Duncan says his new ‘GOP 2.0’ will recruit conservative and moderate Republican candidates and voters who want the Republican party to move away from Trump.
ATLANTA — Georgia’s Republican Lieutenant Governor, Geoff Duncan, is promising to try to wrest control of the GOP out of the hands of Donald Trump and his supporters, to “heal and rebuild” the Republican Party in Georgia and across the rest of the country.
Duncan announced officially Monday that he will not run for re-election next year, to focus, instead, on a new, GOP campaign organization he founded, called “GOP 2.0.”
“We need more than 280 characters on Twitter to send out our message all across the country, as to what we stand for and who we support, and what we can do for folks around the country, and why we should be in leadership,” Duncan told 11Alive News on Monday.
But Trump supporters say, simply, that Duncan is out of touch with Republicans–in Georgia and in the rest of the country.
Duncan was elected Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor in 2018, after serving three terms in the Georgia House of Representatives.
He told 11Alive News will leave after one, four-year term because fighting Donald Trump for control of the GOP will be a full-time job.
Duncan said he respects Trump’s influence on the Republican party as if it were an asteroid colliding with the Earth—earth-shattering.
“It’s huge, here in Georgia,” Duncan said. “His impact has created—it’s literally put a crater in the ground. And we, unfortunately, ended up losing two U.S. Senators in my party, because of that.”
Since the November 2020 elections, Duncan has become a leading Republican voice on the national stage disputing Trump’s election fraud accusations. And he has called the Georgia legislature’s passage of the new, controversial election law as “a solution in search of a problem.”
Now, he said he and “GOP 2.0” will try to defeat Trump, and Trump-supporting candidates, in future elections.
“We need to transition away from ‘anti-Trump’ to ‘post-Trump,’” Duncan said, “because that’s the reality of where we are, today. My opinion is Donald Trump is not going to come back and be the Republican nominee and he’s certainly not going to be the next President of the United States…”
“I think every Republican in the country would agree that our party, right now, is broken. And there’s two camps,” he added. “There’s a camp that’s going to ignore the fact that it’s broken, and there’s the camp that’s going to try to fix it. And I happen to be in the camp that wants to fix it, and certainly, I think every day that list grows bigger and bigger.”
“Geoff Duncan is out of touch with the voices of the people,” said Jeanne Seaver on Monday.
Seaver of Savannah is a veteran Republican activist and organizer in Georgia — she was Trump’s grassroots organizer in Georgia in 2015 and 2016 — who announced in February that she is running for lieutenant governor as a proud, Trump supporter, to represent other Trump supporters.
She has no doubt Trump voters are and will remain in the majority in the Georgia GOP.
Seaver pointed out that this past weekend, Georgia GOP regional conventions were filled with crowds of new Trump supporters showing up to volunteer, enthusiastic to go to work to keep control of the party and win the elections next year and beyond.
“All they want to do is be engaged,” Seaver said. “They want to make a difference, they want to help make sure that what happened in Georgia never happens again, because, without a doubt, Georgia is a Red state.”
Duncan said anti-Trump conservatives are just beginning to organize.
“I hope it gains like a grass fire, and it quickly catches. I do think it’s going to take some time to heal some of these wounds that our party has inflicted on ourselves,” he said. “Realistically, GOP 2.0 is, hopefully, going to help figure out who the GOP nominee’s going to be in the 2024 election cycle for the White House.”
“It’s a huge divide” in the Republican Party, Seaver said. “I think we need to start focusing on us all coming together because the Democrats sure are. I think we all need to come together and focus on beating the Democrats instead of beating up on each other.”
It is a battle for control of the GOP that will likely go on for years.
