GOP 2.0 is both a book and a movement that unites people around a common view of civility and freedom. GOP 2.0 puts policy over politics. It aspires to make Americans great. It's about Geoff Duncan's "P.E.T. Project, " reviving the party with conservative Policies, genuine Empathy, and a respectful Tone. "I'm not the only conservative in America who wakes up wishing the past months were just a bad dream. I'm not the lone Republican who feels in my gut that our party is following the wrong path. And I'm not alone in believing there's a better way forward." As Lt. Governor of the State of Georgia, Geoff Duncan never expected to find himself in the national spotlight – or in the crosshairs of the President of the United States. Then the 2020 Election and its aftermath brought the nation's attention to Georgia. Amidst a hurricane of conspiracy and misinformation, Duncan spoke up for truth, conservative values, and the Republican Party he knows. Duncan had a front row seat as Georgia endured a long nightmare of fraud allegations, Presidential coercion, a dual runoff that flipped the U.S. Senate, and election reform that sparked national protests. He called for reason and principle even as Donald Trump viciously attacked him. He fought for "the silenced majority, " current or former Republicans who yearn for a party that can reclaim lost ground and leave behind the politics of dishonesty, disorder, and division. GOP 2.0 is Geoff Duncan's vision, forged by his unexpected struggle for the party's future. In his words, "GOP 2.0 is not a new party – it's a better direction for our Republican Party." In this refreshing and reinvigorating new book, a leader who has been through the fire lays out a better way forward, one that lifts up reasoned ideas, expands the party, and positions the GOP to win back the White House in 2024.
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WHEN MY FATHER’S JOB FIRST brought my family to Georgia, it was conservative country, led by conservative Southern Democrats. We moved away and came back, and it was still a conservative state. Democrats held majorities at the state capitol but at least in the South, their party hadn’t yet shifted left. After three years at Georgia Tech, I traveled the country playing pro baseball for six seasons. When my wife and I came home to Georgia, it was turning red as conservative allegiances changed to the GOP.
We were starting a family so we moved close to our parents in the suburbs north of Atlanta. And today, we still live nearby in suburban Forsyth County, which I represented in the Georgia House of Representatives for five years. Forsyth voters went Republican 71 percent to 24 percent in the 2016 presidential election. The reddest precinct voted Republican 84 percent to 13 percent. Forsyth was GOP country. Suburban counties such as mine sent a political outsider to the White House in 2016.
By 2020, however, these Republican suburban counties had seen a change. In conversations at our boys’ schools, the local grocery store, church, and other places, I sensed frustration with the president and dissatisfaction with the Republican Party. Some felt outright alienated. Even in conservative Forsyth County, a disturbing number of people would tell me they liked many of the president’s policies but sure wished he’d put down his phone. Many folks agreed his tone and tactics weren’t healthy for the party or the country.
The county’s demographics were also changing, along with those in many other counties and states. My boys’ elementary school changed from majority white to majority Indian. The Asian population nearly tripled from 2010 to 2020 and Black and Hispanic representation also grew significantly. I experienced this change and learned new perspectives.
These changes and the conversations I had with neighbors would prove indicative. In the 2020 election, conservative stalwart Forsyth County saw a 14-point shift away from the president. Another suburban Atlanta county, Henry, notched the country’s largest swing from 2016 to 2020: 16 points to Biden. The county experienced a 28-point shift toward blue since 2008. Nearby Rockdale notched the nation’s second-largest 2020 swing as Biden gained 15 points over Hillary Clinton’s 2016 showing.
If the GOP wants to see the future, it can simply look at Georgia.
Our changing population and voting patterns give warning signs, but they can also offer road signs to a stronger party.
Two nights after the November 1 campaign rally in Rome, I brought Brooke and our three boys to an election night party for one of the two feuding Republican U.S. Senate candidates whom I’d sat awkwardly between before my rally speech. I addressed a happy audience. The candidate seemed on the way to securing a runoff spot, which was fine with everyone there, because we all knew none of the twenty candidates in the special election would capture 50 percent and win outright.
The president also seemed headed for victory. Early returns in Georgia had him leading Joe Biden by more than 8 points and 250,000 votes.
In my role as president of the Georgia Senate, I’d worked hard to reelect 35 Republican senators in 2020. I’d raised money, given speeches, made commercials, shared advice. That night, I saw 34 of 35 senators running strong and likely to win. That success meant all the world to me. I was proud of our candidates and grateful voters seemed to be validating Georgia GOP priorities.
That so many of our state senators were outperforming expectations gave me hope the president would too.
My kids were understandably ready to leave after I spoke—they had school the next day. We packed them into the car and drove home. My family went to bed, leaving Dad to watch returns until midnight. I fell asleep that night pleased our state senate candidates had performed so well and still reasonably optimistic that the president might beat the pollsters again, although I knew final results might take days.
Overnight, as we all know now, Joe Biden closed the gap. The president’s lead had shrunk to 3 percent and 118,000 votes by the time I woke up. It would be close for certain.
Along with the rest of the country, I dug in to wait for thousands of absentee ballots to be counted.
Several facts provide interesting context to the wait.
First, the president had for months been suggesting any votes counted after the night of November 3 might be fraudulent or that a lengthy counting process would invite mischief. But laws passed by the Republican legislatures of Georgia and other states prevented absentee ballot counting from beginning prior to election day. So given the unprecedented volume of ballots being received by mail due to COVID-19 concerns, any election official in Georgia could have told you counting would take days.
Republicans upset about counting ballots after November 3 were essentially complaining about their own doing: The laws had been passed by a Republican legislature and signed by a Republican governor.
Second, the president had created another problem that he used to stir doubt about election results. For months, he had pushed the baseless claim that voting by mail invited fraud, even as he voted by mail himself. He effectively politicized the very act of mail-in or absentee voting.
Prior to the pandemic, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Oregon, and Utah held elections entirely by mail and voters needed no excuse to cast absentee ballots in twenty-nine other states including Republican-run Georgia. The 2016 election saw 25 percent of votes nationwide cast by mailed ballots. Thus, a great body of evidence was available for the 2020 Stanford University study that found voting by mail had no impact on partisan turnout or vote share.
Nor did any evidence support the president’s charges that voting by mail led to fraud.
The conservative Heritage Foundation keeps an online database of voter fraud cases, which proved helpful. In the past twenty years, their data shows 143 fraud convictions related to the 250 million ballots cast by mail since 2000. That’s seven or eight cases of mailed ballot fraud per year. Nationwide.
If you like numbers like I do, that’s a 0.00006 percent fraud rate. Looking at all votes cast by mail and in person over those twenty years, authorities found just 1,200 instances of fraud.
The president ignored the data and the pandemic. He charged, without basis, that voting by mail invited widespread election fraud. As a result, many Georgia Republicans chose not to vote by mail, preferring to show up in person on November 3. That meant initial election-night results reflected those Republican-leaning ballots from polling locations. As election workers counted mail-in ballots, Joe Biden’s numbers began to rise, since those mail-in ballots skewed Democratic. This wasn’t evidence of fraud, just evidence of 2020 voting behavior.
It was a problem of the GOP’s own making.
By Friday, November 6, Joe Biden had pulled ahead in Georgia’s tally. Thankfully, the 34 GOP state senators who were ahead on election night kept their leads and won. At the presidential level, however, it looked like Georgia had flipped. The conservative Republican secretary of state certified the results on November 13—Biden bested the GOP’s nominee by 13,558 votes.
The fears I had at the president’s rally in rural Georgia were realized, and the uneasy inkling I got from my neighbors in Forsyth County proved warranted. The president lost an election he might have won had he employed better tone and discipline.
Prior to November 3, many major polls had projected a Biden victory in Georgia and my gut was telling me the president might lose. I’d also seen worrisome trends in internal polling from our state-senate campaigns. Our senators gained ground during the final weeks, but the same polls showed the president slipping. Still, since so many senators in tight races outperformed, I’d hoped the president might too.
He didn’t.
It was clear that a lot of Georgians had voted for a down-ballot Republican state senate candidate but not for the party’s headliner.
I had worried his tone would cost him. It did.
Still, when the ballots were counted, part of me wondered how the president lost. Perhaps the results were inaccurate; perhaps mischief had occurred, as the president had been predicting for months. After all, the last time Georgia voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was 1992. In 2020, Republicans held all eight statewide offices, including mine.
Despite months of polling showing he might lose the president’s actual loss shocked many believers.
Working with our Democratic colleagues, we’d taken steps to protect and improve our elections during the past years. Georgia selected new voting machines that produced a paper trail. The state outlawed ballot harvesting. The secretary of state implemented a signature requirement for absentee-ballot applications, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had provided training to help improve the signature-matching process.
Those improvements seemed to allay most Republicans’ concerns—at least until the president began assailing, without basis, the security of absentee voting.
The state of Georgia was well-prepared for the 2020 election and did a commendable job handling the curveball thrown by the pandemic. We had record turnout.
The voting process ran smoothly on Election Day, albeit not perfectly. It’s doubtful that any statewide election has ever gone without some flaw or issue. We always aim to learn, improve, and do even better next time. In 2020, 1.3 million mail-in ballots (primarily used due to the pandemic) nearly overwhelmed our election workers and took days to count, but our teams performed admirably. Importantly, of those 1.3 million absentee ballots, not a single one was challenged prior to Election Day.
As early returns placed the GOP ticket comfortably ahead on election night, Republicans across the state celebrated the results. I understand the White House likewise celebrated. That evening, it seemed that perhaps the election wasn’t as rigged as the president had thought.
The coming days saw the lead shift from the Republican ticket to the Democratic one in Michigan and Wisconsin, and then in Pennsylvania and Georgia. The president, who’d been calling the election “rigged” for months (and really since 2016), raised his decibels and unleashed new charges of fraud, all without evidence.
Joining his chorus were a number of his allies and elected officials, none of whom had any more evidence than the president. They levied broad attacks. Even though many had never spent time in our state outside of layovers at the Atlanta airport, they singled us out and became experts on Georgia’s shortcomings.
With all the volume and vitriol they could muster, these Republicans lit into our state’s Republican leaders, good-hearted election workers, and dedicated volunteers. They even pressured our two U. S. senators to call for the secretary of state’s resignation.
Over what? Pure speculation? Over what our officials deemed the most secure election in Georgia history?
It’s worth noting none of these detractors had executive responsibility for governing Georgia or Georgia’s elections. They just threw mud and stirred up trouble Georgians certainly didn’t need or deserve. They all should have known better.
Now, did Georgia have problems during the 2020 election? Yes. Any state with new voting machines, 5 million voters, and thousands of temporary poll workers will experience some problems. Despite the challenges related to equipment and volume, however, all indicators pointed to a well-run election. Any issues uncovered or experienced proved trivial and innocent.
Georgia law requires an electoral audit of one race to ensure overall election integrity. The Republican secretary of state, who had ardently supported the president during the campaign, chose to audit the presidential race because of its national profile. Given the closeness of the results, several million votes needed auditing for statistical validity. The secretary of state decided to audit all five million votes. He didn’t want to leave any doubts. And since each vote produced a paper ballot, he asked for a recount by hand, which also addressed the demands of the presidential campaign. Surely that would put fraud rumors to rest.
The recount found two major discrepancies, which is exactly why Georgia had the recount. Roughly 2,700 uncounted ballots were found on a memory card in Republican-run Fayette County. Those ballots netted 400 votes for the president. In heavily Republican Floyd County, the site of the Make America Great Again rally in Rome I attended just before the election, around 2,600 uncounted ballots were uncovered by the audit. Once counted, they yielded roughly 800 net votes for the president. The additional votes did little to close Joe Biden’s 12,000-vote lead, however.
The hand recount functioned as intended, uncovering discrepancies and clearly proving the election had been fair; it’s hard to dispute the paper trail. Georgia’s Republican governor certified the election on November 20, thereby earning the ire of the president and many of his supporters.
The president’s campaign requested a second recount and Georgia obliged. It, too, proved the election results were valid. The governor recertified the results.
In the end, the president lost Georgia three times. Still, people alleged widespread fraud.
The governor, the secretary of state, and I appealed to anyone inside or outside Georgia to bring forward evidence.
I personally vowed to chase the trail like a bloodhound.
The secretary of state’s office investigated more than 250 allegations. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation assisted in investigating many o...
