Brad Raffensperger believes Republicans can win elections by promoting an uplifting vision for the country. The Georgia secretary of state is a national name because he pushed back on former President Donald Trump s lies about the 2020 election, and refused Trumps repeated attempts to find votes to overturn the results.

Brad Raffensperger is also politically doomed.

He is seeking reelection in Georgia, where a crowded field of primary candidates have lined up to dethrone a man now considered public enemy No. 1 by adherents of the MAGA movement. Almost nobody thinks he can win.

Hes dead in the water, Jay Williams, a Georgia GOP consultant, told HuffPost.

There is no way Brad Raffensperger can win the primary, said Leo Smith, another longtime Republican strategist in the state.

Raffenspergers pariah status is a blinking alert that the Republican Party has so completely morphed into a right-wing authoritarian political project that it cannot tolerate the presence of an elections official who defends the legitimacy of American elections. Republicans and Democrats in Georgia are already proceeding as though Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) who twice voted to contest the results of the 2020 election, tweeted that the Jan. 6 vote to challenge the certification of those results in Congress was a 1776 moment, and unsurprisingly earned Trumps endorsement will be the GOP nominee for Georgias secretary of state next year. (Hice deleted the 1776 tweet after Trumps calls to challenge the election result drove supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol. His spokesperson later said the post was meant only to highlight his electoral objection, and that Hice condemned the riot itself.)

Raffensperger has amassed no major endorsements and has struggled to win even minimal support in straw polls at Republican events across Georgia, an unprecedented fall for an incumbent in a secretary of state race. Meanwhile, the state legislature, controlled by his own party, stripped him of his seat on the state election board for the 2022 election purely because he certified Trumps loss.

In an interview with HuffPost in conjunction with the release of his book this week, Raffensperger expressed longing for his vision of the Republican Party of the past, describing his admiration for former presidents Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln. He said he plans to continue to just calmly and respectfully state what the facts are about the 2020 election, and emphasized the need to listen to the other side of the aisle.

But dont confuse him for a fair election crusader: Raffensperger is desperately trying to show that, despite last years apostasy, he agrees with the mainstream GOP principle that only Republicans should be allowed to win elections. He embraced the state legislatures restrictive elections law that reduces voter access while allowing political partisans to purge local election boards and replace them as they see fit.