With return to 2020, Georgia Republicans are playing with political fire

But the debate was really about control — who should control Georgia’s elections, who can access its citizens’ information and, ultimately, whether the federal government or the state of Georgia gets the final say over which votes should count.

It has never been more important for Georgia leaders, including Gov. Brian Kemp, to insist, as the Constitution does, that running elections is the role of the states, not the federal government.

That isn’t exactly where Republican senators were Monday, arguing that Georgia law requires Raffensperger to send all of the data that the DOJ requested. Plus, state Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, said he could easily hire a private investigator and get all of that information and more, without much effort. So why not just give it to the feds?

“If you think your driver’s license information is not out in the real world, I’ve got some cold news for you — it’s out there,” he said. “And I can go to the white pages or anywhere on the internet, and I can find out where you live.”

State Sen. Ed Setzler, R-Acworth, argued that Georgia should share its full data rolls because only the guilty have something to hide. “If we have only valid voters in our system, what is there to hide?” he asked.

Democrats were quick to argue that the same DOJ that would get the data also just raided Fulton County’s election warehouse and seized about 700 boxes of 2020 ballots. The DOJ has also been sending voter data from other states to the Department of Homeland Security to search for immigrants lacking permanent legal status, well outside the DOJ’s purpose of requesting the information in the first place.

State Sen. Josh McLaurin, a Democrat from Atlanta who is running for lieutenant governor, said the real purpose of the Senate resolution was pure pro-Trump politics, an easy way to curry favor with the president for Republicans running in Georgia’s upcoming primaries. “I’m not saying Trump is literally your daddy, but …”

Other Democrats saw shades of the state’s racist Jim Crow past, when white majorities went to any length necessary to keep Black voters like the ones in Fulton County from having their votes counted.

“Get some guts,” state Sen. David Lucas, D-Macon, said to the Republicans in the room as he argued against the motion. “Get some guts and do the right thing. That’s how you can get elected.”

The back-and-forth dragged on for hours, making it the first substantive debate in the Senate this Legislative session. At one point, a Republican senator could be overheard asking, “Whose idea was this?”

And that may be the best question of the day, because after losing two special elections and two Public Service Commission seats in 2025, GOP leaders seemed to come into the 2026 Legislative session with a single, unified message of affordability, complete with a range of proposals on tax cuts and lowering the cost of living.

But faster than you can say, “Let’s change the subject,” the FBI raid in Fulton County, along with the president’s vocal and ongoing fixation on relitigating the 2020 elections in Georgia, has changed all that.

And therein lies the real problem for Republicans. Because in every recent election when Republicans focused on election security and “rigged” elections, it hasn’t ended well.

In 2021, when Trump told packed rallies that Georgia elections couldn’t be trusted, Democrats won two Senate runoffs and flipped control of the U.S. Senate from Republican to Democrat.

In 2022, Trump’s hand-picked, the-election-was-rigged loyalists lost by a mile in GOP statewide primaries, while Kemp and Raffensperger, who eventually said Trump had lost, not only won their primaries but went on to be Republicans’ strongest statewide performers in November.

And yet, here we are again, with an election looming, voters saying clearly they’re focused on the economy, and the federal government is raiding Georgia elections offices and demanding voter rolls while the president threatens to prosecute officials in Georgia over the 2020 elections, including possibly Republicans.

Unlike the past election years, Trump threw in a plot twist Monday just as GOP senators were warning that if Georgia won’t share its voting data, at some point, “a true tyrant” could come in and try to nationalize Georgia’s elections.

Almost on cue, at nearly the same moment, Trump suggested that exactly.

“The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump told Dan Bongino during his podcast Monday. “We have states that I won, that show I didn’t win. You’re going to see something in Georgia, where they were able to get, with a court order, the ballots. I won that election by so much, and everybody knows it.”

In fact, Georgia leaders know the exact opposite. But if they don’t stand up and defend the state’s elections now, just as they did in 2020, Georgia may not run its elections at all after this.