Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who has been a Republican his entire career, has decided to leave the party.
Duncan was very vocal about Donald Trump after the 2020 election, and that fallout continues to weigh heavily on him.
Now, Duncan has just announced he is leaving the GOP to join the Democratic Party, surely making the fight for Georgia in 2026 and 2028 even harder.
After the 2020 election, Trump was working the phones to try to find votes, any votes, that would help him flip states in order to defeat Joe Biden.
One of the more infamous calls he made was to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Trump told him, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” This was interpreted, more or less, in two different ways by the media and by voters.
Anti-Trumpers said that Trump was giving Raffensberger an order to illegally flip the votes to give him the state of Georgia. Trump’s allies said that the then-president was merely asking Raffensberger to investigate the election in the hopes of finding the nearly 12,000 votes needed to win the state.
Duncan was among Republicans in office who pushed back on this “ask” by Trump from the very outset, and he has continued to rail against Trump ever since.
For instance, during a 2023 interview, Duncan stated, “But quite honestly, [Trump] would be the biggest mistake our party's ever made, is to lift him up as the nominee, for two reasons -- one, because I do believe he would be beat by the other the other party."
He continued, “But secondly, even if he was to somehow figure out a way to be a president again, it would be a disaster for this country and, I would argue, a disaster for the world for somebody that is this small-minded to have that much control.”
Needless to say, Duncan was not happy with the party for nominating Trump again in 2024, and it would appear that the president's election win pushed him over the edge.
Duncan is now calling it quits, joining the Democratic Party.
This week, he announced, "My journey to becoming a Democrat started well before Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election in Georgia.”
He continued, "There’s no date on a calendar or line in the sand that points to the exact moment in time my political heart changed, but it has. My decision was centered around my daily struggle to love my neighbor, as a Republican."
Georgia has been a purple state ever since Trump was elected in 2016, but the state has started to swing back in favor of Republicans, albeit still considered one of the new battleground states. That being said, we are about to find out who now has more sway in the state… Duncan or Trump.
