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On Monday, the New York Times reported a bizarre and shocking update to news of an FBI raid last week on a Georgia election office: It turns out that immediately after the federal raid, the FBI officers involved spoke directly with President Donald Trump. To say that this is unusual would be an understatement—it is without precedent. It has long been known that the 2020 election in Georgia is a personal obsession of Trump’s, but the extent to which he is actively, openly, and personally meddling in the state’s elections system is still surprising and new. One big question looming over this entire episode, though, is why—of all the states where Trump falsely claimed there was fraud in 2020—has Georgia become ground zero for the president ahead of the 2026 midterms that election experts feel are potentially threatened by Trump’s latest actions? We think we have a few answers.

Those answers have to do as much with 2026 as they do with 2020. And, perhaps surprisingly, a big motivation for Trump’s assault on Georgia’s election infrastructure now has as much to do with the Republican primaries in the state as with November’s general election. Allow me to explain.

Georgia’s race for governor is considered a toss-up, though Republicans have consistently held the job since 2002. Polling has shown the top Republican contenders are Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. Trump has endorsed Jones, who served as a fake elector in 2020 and was tied up in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ election interference investigation, which charged Trump and several co-conspirators with a criminal conspiracy to steal Georgia’s 2020 election. Jones has focused his campaign on attacking Raffensperger over that election. Raffensperger, as you may recall, has been a longtime personal target of Trump’s after a 2021 phone call with the president in which he was asked to “find” 11,780 votes for Trump in order to flip the state’s 2020 election results.

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In order to understand how the race between Rafensperger and Jones relates to the FBI’s raid on Fulton County, it’s necessary to recognize that Georgia’s voting system has been mired in controversy for nearly a decade. Back in 2017, a group of Georgia voters and the Coalition for Good Governance sued the state over its use of Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic........

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