'Georgia Is Our Laboratory': Inside Trump's Plan to Rig 2024

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

77% : Since last year, Trump has regularly asked confidants whether Georgia's Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones would make a good governor.
68% : Trump has played a key role here, behind the scenes.
63% : Trump sits atop this sprawling network, receiving updates on progress from political advisers and other MAGA acolytes.
53% : If the election were held today, polls suggest Trump would win Georgia outright.
52% : "He's got to go," Trump said privately, noting Lindsey's position on the "very important" election board, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
43% : "I just feel like this is a waste of my time and also my kids' time," she told county officials at a 2023 hearing.
41% : Lawyers close to Trump are already preparing for the former president to claim fraud in Georgia and challenge the results of the election -- even in the event that he wins -- just to prove a point about imaginary "fraud" in Democratic areas.
41% : That position was echoed by a host of conservative media outlets and at least one think tank with ties to Trump.
41% : "It is Donald Trump's party," says a GOP source close to Trump.
38% : In recent months, Trump spent time calling Georgia lawmakers and fellow MAGA hard-liners in the state to ask them about Lindsey and to demand that he be shown the door, somehow.
37% : Republican state House Speaker Jon Burns announced that he would replace Lindsey with Janelle King, a Republican media pundit in Georgia who supported Trump in 2020 and said on her podcast that she is "against no-excuse" voting by mail.
36% : "Everybody is gearing up for full-blown warfare," says a Republican source close to Trump who has worked on "election integrity" efforts.
35% : As lieutenant governor, Jones replaced a Republican critical of Trump.
33% : Across the state, MAGA die-hards are devoting considerable resources to purging voter rolls, intimidating election officials, employing legal dirty tricks, and ousting Republican officials and election appointees who haven't been initiated into the cult of Trump.
31% : But ever since President Biden's inauguration, conservative activists and policymakers in Georgia have tried to bypass Raffensperger and worked diligently to turn Trump's heads-I-win-tails-you-lose philosophy of elections into public policy.
31% : As Trump has continued to lie that the 2020 election was "stolen" and "rigged" , the former president and his supporters have been making concrete, step-by-step progress in shaping electoral processes to his benefit.
31% : Conservative activists heckle election officials on a regular basis with the conspiracy theories Trump birthed, and an indicted election denier -- now the state's lieutenant governor -- pushes Trump's agenda in the Assembly as he eyes higher office.
30% : "There's massive fraud, so that should be ... solved, no matter who wins in Georgia or any state," says one lawyer and conservative-movementarian who has discussed the matter with Trump, although they present no evidence to back such claims.
27% : In the past four years, Trump and his allies have been doing everything they can to make sure that a Republican defeat in Georgia simply cannot happen again -- and to entrench a permanent GOP majority in a deeply divided state.
26% : During his time out of office, Trump has noted to close advisers that while the state's voting overhaul does "some nice things," the changes won't matter unless, in Trump's words, "you get the fucking RINOs out of the way," according to a source with direct knowledge of the ex-president's opinions on the matter.
23% : During Georgia's presidential primary in March, Fulton County Republican Board of Elections member Julie Adams refused to certify the results of a primary contest that Trump won without question.
18% : "I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people" for Zuckerberg's role in funding election-administration charities, Trump told CNBC in March.
17% : Team Trump sees Georgia as 'a road map' for putting Trump's heads-I-win-tails-you-lose philosophy of elections into practiceT he presidential election this year will come down to seven states -- but there's one that Donald Trump and his most committed lieutenants see as a blueprint for corrupting future local and national elections: Georgia.
15% : "The MAGA movement will be set for life if Donald Trump and the party can purge the RINOs from Georgia," says the Republican source close to Trump.
12% : Despite the bad blood between Trump and Kemp, the Georgia governor signed the bill, dubbed "Jim Crow in the 21st century " by Biden, into law.

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