2026年3月29日 美国东部时间上午5:00 / 美国有线电视新闻网（CNN）
作者：弗雷德里卡·舒滕
更新于2026年3月29日，美国东部时间上午6:34
发布于2026年3月29日，美国东部时间上午5:00
Erik S. Lesser/EPA/Shutterstock
佐治亚州阿尔法勒塔——
布拉德·拉芬斯珀格通常会回避让他声名大噪的爆炸性话题。
作为该州最高选举官员，拉芬斯珀格拒绝了唐纳德·特朗普“找到”足够选票以推翻其2020年在这个“桃子州”败选结果的要求。如今，作为佐治亚州州长共和党提名候选人，他更倾向于谈论精简州政府、降低成本——尽管共和党人要么谈论对他的愤怒，要么干脆希望他退出竞选。
亿万富翁医疗保健高管里克·杰克逊上月启动竞选活动时，在一则广告中将拉芬斯珀格的行为比作犹大的背叛。曾在2020年担任虚假共和党选举人的副州长伯特·琼斯目前获得了特朗普的背书，他将拉芬斯珀格斥为“永不支持特朗普的团队”成员。
去年的州党代表大会代表通过了一项决议，称拉芬斯珀格“令人反感”，不符合政党形象，并试图禁止他以共和党身份竞选任何公职。
“共和党人不喜欢布拉德·拉芬斯珀格，”保守派的佐治亚州共和党 assembly 主席亚历克斯·约翰逊说道，该组织近期已背书琼斯。“这是所有人都达成共识的一件事。”
随着特朗普要求对选举展开调查，联邦调查局近日查获了亚特兰大地区2020年的选票，就在5月19日初选升温之际，这场闹剧重新回到了公众视野中。
拉芬斯珀格是一位言语温和的商人出身的政治家，他顶住了特朗普的怒火，在四年前成功连任州务卿。如今他仍坚称自己拥有可行的竞选之路。他的竞选结果不仅将反映这个关键摇摆州的共和党情绪，还将揭示敢于反抗特朗普的候选人在特朗普领导的共和党中是否还有立足之地。
如今很难找到曾公开反对特朗普关于选举的虚假主张、且目前仍在共和党内部担任职务的人——更别说获得晋升了。许多人选择退休或在初选中落败，还有少数人转投其他党派，比如前佐治亚州副州长杰夫·邓肯，他正在今年的民主党州长初选中参选。
“我认识的共和党人中没有一个真的相信2020年选举被操纵了，但唐纳德·特朗普从未为他们大胆说出真相创造条件，”邓肯在接受CNN采访时说道。
那么拉芬斯珀格要如何获胜？
“我只需要继续做我自己，”他最近在亚特兰大郊区的竞选活动间隙告诉CNN。“人们都在寻找正直、无论如何都会做正确之事的人。”
为竞选投入500万美元个人资金
在竞选活动中，这位70岁的高个子候选人讲述了自己的人生经历：他热爱数学，是一名工程师，在50多岁踏入政坛前曾创办过成功的建筑和制造企业。他从郊区市议会席位起步，进入州议会，并在2018年首次赢得全州范围的公职。目前他即将结束第二任州务卿任期。
截至目前，拉芬斯珀格已为竞选活动投入了500万美元个人资金。他的团队近期预订了超过300万美元的广告时段，将于4月开始播出。
他主张，如果当选佐治亚州州长，将为州政府提供商业风格的服务和效率。拉芬斯珀格还将公共安全列为优先事项。他的长子布伦顿于2018年因芬太尼过量去世，留下了妻子和孩子。拉芬斯珀格表示，布伦顿曾多次戒酒、复吸、再戒酒，还曾入狱。
“任何父母经历的最沉痛的损失，莫过于失去孩子，”他在采访中轻声说道。
他的竞选活动和他本人的性格一样低调。
就在竞争对手们在最近一个周二密集投放电视广告时，拉芬斯珀格向北富尔顿扶轮社每月两次的例会发表了竞选演讲。
当二十多名扶轮社成员在阿尔法勒塔的硫磺石餐厅和酒馆享用沙拉、火鸡三明治和炸薯饼午餐时，拉芬斯珀格谈到了核心民生议题。其中包括呼吁对飙升的财产税设置上限、扩大择校选择，并推动恢复自然拼读法以提高四年级学生的阅读成绩。
他几乎没有提及选举，只是称赞了选举日等待时间缩短和选票计票速度加快。他还间接且正面地提及了特朗普，称赞这位总统致力于将海外制造业岗位“回迁”。（在接受CNN采访时，拉芬斯珀格表示他支持特朗普及其政策。）
但此次竞选活动凸显了拉芬斯珀格试图维持的艰难平衡。
毕竟，正是那段公开的通话录音让拉芬斯珀格登上了全国头条——在录音中，特朗普恳求拉芬斯珀格“找到11780张选票”，以声称自己在佐治亚州获胜。
拉芬斯珀格在2021年1月6日国会骚乱调查委员会的电视听证会上作证，讲述了自己拒绝满足特朗普要求的经过。他还在2021年出版了《诚信至关重要》一书，记录了2020年选举风波以及他、家人和佐治亚州选举工作者所遭受的威胁。
Al Drago/Pool/Reuters/File
一些威胁直接发到了与他结婚49年的妻子特丽西娅的手机上。其中一条写道：“请祈祷。我们每天都在计划杀死你和你的家人。对不起。”
2022年，拉芬斯珀格仍以压倒性优势击败了获得特朗普背书的初选对手、前佐治亚州众议员乔迪·海斯。
多年后，当他试图组建足够大的联盟以在5月初选中胜出时，他不愿过多提及那场选举风波。距离上次竞选已过去四年，政治格局也发生了一些变化。
其一，特朗普已经重返白宫，比以往任何时候都更专注于清算政治旧账。
“大多数人已经翻篇了，”当被问及2020年事件对此次竞选的遗留影响时，拉芬斯珀格说道。他表示，“有一小部分人”仍坚持选举欺诈主张。
“我试着温和地回应他们，但他们就是没有事实依据。”
然而，联邦调查局近期查扣2020年选票的行动表明，有些人并未翻篇。在富尔顿县执行搜查令时到场的有图尔西·加巴德，她是特朗普的国家情报总监，将重新审理选举主张作为优先事项。
当被问及联邦调查局的查扣行动时，拉芬斯珀格平静地回应道：“我看不出他们能从中得到什么。”
Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters/File
他有进入决选的机会吗？
四大共和党主要候选人——杰克逊、琼斯、拉芬斯珀格和佐治亚州总检察长克里斯·卡尔——近日走访了亚特兰大郊区玛丽埃塔的一所浸信会教堂，参加由拉尔夫·里德保守派网络分支佐治亚信仰与自由联盟组织的领导力圆桌会议。
尽管这场接替任期届满的共和党州长布莱恩·坎普的竞选日趋激烈，但此次活动并未出现激烈争执。里德在观众席旁观，每位候选人都有均等时间单独登台讲述自己的人生经历和信仰，重申反对堕胎的立场，表达对以色列和佐治亚州犹太人群体的支持，并承诺削减监管繁文缛节。
但近几周来，共和党初选已演变为杰克逊和琼斯之间的巨额开支混战，有可能将拉芬斯珀格和卡尔挤到边缘位置。
据追踪政治广告的AdImpact数据显示，医疗 staffing 公司创始人杰克逊在初选前已花费超过3900万美元用于广告投放。据《亚特兰大宪法报》报道，这一数额创下了佐治亚州州长初选当前阶段的纪录。琼斯阵营的开支则超过1300万美元。
两人之间的攻击也愈发个人化。琼斯试图将杰克逊描绘成对特朗普不忠，指出这位亿万富翁过去曾为特朗普的前总统竞选对手提供资金支持，包括前南卡罗来纳州州长尼基·黑利。
杰克逊则称琼斯“懒惰”，并试图将他描绘成依靠家族财富支撑竞选活动的人。联邦记录显示，杰克逊已向一个特朗普支持的超级政治行动委员会捐赠了100万美元。据一位知情人士透露，他近日与特朗普及其他主要捐赠者在佛罗里达州的海湖庄园私人俱乐部共进晚餐。
尽管杰克逊试图与总统建立联系，但特朗普仍坚定支持琼斯，这位副州长在信仰与自由联盟的集会上也特意提到了这一点。
“顺便说一句，我得到了特朗普总统的背书，不知道大家有没有听说，”琼斯在观众的零星笑声中打趣道。“他已经背书了三次，不是一次，也不是两次。”
拉芬斯珀格的助手认为，杰克逊和琼斯可能会瓜分支持“让美国再次伟大”阵营的选票，这为他创造了机会。根据佐治亚州法律，候选人必须获得超过50%的选票才能直接赢得初选；否则，得票前两名的候选人将在6月16日的决选中展开角逐。
佐治亚大学资深政治学家查尔斯·布洛克表示，这种情况是有可能出现的。“可能会有一部分选民说，‘我不想投票给杰克逊或琼斯，他们俩听起来都像无赖，所以拉芬斯珀格听起来是最佳选择。’”
曾担任佐治亚州共和党执行主任、如今经营一家公共事务公司的杰伊·摩根表示，拉芬斯珀格的竞选之路艰难。他说，即便选民厌倦了杰克逊和琼斯之间的内斗，该州相当一部分共和党选民可能会听从特朗普的指示。而拉芬斯珀格，他说，“显然是特朗普最不希望看到出现在选票上的人。”
在采访中，一些选民表示他们认可拉芬斯珀格的理念，但尚未下定决心支持他的 candidacy。
“坦白说，拉芬斯珀格是最遭人恨的，”丽莎·巴贝奇说道，她担任佐治亚州黑人共和党理事会第一副主席，在信仰与自由联盟活动中聆听了四位候选人的演讲。“但当他讲述儿子的故事时，我不禁感同身受，真心相信他是在乎的。”
CNN记者大卫·赖特对本文亦有报道贡献。
Brad Raffensperger runs for Georgia governor and tries to defy Republicans who called him ‘repugnant’
2026-03-29 05:00 AM ET / CNN
By Fredreka Schouten
Updated Mar 29, 2026, 6:34 AM ET
PUBLISHED Mar 29, 2026, 5:00 AM ET
Georgia Secretary of State and Republican gubernatorial candidate Brad Raffensperger speaks at an event in Duluth, Georgia, on January 9, 2026.
Erik S. Lesser/EPA/Shutterstock
Alpharetta, Georgia—
Brad Raffensperger generally avoids the explosive topic that made him famous.
As the state’s top election official, Raffensperger refused Donald Trump’s demand to “find” the votes needed to overturn the president’s 2020 loss in the Peach State. Now, as a candidate for the Republican nomination for Georgia governor, he prefers to talk about making state government leaner and lowering costs — even as Republicans either talk about their anger at him or just want him to go away.
Billionaire health care executive Rick Jackson kicked off his campaign last month with an ad that compared Raffensperger’s actions to those of Judas. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who served as a false Republican elector in 2020 and is running now with the president’s endorsement, has cast Raffensperger as a member of “Team Never Trump.”
Delegates to a state party convention last year approved a resolution that labeled him “repugnant” to the party brand and sought to bar him from seeking any office as a Republican.
“The Republican Party does not like Brad Raffensperger,” said Alex Johnson, chairman of the conservative Georgia Republican Assembly, which recently endorsed Jones. “That’s the one thing everyone is in agreement on.”
And as Trump demands election investigations, the FBI recently seized 2020 ballots from the Atlanta area, pushing the drama back into the spotlight just as the May 19 primary heats up.
Raffensperger, a soft-spoken businessman-turned-politician who survived Trump’s wrath to win reelection as secretary of state four years ago, still insists he has a viable path forward. How he fares will suggest not just the mood of the GOP in a critical swing state, but whether candidates who defy the president have a place in Trump’s Republican Party.
It’s hard to find Republicans who stood up to Trump on his false claims about elections and still have current positions in the GOP — much less who’ve secured promotions. Many have retired or lost primaries, and a few have switched parties, like former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who is running in this year’s Democratic primary for governor.
“I don’t know of a single Republican that actually believes the election was rigged in 2020, yet Donald Trump has not created the permission structure for them to actually say that out loud,” Duncan said in an interview with CNN.
So how can Raffensperger win?
“I just need to continue to be Brad,” he told CNN recently between campaign stops in suburban Atlanta. “People are looking for someone who has integrity, that will do the right thing, no matter what.”
A $5 million investment in his own bid
On the stump, the lanky 70-year-old leans into his biography as a math-loving engineer who built successful construction and manufacturing companies before entering politics in his 50s. He rose from a suburban city council seat to the state legislature and won statewide office for the first time in 2018. He’s now wrapping up his second term as secretary of state.
Raffensperger has put $5 million of his own money into the campaign so far. His team recently reserved more than $3 million in advertising that will start airing in April.
As Georgia governor, he argues, he would help deliver business-style service and efficiency to state government. Raffensperger also made public safety a priority. His eldest son, Brenton, died in 2018 of a fentanyl overdose, leaving behind a wife and children. Brenton, Raffensperger said, went through multiple bouts of sobriety and then drug use and sobriety again and served time in jail.
“The deepest loss any parent will ever have is when they lose a child,” he said softly during the interview.
His campaign is as low-key as his demeanor.
While his rivals bombarded the airwaves on a recent Tuesday, Raffensperger took his campaign pitch to the twice-monthly meeting of the Rotary Club of North Fulton.
As more than two dozen Rotarians lunched on salads, turkey sandwiches and tater tots inside Alpharetta’s Brimstone Restaurant and Tavern, Raffensperger talked up bread-and-butter issues. That included calling for a cap on soaring property taxes, the expansion of school choice options and pushing for a return to phonics to boost fourth-grade reading performance.
He barely mentioned elections, except to tout lower Election Day wait times and faster ballot tabulation. And he made a glancing — but positive — reference to Trump, praising the president for working to “reshore” manufacturing jobs from overseas. (In his interview with CNN, Raffensperger said he supports Trump and his policies.)
But the campaign appearance underscores the difficult balance Raffensperger is trying to strike.
After all, it was the public release of a recording of a phone call in which Trump implored Raffensperger to “find 11,780” votes he would need to claim victory in Georgia that catapulted Raffensperger into the national spotlight.
Raffensperger testified about his refusal to accede to Trump’s demands during a televised hearing of the January 6, 2021, committee. And he wrote a 2021 book, “Integrity Counts,” that chronicled the 2020 election drama and the threats he, his family and Georgia election workers endured.
A transcript of a phone call between Donald Trump and Brad Raffensperger appears on a screen during a hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol, held on June 21, 2022.
Al Drago/Pool/Reuters/File
Some went directly to the cell phone of his wife of 49 years, Tricia. Read one: “please pray. we plan for the death of you and your family every day. Im sorry.”
Raffensperger still handily beat former Georgia Rep. Jody Hice, his Trump-backed primary challenger, in 2022.
Years later, he’s reluctant to dwell on the drama of those elections as he tries to build a big enough coalition to survive the primary in May. Four years after his last race, the political landscape has shifted some.
For one thing, Trump has returned to the White House, more focused than ever on settling political scores.
“Most people have moved on,” Raffensperger said when asked about the lingering effects of 2020 on the race. “There’s a subset” of people who cling to the election fraud claims, he said.
“I try to be gentle about it, but they just don’t have the facts.”
The FBI’s recent seizure of 2020 ballots makes clear, however, that some people have not moved on. Present at Fulton County to see the execution of the search warrant was Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who has made relitigating election claims a priority.
Asked about the FBI’s seizure, Raffensperger responded mildly, saying, “I don’t see what they are going to get out of it.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks at an event in which dice are rolled to determine the random selection of presidential election ballot batches chosen for audit, at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta on November 14, 2024.
Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters/File
Does he have a path to the runoff?
All four major GOP candidates — Jackson, Jones, Raffensperger and Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr — recently visited a Baptist church in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta for a leadership roundtable organized by the Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition, an arm of Ralph Reed’s conservative network.
Despite the growing intensity of the battle to replace the term-limited GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, the event was free of acrimony. As Reed looked on from the audience, each candidate had equal time individually on the stage to talk about their lives and faith, reaffirm their opposition to abortion, voice support for Israel and Georgia’s Jewish population, and commit to cutting regulatory red tape.
In recent weeks, however, the GOP contest has turned into a big-spending brawl between Jackson and Jones that risks pushing both Raffensperger and Carr to the sidelines.
Jackson, the founder of a health-care staffing company, has spent more than $39 million on advertising ahead of the primary, according to AdImpact, which tracks political advertising. That’s a record for this point in a Georgia gubernatorial primary, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Jones’ camp has spent more than $13 million.
The attacks between the two have grown increasingly personal. Jones has tried to portray Jackson as disloyal to Trump, citing the billionaire’s past financial support for the campaigns of former Trump rivals for the presidency, including former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
Jackson has called Jones “lazy” and sought to cast him as relying on his family’s fortune to prop up his campaign. Jackson has donated $1 million to a Trump-aligned super PAC, federal records show. He recently attended a dinner with Trump and other major donors at the president’s Mar-a-Lago private club in Florida, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Even as Jackson seeks to cultivate ties to the president, Trump has stuck by Jones, something the lieutenant governor eagerly noted at the Faith & Freedom gathering.
“I’m endorsed by President Trump, by the way, I don’t know if you all know that or not,” Jones quipped to scattered chuckles from the audience. “He’s not done it once, not twice but three times now.”
Raffensperger’s aides believe Jackson and Jones could split the MAGA-aligned vote, creating a path for him. Georgia law requires a candidate to receive more than 50% of the vote to win the primary election outright; otherwise, the top two vote-getters would compete in a June 16 runoff.
Charles Bullock, a veteran political scientist at the University of Georgia, said that’s possible. “There could be some share of the voters that say, ‘I don’t want to vote for either Jackson or Jones. They both sound like scoundrels, so Raffensperger sounds like the best bet.’”
Jay Morgan, a former executive director of the Georgia Republican Party who now runs a public affairs firm, said Raffensperger faces a tough path. A decent share of the state’s Republican electorate likely will take its cue from Trump, even if voters grow weary of the Jackson-Jones infighting, he said. And Raffensperger, he said, “is clearly the guy Trump would least like to see on the ballot.”
In interviews, some voters said they were open to Raffensperger’s ideas but not yet sold on his candidacy.
“Let’s be frank, Raffensperger is the most hated,” said Lisa Babbage, who serves as first vice chair of the Georgia Black Republican Council and listened to all four candidates at the Faith & Freedom event. “But when he told the story about his son, I couldn’t help but connect to that and truly believe that he cares.”
CNN’s David Wright contributed reporting.
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