Who Decides Who’s A Republican? Not You
A little over two years ago, during the runup to the 2023 Georgia GOP state convention, I asked, “Who Gets to Decide Who’s a Republican?” The Georgia Republican Assembly was supporting a resolution allowing the state party to reject a candidate from qualifying as a Republican. At that convention, quorum was lost before voting on any resolutions, so the issue was tabled for the time being.
But that didn’t stop the state executive committee from later banning former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan from qualifying for any future office in Georgia as a Republican. As Mr. Duncan has to date expressed no interest in running for any office, the legality of this action has yet to be tested.
This year was different. At the state convention held this past weekend in Dalton, another GRA-supported resolution was approved that purports to prohibit the party from allowing sitting Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to qualify as a Republican for any future race, and to obligate the party to legally defend such refusal in court if necessary.
Unlike Mr. Duncan, Sec. Raffensperger is speculated to be considering a run for either Governor or U.S. Senate next year, so the enforceability of this resolution is likely to come into play sooner rather than later. Setting aside the questionable wisdom of pre-committing party resources to defend lawsuits instead of electing candidates, what do such resolutions mean about who gets to decide who’s a Republican?
The GRA’s view is that their members are the “grassroots” and therefore the only ones with a legitimate claim to direct the GOP. Anyone opposed to them is “establishment” and probably part of the “paid political industry”, only interested in generating revenue for themselves.
The problem is that it’s quite a lot of work to be “grassroots” by their definition. First, you need to be a member of your county Republican Party, which generally entails some annual membership fee, and of course to be active you’ll want to go to the monthly meetings. To participate statewide in the convention cycle generally requires giving up two to three Saturdays a year, plus an entire weekend, at a total cost of several hundred dollars, plus travel expenses if the state convention isn’t held in your town.
And, of course, you need to join the GRA itself, at an annual cost of $45 and up, and participate in its local meetings, endorsement assemblies, and state and national conventions, each with their own fees and time commitments. All of this is above and beyond any time and money you give directly to candidates.
If this is sounding less like “grassroots” and more like a second full-time job, you’re not far off. It takes a lot of time and a not insignificant amount of money to be an active party volunteer, even without having to join a second parallel organization and also participate in its events.
That’s probably why a lot of people who are consistent and dedicated Republican voters just don’t do it. Voting strength at the Georgia GOP state conventions tends to be in the range of 1500-2000 delegates. Maybe three or four times as many people are dues-paying members of their county GOP at any given time. I don’t know how many people GRA claims as active members, but it’s not likely to be more than the GOP itself, if for no other reason than the GRA would surely encourage all of its members to also be GOP members.
Conversely, in the last primary election for which Raffensperger was on the ballot, over 1.2 million Georgians cast a Republican ballot. Raffensperger himself received over 611,000 of those Republican votes, good for a 52.37% win without a runoff against three other primary candidates.
The GRA’s view is that those hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters shouldn’t get a say in who’s on their ballot because a couple thousand (at best) activists are willing to spend a lot more time and money than they are to participate in a whole lot more meetings. Regardless of whether you think that’s right, it’s just not the way Georgia’s elections work by law. We choose our candidates in primaries, not through political conventions.
If they want to change state law so that parties choose their candidates at conventions, they have every right to try. Note that under this system, conventions will take about a week and cost a thousand dollars, so the small handful of people who are willing to sit through all that will be the ones deciding on candidates for everyone. This may be ideal for the GRA but is likely a big part of the reason we moved away from convention nominations and towards primaries in the first place.
But banning candidates they don’t agree with is just an end-run around that system. “Sure, you can have a primary, but only among candidates we have already determined pass our purity test” is a fine way to get what you want, but it’s hardly a free and open election.
Newly reelected state party chair Josh McKoon is already on record as saying he will not “purchase a lawsuit” by refusing to qualify anyone who meets the legal standard to run. But GRA chair Alex Johnson is also on record as saying he believes the resolution is binding and enforceable on the state GOP, so if Raffensperger does run, the GOP may have to pick between a lawsuit from his campaign and a lawsuit from the GRA.
It’s hard to imagine how either suit would be a better use of funds for a political party than, say, electing that party’s nominees. But it does answer my question from two years ago. Who gets to decide who’s a Republican? In the current Georgia GOP, the GRA does. If you’d rather spend your time and money doing something other than attending endless political conventions, you’re an establishment RINO, and you need to sit down and vote for who they tell you.
