Atlanta (AFP) - Republican voters appeared set Tuesday to deliver a stark repudiation of Donald Trump's "Big Lie" that the 2020 US election was stolen as the swing state of Georgia picked its candidates for November's midterms.
Five states were holding nominating contests for congressional elections that will decide in November which party controls the US Senate and House of Representatives for the remainder of President Joe Biden's first term.
But all eyes are on the Peach State, where wounds from the 2020 presidential election are still festering two years after Trump lost there by the narrowest of margins.
Up and down the ballot, the Republican side of the Georgia primary pits candidates peddling the former president's false claims of widespread election fraud against hopefuls who pushed back in defense of the Constitution.
In the contest to be the next governor, incumbent Brian Kemp, frequently the target of Trump's wrath for refusing to help overturn the election, went into election day leading former senator David Perdue by more than 20 points.
Trump-backed Perdue has made the bogus claims about 2020 a centerpiece of his campaign, in a direct appeal to his endorser's supporters who continue wrongly to question the validity of the outcome.
But Kemp's confidence in victory over his opponent was apparent Monday at a rally in Cobb County with former vice president Mike Pence, where neither man mentioned Perdue once.
- 'Inelegant delivery' -
"I was for Brian Kemp before it was cool," Pence told a cheering crowd of a few hundred at an airfield on the outskirts of Atlanta.
Pence's support for a candidate Trump reviles marks a high-profile clash between the former president and his White House wingman, underscoring the party's internal tug of war over its future direction.
But the former president, who banked much of his own political capital in the race, was facing embarrassment as the first results after polls closed showed Kemp leaping into an enormous 73 percent to 23 percent lead over his opponent.
The race to be Georgia's secretary of state is seen as equally consequential, as these are the officials who oversee elections in the United States.
Democrats fear that, across the country, Trump will be able to install loyalists who can weaponize specious fraud accusations from 2020 to make it harder for his opponents to vote in 2024.
As the man responsible for certifying Georgia's 2020 election results, Brad Raffensperger was in lockstep with Kemp in pushing back against Trump.
He faces Jody Hice, one of more than a dozen Trump-backed candidates across America bidding to become secretary of state and professing to believe the 2020 election was stolen.
With 55,000 votes counted, Raffensperger jumped into an early 48 percent to 37 percent lead, in a race that was expected to go down to the wire.
Biden was the first Democratic presidential candidate since 1992 to win Georgia, while Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff triumphed in runoff elections in January 2021 that wrested control of the US Senate from Republicans.
Georgia's Democrats are doing all they can to cement those gains, headlined by news that Democratic star campaigner Stacey Abrams is reprising her bid for governor.
Abrams courted controversy over the weekend with remarks that Georgia is the "worst state in the country to live," citing its healthcare and crime statistics, rising incarceration rates and falling wages.
At a news conference Tuesday she attempted to clean up a comment that Republicans have seized on as a sign of her lack of local pride, faulting herself for an "inelegant delivery" of her message.
