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      A Georgia Mystery: How Many Democrats Voted in the G.O.P. Primary?

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      ATLANTA — One look at the results of Georgia’s primary election last week led many Republicans to believe it was the product of Democratic meddling. Former President Donald J. Trump’s recruited challengers lost in grand fashion in his most sought-after races: David Perdue was routed by Gov. Brian Kemp by more than 50 percentage points, while Representative Jody Hice fell to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger by nearly 20.Mr. Trump and his allies pointed to so-called Democratic crossover voters as the cause of their shellackings. In Georgia’s open primary system, Democrats and Republicans can vote in the other party’s primary if they wish, and more than 37,000 people cast early ballots in this year’s Republican primary election after voting in the Democratic primary in 2020.Some Democrats, for their part, staked a claim to these voters, arguing that they had crossed over to strategically support candidates who reject Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election. Most of the crossover voters, the Democrats said, would return to the party in November.But a closer look at these voters paints a more complicated picture. Just 7 percent of those who voted early during last month’s Republican primary cast ballots for Democrats in that party’s 2020 primary election, according to the data firm L2. And 70 percent of this year’s crossover voters who cast early ballots in the G.O.P. primary had participated in both Democratic and Republican primaries over the last decade.These voters, data suggests, are less Republican traitors or stalwart Democrats aiming to stop Trump loyalists than they are highly sought-after — and unpredictable — swing voters.“I didn’t want any of the Trumpsters becoming a candidate,” said Frances Cooper, 43, who voted in Columbia County, two hours east of Atlanta.A self-described moderate, Ms. Cooper said that she had voted in both Democratic and Republican primaries in the past, and that she could often vote “either way.” This time, she said, Mr. Kemp had been “pretty good, and was the best of our options.” She was undecided about the November general election for governor, but “if anything leaning toward Kemp.”Understand the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarAfter key races in Georgia, Pennsylvania and other states, here’s what we’ve learned.Trump’s Invincibility in Doubt: With many of Donald J. Trump’s endorsed candidates failing to win, some Republicans see an opening for a post-Trump candidate in 2024.G.O.P. Governors Emboldened: Many Republican governors are in strong political shape. And some are openly opposing Mr. Trump.Voter Fraud Claims Fade: Republicans have been accepting their primary victories with little concern about the voter fraud they once falsely claimed caused Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss.The Politics of Guns: Republicans have been far more likely than Democrats to use messaging about guns to galvanize their base in the midterms. Here’s why.Voters like Ms. Cooper base their choices in every election on multiple variables: their political leanings, how competitive one party’s primary might be or the overall environment in any given election year, among others. Some Democratic voters in deep-red counties opted for a Republican ballot because they believed it would be a more effective vote. Others, frustrated with leadership in Washington, voted according to their misgivings.Many unknowns still remain. The current data on crossover voters includes only those who cast ballots during Georgia’s three-week early voting period, when the most politically engaged people tend to vote. In addition to traditional swing voters or disaffected Democrats, a portion of those who crossed over were indeed probably Democratic voters switching strategically to the Republican primary to spite the former president.Yet the crossover voters who cast early ballots in last month’s Republican primary are not demographically representative of Georgia’s multiracial Democratic base, which also includes a growing number of young voters. Fifty-five percent of these early crossover voters were above the age of 65, and 85 percent were white, according to voter registration data. Less than 3 percent were between the ages of 18 and 29.It is unclear whether a majority of these voters will return to support Democrats this November, as some in the party expect, or whether they will vote again for Republicans in large numbers.“I think there’s a real danger on the part of Democrats in Georgia to just assume that they aren’t going to lose some of those voters from 2020,” said Erik Iverson, a Republican pollster who works with Georgia campaigns.Crossing the runoff thresholdNo race has attracted more debate about crossover voting than the Republican primary for secretary of state, in which Mr. Raffensperger, the incumbent, who had rejected attempts to subvert the 2020 election, defeated Mr. Hice, a Trump-endorsed challenger.Though Mr. Raffensperger won by almost 20 points, he escaped being forced into a runoff election by finishing with 52.3 percent of the vote, or 2.3 percent above the majority threshold that would have prompted a runoff.Operatives on both sides of the aisle have speculated that crossover voting was a chief reason that Mr. Raffensperger avoided a runoff. But drawing such a conclusion ignores the many reasons for crossover voting in Georgia, and probably overestimates the number of true Democrats voting for Mr. Raffensperger.“That would be an awful lot of crossover voting,” said Scott H. Ainsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, adding that Mr. Raffensperger’s nearly 30,000-vote margin to avoid a runoff had most likely been spurred by more than just meandering former Democratic primary voters.Still, that hasn’t dissuaded some from pointing to crossover voters as a root cause of Mr. Raffensperger’s success.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger at a campaign event in Atlanta. In 2020, he refused to help President Donald J. Trump overturn Georgia’s presidential election results.Audra Melton for The New York TimesRepresentative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a Republican who founded the group Country First, which supports pro-democracy G.O.P. candidates, cited the Georgia secretary of state’s victory as proof of his organization’s effectiveness.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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      They Insisted the 2020 Election Was Tainted. Their 2022 Primary Wins? Not So Much.

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      Republicans are accepting their primary victories with little concern about the voter fraud they once falsely claimed caused Donald J. Trump’s loss.This spring, when Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama was fighting to win over conservatives in his campaign for Senate, he ran a television ad that boasted, “On Jan. 6, I proudly stood with President Trump in the fight against voter fraud.”But when Mr. Brooks placed second in Alabama’s Republican primary last week, leaving him in a runoff, he said he was not concerned about fraud in his election.“If it’s a close race and you’re talking about a five- or 10-vote difference, well, then, it becomes a greater concern,” he said of his primary results. “But I’ve got more important fish to fry. And so, at some point, you have to hope that the election system is going to be honest.”Mr. Brooks was one of 147 Republican members of Congress who voted on Jan. 6, 2021, to object to the results of the 2020 presidential election. Hundreds more Republican state legislators across the country took similar action in their own capitals. President Biden’s victory, they said, was corrupted by either outright fraud or pandemic-related changes to voting.Now, many of those Republicans are accepting the results of their primaries without complaint. Already this year, 55 of the lawmakers who objected in 2020 have run in competitive primaries, contests conducted largely under the same rules and regulations as those in 2020. None have raised doubts about vote counts. No conspiracy theories about mail ballots have surfaced. And no one has called for a “forensic audit” or further investigations of the 2022 primary results.Republicans’ easy acceptance of a voting system they once slammed as broken exposes a fundamental contradiction in their complaints about the 2020 election. Claims about fraud and stolen elections are often situational — used in some races (against Democrats) but not others (against other Republicans), and to challenge some outcomes (losing) but not others (winning).Mr. Brooks placed second in last week’s Republican primary, but made it into the June 21 runoff.Charity Rachelle for The New York TimesThis phenomenon was on clear display in 2020, when scores of Republicans who repeated allegations about a “rigged” presidential race accepted their own victories based on the same ballots.But the lack of discussion about fraud in this year’s primaries highlights a particular strain of partisanship driving many of the myths about stolen elections.Mr. Brooks offered a simple answer to why he’s not worried about his race: There’s no fraud in Republican primaries, he said.After the Georgia Primary ElectionThe May 24 races were among the most consequential so far of the 2022 midterm cycle.Takeaways: G.O.P. voters rejected Donald Trump’s 2020 fixation, and Democrats backed a gun-control champion. Here’s what else we learned.Rebuking Trump: The ex-president picked losers up and down the ballot in Georgia, raising questions about the firmness of his grip on the G.O.P.G.O.P. Governor’s Race: Brian Kemp scored a landslide victory over David Perdue, delivering Mr. Trump his biggest setback of the 2022 primaries.2018 Rematch: Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor, will again face Mr. Kemp — but in a vastly different political climate.“I’m in a Republican primary, and noncitizens don’t normally vote in Republican primaries,” Mr. Brooks said. “In a Republican primary or a Democrat primary, the motivation to steal elections is less because the candidates’ philosophy-of-government differences are minor.”Noncitizens don’t vote in any federal elections in significant numbers, in Alabama or elsewhere, according to a 2020 report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Investigators from both parties have unearthed only minuscule numbers of any type of voter fraud. In recent years, the rare instances of broad fraud schemes that have become public have been engineered by Republicans, including an absentee ballot scheme in North Carolina that led the state’s Board of Elections to order a redo of a House race in 2018.Not all Republicans who spread false claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election considered their own races to be exempt. Some said that “fraud existed” in their own elections and that investigations were needed. Still, they accepted their victories.“We don’t know how much fraud exists or existed because we weren’t able to see,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania told a local CBS affiliate a week after the 2020 election. Mr. Perry focused on Philadelphia as a source for fraud in the presidential race and called for additional review. He also said he was “humbled” to take his seat in the House.In the Pennsylvania primaries last week, Mr. Perry ran for re-election unopposed. He did not respond to messages left on his cellphone, and his campaign did not return requests for comment.The Republican effort to sow skepticism about elections in racially diverse Democratic cities is a generations-long project, with roots as far back as Richard Nixon’s 1960 defeat against John F. Kennedy. By the time Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, he and millions of his supporters were primed to believe false allegations about “ballot harvesting” and machines miscounting in America’s populous cities. Mr. Brooks said in an interview that, in Alabama, fraud occurred “in predominantly Democrat parts of the state.”Part of the reason Republican candidates are accepting primary results without talking about fraud is they don’t have Democrats to blame, said Trey Grayson, the former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky.“They’re thinking it’s a primary, it’s our side. We didn’t lose to somebody on the other side who is evil, who’s going to change policy more dramatically,” Mr. Grayson said in an interview. “There’s a tribal, ‘my side’s always right, your side is always wrong. We’re not stealing elections, your side is stealing elections.’”Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina accepted his defeat in the Republican primary on May 17.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesEven candidates who lost this year, either in close elections or decisive defeats, have accepted the results. Representative Madison Cawthorn, who had still been promoting falsehoods about the 2020 election on social media a week before his primary election, conceded and called his rival, Chuck Edwards, the night of his loss.When asked if Mr. Cawthorn had any concerns about fraud in the election, a spokesman for his congressional office declined to comment.In Georgia, the statewide Republican primaries were high-profile contests between Trump-aligned election deniers and officials who blocked Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results. Representative Jody Hice spent much of his campaign railing about Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, and his mismanaging elections.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More