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What was Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s highest-ranking intelligence official, doing at a suburban Atlanta elections office for the execution of a search warrant that was obtained by an interim U.S. attorney from St. Louis over alleged voter fraud in Georgia?
Welcome to the wild and wooly world of President Trump’s never-ending quest to overturn the results of a presidential election he lost six years ago.
We can mostly leave it to others to analyze the internal politics of Trump World. But we can explain Gabbard’s presence in a domestic law enforcement raid, despite her titular role as the nation’s chief spymaster, as an effort for her to get back in the president’s good graces after trying to undermine his interventionist second-term military enthusiasms.
Gabbard’s well-cultivated reputation for kookiness made her hard to confirm to her job but then easy to sideline by more experienced intelligence and foreign policy experts in the administration and the Senate. But that same kookiness makes her a natural for this “stop the steal” mission to Georgia, since the president and his 2020 election lawyers have long alleged that shadowy foreign entities were part of interfering with the results back then.
As for why the prosecutor on the case is in St. Louis and not Atlanta, it’s practical politics. Georgia has two Democratic senators — ironically because Trump’s efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 results tipped two Senate runoffs to the blue team — who have blockaded hard-line MAGA picks for the job. The administration won’t offer a squishier pick, so local federal judges have allowed the interim U.S. attorney for the district, Theodore Hertzberg, to remain in the job indefinitely. He does not seem like the kind of guy who would go on raids with Gabbard.
More amenable is Thomas Albus, the recently confirmed top federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Missouri. He has no Senate problems since he was formerly the top deputy to Sen. Eric Schmitt when Schmitt was the state’s attorney general. As attorney general, Schmitt was one of the lead plaintiffs on the lawsuit to try to overturn the results of the election. After it was rejected, Missouri’s other senator, Josh Hawley, was among the leaders of the effort to use those claims to stop the certification of the results on Jan. 6, 2021.
This all makes Albus a natural choice to be Attorney General Pam Bondi’s pick to take up the administration’s claims of election fraud from coast-to-coast. Unlike with some of the president’s other efforts to prosecute his enemies, Albus is a former county judge who spent 17 years as an assistant U.S. attorney before he went to work for Schmitt. He’s no Lindsey Halligan.
The chances of major prosecutorial success seem low here. Georgia has a reputation for well-run elections, and its Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has been through the wringer on these results for more than five years, including the president going at him hammer and tongs. But maybe they find something fishy. Maybe they placate Trump with a lawfare kind of prosecution like the one against the Federal Reserve. Maybe local officials lose sleep ahead of the 2026 election. Maybe it will be like the Durham report from the first Trump term, and simultaneously highlight failures in election procedures while debunking the wildest conspiratorial claims. Who knows?
What we do know is that the decision to focus on Georgia is consequential. Georgia particularly angered Trump because it is a typically Republican state — the president probably assumed he had its 16 electoral votes coming — where officials would not give an inch in trying to pander to him in 2020. In Arizona, Wisconsin and other states with Republican governors and legislatures, local Republicans played along. They held huge audits, tried to overturn results, etc. In Georgia they went by the book and Gov. Brian Kemp told Trump there was nothing to be done but try to win next time.
Trump did win Georgia convincingly in 2024, but one assumes that his rejection of six years ago still stings — as does the failed prosecution by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Georgia, and Fulton County in particular, is not the opening shot in this war by accident.
But Georgia is significant beyond Trump’s grudges.
The Census Bureau is just out with its mid-decade assessment of how the American population is moving. It’s no surprise that the long-term trend of the Southern shift is still very much happening. The other three quadrants — the West, Midwest and Northeast — all lost population to domestic migration while gaining from international immigration. Only the South grew on both measures.
The surprise of the report is that in the past two years, the Midwest actually saw some net in-migration from other parts of the country. It’s small, but it marks the reversal of a long-term trend. But for the West, particularly California, and the Northeast, particularly New York, there’s been no relief. They’re still draining out like somebody pulled the plug in a bathtub.
Republicans are very pleased about the trend that includes the potential of an eight House-seat (and Electoral College vote) shift from California, New York and Illinois to Texas and Florida with five more seats shifting from mostly blue states to mostly red states. One GOP group is more modest, forecasting Texas gaining four, Florida gaining two, and one each for Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Utah and Idaho. California loses four while New York, Illinois, Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island all lose one.
But whether it's 13 electoral votes or 11, the expected shift by the time of the 2032 presidential election would definitely put the South in the driver’s seat. But which way are they going to be driving by then?
Republicans have long bellyached about how people from California and the Northeast come to red states for the low taxes and traditional values and then immediately start changing them by their left-leaning politics. There’s probably some truth to that, but not nearly as much as Republicans in places like Texas would like. The truth is that the people most eager to move to these places are the most likely to share the values. It is, to a large degree, a self-selecting group.
Underappreciated is the way in which the prosperity the domestic migrants are seeking changes these states. In 2006, 26.6 percent of Georgia adults had a bachelor’s degree or higher. In 2024, it was 36.3 percent. In Texas, the climb was almost identical over the same period. Both states now have higher educational attainment rates than Ohio and Michigan, something that would have sounded preposterous 50 years ago.
As the South grows, it is getting younger on average, richer, better educated and more ethnically diverse, which is to say, more open to Democratic incursions. If the current trajectories for the parties continued into 2032 with working class white people skewing Republican and the managerial class leaning Democratic, you could see a world in which Michigan was solidly Republican and the suburbs of Atlanta and Dallas were the key battlegrounds.
Again, who knows? But certainly we can bet that Georgia’s turn as a swing state was not a one-time COVID fluke, but a likely predictor of the future.
That makes Trump’s fixation understandable, but particularly damaging. As Sen. Jon Ossoff can surely attest, Democrats in Georgia would very much like to run against a Republican Party more concerned with past elections than future ones.
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