levers of power to the Democrats at this point in time.” But he has found it difficult to persuade some acquaintances to vote at all. “I’ve had to argue with people I have known for twenty years,” he said. “I had a back-and-forth on Facebook Messenger with a woman I’ve known for a long time, who was like, ‘I’m not going to vote, because it’s not going to matter.’ ” He has a go-to argument in these situations. “I’m not admitting there is any theft, because there wasn’t,” he tells people. “But if you believe that, hand on a Bible, and you believe it will continue to be stolen, then your best bet is to make it harder for them to steal, and show up to vote.” When we spoke, in early December, he’d become worried that Trump’s increasingly elaborate and thoroughly discredited story that the election was stolen—and the echoing of that fiction by Perdue, Loeffler, and others—was going to cost Republicans the Senate.

The week after the senators called on Raffensperger to resign, I went to the fairgrounds in Perry, two hours south of Atlanta, to hear them speak to a hundred or so mostly white and mostly elderly Georgians. They were joined by Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, who is widely expected to run for President someday. A truck circled outside, bearing a message in large letters: “David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler: Blocking COVID Relief for 200+ Days.” I watched the driver, a Black man in a Yankees cap, get hassled by some of the people who’d come for the rally. “I’m just doing a job trying to feed my family,” he told me. “And these old ladies out here telling me, ‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’ ” Nearby, a man sold shirts bearing the Gadsden flag and the words “Don’t Tread On My Vote.”

Perry is in Houston County, where Perdue, a onetime management consultant who later became the C.E.O. of a series of companies, including Reebok and Dollar General, grew up. His father was the county’s superintendent of schools in the years that those schools were desegregated. One of the county’s largest employers is Robins Air Force Base, and many in the crowd wore items signalling a connection with, or an appreciation for, the U.S. military. I asked John Glover, a veteran of the Second World War, what he liked about the senators. “She backed up Trump a hundred per cent,” he said, of Loeffler. “That’s No. 1, because it helps offset the other side, so to speak.” I asked him what he thought of reports that both Loeffler and Perdue had made suspiciously timed stock trades following private meetings about the coronavirus at the beginning of the year. “So much B.S.,” he said. “I’ve got stocks myself. And I hire somebody to take care of them.” (E-mails show that Perdue may have directed trades himself; the Department of Justice investigated both senators but declined to pursue charges.) Glover was dubious of November’s results but passionate about voting again. “We can’t sit on our butts and expect to win, because we know that Stacey Abrams is pushing very hard on her people, and there’s a lot of shenanigans going on,” he said, referring to the Democrat and former gubernatorial candidate who has worked on voter turnout in Georgia for years. Glover shared Trump’s frustration with Kemp. “I don’t know if they’ve got something on him or what,” he said. “Just follow the money. It’ll lead you right to what’s going on.”

Cotton began by announcing that the Lord wanted the good people of Georgia to “hold the line.” He lambasted Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Atlanta, for an old sermon in which Warnock said, “Nobody can serve God and the military.” Those comments were part of a Palm Sunday riff on Matthew 6:24—“No man can serve two masters”—though Cotton didn’t mention this. Painting Warnock as an extremist is a key component of Republican strategy. Warnock and Ossoff, the thirty-three-year-old C.E.O. of a small production company that makes documentaries, have similar policy positions, in line with Biden and the mainstream of the Democratic Party. But Ossoff, whom Cotton dismissed as a “pawn for the Democrats, like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi,” has been deemed “too dull” to caricature. As Jelani Cobb has written, “Ossoff is white, Warnock is Black, and this is still Georgia.”

Perdue compared the election to a good war. “I think God has put us in this position, right now, to stand up and tell the world what America is gonna be for the next fifty to a hundred years,” he said. He talked about Democrats stacking the Supreme Court and granting statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. “That’s four Democrat senators,” he said. “We may never have another Republican majority in the Senate in my lifetime! They want to then get rid of the Electoral College, if you can believe that!” He told those gathered, “It’s not about issues anymore,” and added, “If we win Georgia, we save America.”

Loeffler, the wealthiest member of the Senate, began by connecting with the crowd. She grew up on a large family farm in Illinois, “showing cattle in 4-H,” she pointed out. “I’m so sad there’s not a cattle show going on right now,” she said. After college, Loeffler mortgaged land that her family owned to pay for business school, and, in 2002, she moved to Atlanta to work for the trading company Intercontinental Exchange. Two years later, she married its founder, Jeffrey Sprecher, who, in 2013, bought the New York Stock Exchange. I approached him then about a possible piece in this magazine, and Loeffler, a part owner of Atlanta’s W.N.B.A. team, suggested that we all attend a game together. Afterward, we had fancy pizza and talked about Sprecher’s favorite artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose triptych “Catharsis” hung above the pool table in their home, a fifteen-thousand-square-foot mansion called Descante, which, at the time, was the most expensive residential property in the history of Atlanta. (The Daily Beast recently reported that, in 2016, the mansion’s appraised value dropped by sixty per cent, for no obvious reason, saving the couple around a hundred thousand dollars a year on their property taxes.) Loeffler said she liked that the painting included a crown.

In Perry, Loeffler recited the lines of attack against Warnock and Ossoff. She said, “Every Republican wants to cover preëxisting conditions,” but also railed against “Obamacare,” the legislation that protects that coverage. She repeated the plea “hold the line” eight times. “The American dream is on the ballot,” she said. “Socialism is on the other side of the ballot.” She encouraged early and absentee voting. Neither Loeffler nor Perdue said the name Donald Trump.

The plan, it appeared, was to recapitulate Trump’s claims about election fraud on social media and to campaign on saving America from socialism. But the ongoing saga of those baseless claims kept overshadowing that pitch. The day after the rally in Perry, a federal judge named Steven D. Grimberg dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Atlanta attorney Lin Wood alleging harm done to him as a voter, one of many preposterous lawsuits filed by the “Stop the Steal” crowd. “The fact that Wood’s preferred candidates did not prevail in the General Election—for whom he may have voted or to whom he may have contributed financially—does not create a legally cognizable harm, much less an irreparable one,” Grimberg wrote. Wood, who first received national attention for defending Richard Jewell, and has lately represented Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kyle Rittenhouse, told his more than eight hundred thousand Twitter followers that Georgians who believe that Trump won should refuse to vote for Loeffler and Perdue unless the senators do more to help the President. The next day, Debbie Dooley, the head of the Atlanta Tea Party, made a similar case. “If you have to choose between the Republican Party or @realDonaldTrump,” she asked her twelve thousand followers, “who would you choose?” Most who replied picked Trump. “Republican élitist establishment folks, like Karl Rove, are vastly underestimating the anger that is out there,” Dooley told me. “Many Trump supporters are angry enough they will sit out the runoff.”

The night before Thanksgiving, another lawyer, Sidney Powell—who was at the White House this past weekend—filed a lawsuit riddled with spelling errors accusing Governor Kemp of taking a bribe from the voting company Dominion as part of a conspiracy to throw the election to Biden. (The conspiracy somehow included the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013.) On the following Tuesday, a prominent QAnon conspiracist uploaded videos showing a young Dominion employee transferring data to a computer, and claimed that it was evidence of fraud. (It was not.) Within hours, people on the message board 4chan, where QAnon was born, had identified the employee; one user on another pro-Trump forum shared the employee’s name next to a gif of a swinging noose. That afternoon, Gabriel Sterling held a press conference at the state capitol. A self-described “process guy” who doesn’t usually attract much attention—his job title is voting-system implementation manager—Sterling strode to the lectern and pulled off his mask. “I’m going to do my best to keep it together,” he said. “Because it has all gone too far. All of it.” After relating what had happened to the Dominion employee, he said, “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop. We need you to step up. If you’re going to take a position of leadership, show some.”

The video of Sterling’s comments was widely shared, and Loeffler and Perdue released statements hours later. “Like many officials, as someone who has been the subject of threats, of course Senator Loeffler condemns violence of any kind,” Loeffler’s spokesperson, Stephen Lawson, tweeted. “How ridiculous to even suggest otherwise.” A spokesperson for Perdue said, “We won’t apologize for addressing the obvious issues with the way our state conducts its elections.” He did not say what those issues were.

Later, I asked Sterling about these statements. “Is it that high of a bar as a senator or a President to go out yourself and say, ‘We condemn violence’? It seems like a pretty low bar, and having to do it through a spokesperson just struck me as weak,” he said. He mentioned a rambling Facebook video that Trump had posted the following day, rehearsing his usual falsehoods. “He gave them oxygen again,” Sterling said. “I mean . . .” He sighed. “The disinformation itself is what’s leading to the environment that could lead to violence.”

I spoke with a G.O.P. strategist in Georgia, who asked not to be named, about the way that Loeffler and Perdue were handling this misinformation. The strategist told me a story about two other senators from Georgia, both Democrats, who held office decades ago. “When Sam Nunn first got to the U.S. Senate, he told Senator Herman Talmadge that he got all sorts of crazy letters from constituents talking about seeing space aliens and such,” the strategist recalled. “He asked the senior senator what to do about those. Talmadge said, ‘Sam, you answer every one of those letters. Without the nut vote, you won’t carry a county in Georgia.’ ” The Republican Party in the state is split between those who believe the election was stolen, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who endorsed Loeffler and whom the strategist described to me as “fucking crazy,” and those who regard the allegations of theft as “absolutely bonkers,” the strategist said. He didn’t think the senators had succeeded in pleasing either side. “Loeffler and Perdue tried to feed the nuts with their attack on Raffensperger,” he said. “The nuts spit it out.”

On December 4th, I drove to Roswell, a town in the north Atlanta suburbs, to shadow canvassers with the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a conservative group founded a decade ago by the Christian lobbyist Ralph Reed. It was raining, and the canvassers, Adam Pipkin and Matthew Fuentez, tucked door hangers in the pockets of their coats as they trudged up steep driveways. We were in an area that leans only slightly Republican; Ossoff-Warnock yard signs outnumbered Loeffler-Perdue signs, although Trump signs outnumbered them all. Pipkin, a genial man in his late thirties and F.F.C.’s state director, drove his F-150 between groupings of target homes. He and Fuentez, a thirty-one-year-old who lost his job earlier this year and was door-knocking part-time, used an app that listed addresses worth approaching. Not all of them belonged to Republicans. “You may have a Dem on here that’s pro-life,” Pipkin said. “That’s why it’s telling us to go there.” He added, “I think we’re hitting more independents than anybody else.”

Seven hundred F.F.C. team members had descended on Georgia, Pipkin said. They were not telling people how to vote, he assured me. But the candidate-comparison charts that they handed out, with such headings as “abortion on demand” and “Confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett,” made their preferences clear, even if “Hi, I’m a canvasser with Faith & Freedom” did not. At one point, Pipkin and Fuentez optimistically approached a woman who had a Warnock-Ossoff sign in her yard. (Her house was not on their list.) Hearing the name of the group, the woman said, “That could be . . . for Warnock?” When she learned that it wasn’t, she tried to give Fuentez some literature of her own.

Tim Head, F.F.C.’s executive director, is a Texan who did missionary work in Asia and Europe before becoming a policy adviser to legislators in his home state. He trailed Pipkin and Fuentez in a red S.U.V. The organization had “four hundred people knocking on doors every single day in Georgia already,” he told me. By January, he said, “we might literally have a thousand people on the streets knocking.” Head described Trump’s focus on election fraud as a “quandary,” but sounded a hopeful note. “I think that his tone and his specific message is actually in the process of slightly moderating,” he said. “Instead of calling into question the veracity of the process, he’s actually going to start engaging people again to engage in the process.” Trump would soon make his first visit to Georgia in support of the campaigns, and Head believed he would visit once more before they were over. “He needs to do it,” he said. “And he will. He’s going to want to have Loeffler’s support, and her super pac’s support, in two or three years.”

Head was confident that Perdue would beat Ossoff. “Based on voting lists and turnout in November, he should win by three points,” he said. (The polls—which, in recent years, have been more accurate in Georgia than in many states—show two tight races, in keeping with November’s results.) He had his doubts about Loeffler, though, and he fretted about the effect that Lin Wood and other conspiracists might have on turnout. “If twenty thousand Republicans in the state of Georgia sit at home and say, ‘I don’t believe in the system,’ or ‘I’m tired of Kemp and Raffensperger,’ that’s enough for Loeffler to lose,” he said. (A few days later, Debbie Dooley tweeted, “GA voters should vote for Perdue but not vote for Kemp’s appointee Loeffler in protest of Kemp being a traitor.”) “Lin Wood’s rhetoric could almost single-handedly move half a per cent, which could shift the outcome in the Loeffler race,” he said.

Pipkin and Fuentez told me that only a few of the people they’d met while canvassing had brought up the claims of election fraud. One person had said, “I just don’t see the point of voting anymore,” Fuentez told me. “I just say, it’s gonna come down to the wire—we need your vote,” he said.I walked with him to another door, past a yard festooned with half a dozen American flags. Janet Hardesty, a seventy-year-old analyst for A.T. & T., opened the door and said that she’d already voted. “I’m a proud Republican,” she explained. She had sent in an absentee ballot. “I was afraid that maybe it wouldn’t get there,” she said. “Or maybe it would be changed. That’s when I found the My Voter Page—and it lets me track the whole thing!” Hardesty believed Democrats had rigged the November result, but didn’t think the Republicans could prove it in court. “But, as I told my family,” she went on, “you’ve gotta get Loeffler and Perdue in there. You’ve gotta have a fire wall.” She added, “The fraud makes the people I’ve talked to more inclined to vote again.”

Across the street, a father in his eighties and his adult son sat in lawn chairs smoking cigars in an open garage. Fuentez began to introduce himself.

“Are you guys Republican?” the son asked. Fuentez said that he was.

“I’m gonna vote Republican,” the father interjected.

“Yeah, we’re a hundred per cent for Kelly Loeffler and . . . yeah,” the son added.

Both men said they’d be voting in person. “There’s always concerns about fraud, with dead people voting,” the son said. “You’d be foolish not to be concerned.”

After Fuentez said goodbye and started back down the street, the son shouted in his direction. “Keep up the good work, as long as you’re Republican,” he said. “Otherwise, go away.”

The following Saturday, at a small airport in Valdosta, just north of the Florida line, thousands waited to hear Trump speak at a “Defend the Majority” rally. Venders were selling “Stop the Steal” gear, and members of the media were accessing the venue’s Wi-Fi network by typing the password “RiggedElection!” It was cold for South Georgia; most of those gathered wore heavy jackets but not masks, and were packed tightly around the stage. Among them was a radiator repairman who’d driven his family down from upstate New York and a man who’d come from Illinois. A dozen or so members of the Proud Boys, which the F.B.I. has deemed an “extremist group with ties to white nationalism,” wore sweatshirts signalling that they were from New Jersey. There were Georgians there, too, and I asked dozens of them if they planned to vote. Most said they did. One man told me, “The votes will probably get switched to the person we don’t vote for. My vote in November probably got switched to Biden. Bunch of damn thieves.” He said that he was planning to vote in person.

The Elton John song “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” played as I walked to a table with free signs reading “women for trump, defend democracy” and “make america great again.” None of the signs featured the names of Loeffler or Perdue. “Hell, yeah, I’m voting,” Mickey Cereijo, a junk-removal specialist standing near the table, told me. Probably in person, he said. He was concerned about “Dominican” voting machines, and he planned to be a poll watcher at his precinct. “I’m gonna make sure I keep a sharp eye out,” he said. He described Lin Wood and Sidney Powell as “troupers” who have “so many witnesses,” but he disagreed with Wood’s proposition that people should withhold their votes. “He’s full of shit about that,” he said.

A young couple from Valdosta, with children in tow, said that they planned to vote early and in person, too. “There’s no real procedure that I have trust in,” the husband said. He added, “The whole state of Georgia is Dominion. I don’t even trust this runoff election. We’re gonna see maybe even worse than what we saw in the Presidential.” “I don’t think we’ll see worse,” his wife said. “There’s been light shown in the dark.” She went on, “They’re investigating that ballot-harvesting group that had to do with that one Black chick who tried to win the governor’s race.” She was referring to Stacey Abrams. Lin Wood’s revolt “is bullshit,” she said. The family headed toward the fence closest to Air Force One, which had just landed, to watch Trump walk down the stairs.

“You know we won Georgia,” Trump began, reiterating a lie that, at that point, had been disproved by two vote counts and audits. The crowd chanted “Four more years” and “We love you!” Loeffler and Perdue stood at Trump’s side, smiling and nodding. Trump spoke for most of two hours, and eventually got around to the rally’s ostensible purpose, which he described as “the most important congressional runoff, probably in American history.” “If these two don’t get in,” he continued, pointing to the senators, “there’s going to be nothing to stop them,” meaning the Democrats. “You have no idea how bad it will be.” He said that the United States would become a “socialist country” with a “communistic form of government,” and that Warnock and Ossoff would be “total pawns of Chuck Schumer.” But Trump spent the majority of the chilly evening rehashing election-related grievances and conspiracies, mentioning suitcases put “under a table with a black robe around it” and other mysterious items. Later, Loeffler and Perdue each spoke briefly and thanked Trump profusely. The crowd shouted over them “Stop the Steal!” and “Fight for Trump!”

Heading back to my truck, I struck up a conversation with Brandon Beasley, a forty-one-year-old Republican from a suburb north of Atlanta, who was one of the few Black people I saw at the rally. He called voting “the lesser of two evils.” I asked if he knew people who were sitting out the runoffs. “They’re everywhere,” he said. “I know some personally. They’re not voting. Thousands of them.” Beasley went on, “I’m looking at what President Trump is going through. And if the President is going through that, what can two senators go through?” Loeffler and Perdue hadn’t done enough, in his estimation, to advance Trump’s case.

“Guys,” a white man from Chicago said, walking up to us. “Drag everybody and go vote.”

“You have to,” Beasley said.

“And don’t wait until the last fucking day,” the man went on. “Go early. So if there’s any shenanigans, we can catch them early.” He added, “There’s so many people watching this election, there’s not going to be an ounce of fucking fraud.”

“The same machines are in place,” Beasley countered.

“It’s gonna be so watched,” the man said. “They’re not gonna be able to hack it.”

“Let’s hope so,” Beasley said.

The next day, I texted the G.O.P. strategist who’d emphasized the importance of the nut vote, to ask what he thought of Trump’s performance. “I think this line of messaging will lead to Ossoff and Warnock winning,” he replied.

On December 9th, I called up Lin Wood. I wanted to know whether he thought his crusade would help the Democrats take the Senate. He replied by calling a number of Georgia Republicans “crooked”—not only Kemp and Raffensperger (which he pronounced “Raffenspurger”) but also the attorney general, Chris Carr, and the lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, whom Trump had recently called “dumb.” The day before, Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Presidential election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Loeffler and Perdue announced their support for his efforts; Carr said that Paxton was “constitutionally, legally, and factually wrong about Georgia.” (The Court declined to hear Paxton’s case.) Wood said that Carr and the other officials he had mentioned would all resign, get recalled, or be convicted of crimes before their current terms were over. What crimes, specifically, would those be, I asked? Wood pointed out that he is not a criminal attorney, but said that these men had “taken China money” in exchange for interfering in the election. “And maybe tax issues,” he said.“Hundreds of thousands” of Georgia Republicans are “disgusted” by their party and might boycott the runoffs, according to Wood. “Why does Kelly Loeffler have a Mao Zedong Andy Warhol painting in her house?” he asked at one point. He decried voting on machines “owned by China and on paper ballots likely falsified, many of them, on Chinese paper, produced in China.” (The ballots are printed in the U.S. on paper manufactured in North America; the machines are not owned by China.) What about the potential “Lin Wood effect” dampening conservative turnout? “They can blame me if they want to,” he said. So long as Trump and Mike Pence were rightly reinstalled in office, he went on, the Vice-President, Pence, would still “cast any tie-breaking vote in the Senate,” even if the Democrats were to win the two runoffs. This is the kind of thinking that worries Republicans like Gabriel Sterling: the idea that helping Trump makes voting for Loeffler and Perdue unnecessary. The day I spoke to Wood, Trump tweeted, “If the two Senators from Georgia should lose, which would be a horrible thing for our Country, I am the only thing that stands between ‘Packing the Court’ (last number heard, 25), and preserving it.”

I asked Wood why the courts kept dismissing his lawsuits and those of his allies. “Candidly,” he said, “I believe that our government—from the local, state, and national level, including our judiciary—has been infiltrated and influenced by Communist China.” I asked if Republican officials­ had told him directly to cease his efforts. “Those people have not contacted me, because those people are cowards,” he said. Before our call ended, Wood, who has been sued by former colleagues for erratic and abusive behavior, suggested that the recent death of a young aide to Loeffler, who had dated one of Kemp’s daughters, was the result of foul play­ and not a tragic car crash, as had been widely reported. “I’m not making any accusations about what happened to that young boy,” he said. “It’s tragic that he died. But I think there’s a lot of reasons to investigate it very, very thoroughly.”

“He’s an unserious man in a very serious time,” Sterling told me, of Wood, the next day. “It's just totally out there. I mean, the fact that anybody gives him any credence is amazing to me.” But plenty do, apparently. “There was another site that was taken down, last night, that basically had an ‘enemies list’ that had the governor of Michigan, me, Brian Kemp,” Sterling said. “It had our pictures with a sniper kind of target on us.” It included their addresses and pictures of their homes.

Sterling did not believe that hundreds of thousands of Georgia Republicans would boycott the runoffs. But he feared that a smaller group could—maybe ten thousand or so, possibly enough to be decisive. “He’s a big freaking problem,” he said, of Wood. “The President lost by twelve thousand votes here.” Sterling hadn’t been thrilled by Trump’s Valdosta performance, either. A few days after we spoke, Politico reported that while Trump was ostensibly fund-raising for the Georgia runoffs, most of the money he received was going to his own pac. Before we hung up, I asked Sterling if he’d support a potential Trump run in 2024. “This is why God gave us primaries,” he said.

To reach a precinct won by Trump in November, you must drive at least half an hour from downtown Atlanta. On the second day of early voting, in mid-December, I went to Milton, one of the wealthiest and whitest parts of Fulton County. Later in the month, Ivanka Trump would come to Milton for a rally with Loeffler and Perdue. Across the street from the local library, where voting was taking place, I counted eleven signs for each of the Republicans, and two each for Ossoff and Warnock. It was shortly before lunchtime, and a line wrapped around the side of the building. I spoke briefly to a middle-aged white woman as she got into her car. “Some shady things went on during our election,” she said, referring to November. Still, she added, “It’s really important to exercise your right to vote.”

“I’m surprised to see the line here for a runoff like we have,” a white man in his eighties, who said his name was Don and that he was a “fiscal conservative,” told me. He didn’t say whom he’d voted for, but proposed that “we need a check and balance” and that “Obamacare” was the result of an insufficiently checked Administration. Christian, a white man in his forties who said he voted for Libertarian candidates in the last two Presidential elections, offered the same reasoning. “You need divided government, so that we can kind of just all take a step back,” he said. I recalled a conversation I’d had in November with a local resident named Mike, who voted for Trump in 2016 but scoffed at his most recent conspiracy theories, and was troubled that Loeffler and Perdue seemed to be taking them up. Each of the senators was “just an R,” Mike said, and he’d be voting for them.

By the evening, more people had cast in-person ballots in two days of runoff voting than did so in the first two days of the general election. So far, mail-in ballots were down; those had broken disproportionately for Democrats in November. A recent SurveyUSA poll of eight hundred Georgia adults turned up seventy-eight registered voters who said that they were unlikely to vote in the runoffs; of those, about one in five said it was because “the voting process is rigged,” and most who selected that reason identified as conservative. (The poll had Ossoff up five points and Warnock up seven, although polls generally show closer races.) But many Republican voters seem capable of doubting an election their candidate lost while participating in an election they still hope to win. This past Saturday, Trump tweeted, “As badly as we were treated in Georgia by the ‘Republican’ Governor and ‘Republican’ Secretary of State, we must have a massive victory for two great people, @KLoeffler & @sendavidperdue, on January 5th. I will be having a big Rally for them on Monday night, January 4th. WIN!”

Even Chris Hill, the far-right militiaman who live-streamed one of Atlanta’s first “Stop the Steal” protests—his YouTube channel has since been taken down—said that he was planning to vote again. The picture that Trump has been painting, of dark forces connected with the Democratic Party thwarting the will of real Americans, may or may not ultimately hurt Loeffler and Perdue at the ballot box, but, either way, it bolsters Hill’s view of things. His group is part of a larger Three-Percenter movement; some of the men charged with attempting to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, earlier in the fall, reportedly have ties to a chapter in Wisconsin. “We maintain a defensive posture,” Hill insisted. “We have no plans of going on the offensive, but we will defend people and property in the aftermath of this fraudulent election. And we will resist unconstitutional law. And we will resist tyranny.” He still holds that Trump’s loss in November was bogus, and he knows whom he’s voting for on January 5th.