Trump's election threats shape this year's key secretary of state races

President Donald Trump’s call to “nationalize” elections and continued false claims of fraud are defining races this year for offices that oversee the voting process in key battleground states.

Democratic candidates for secretary of state in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada have put Trump’s comments and recent actions by his administration — including lawsuits over state voter rolls and the recent FBI raid of an Atlanta-area election hub — front and center as part of a broader messaging effort focused on protecting elections.

And the Republicans vying to be these states’ top election officials have largely lined up behind Trump’s aggressive approach and unfounded assertions that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Four years ago, with Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss to Joe Biden still fresh, these normally low-profile secretary of state races garnered national attention, with Democrats arguing that Republicans would be in a position to interfere with the 2024 presidential election if they won.

Now, Democrats are updating their 2022 playbook and warning the stakes are even higher in these contests with Trump back in power.

“The bad guys are on the inside now,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who is up for re-election this November. “You’ve got various folks who are just flat-out lying about elections, including the president. Now, that hasn’t changed, but now they have high levels of power and high levels of visibility.”

Fontes’ sole Republican challenger is state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who was on the alternative slate of presidential electors backing Trump in 2020, when Biden won Arizona. Kolodin was also part of efforts to file numerous lawsuits that sought to overturn the 2020 results in Arizona. He has not officially been endorsed by Trump, but on his campaign website he includes a quote from the president calling him “one hell of an attorney.”

Kolodin didn’t respond to questions from NBC News for this story.

In Georgia, Trump’s election obsession is at the forefront of the secretary of state race following the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at an election hub in Fulton County in search of records related to the 2020 election.

The race to succeed Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — who rejected Trump’s plea to “find” more votes in Georgia after the 2020 election and is now running for governor — features lively primaries on both sides.

The Democratic race features Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett, who’s been an outspoken critic of Trump and his allies. Barrett made waves last year after refusing to approve two Republican nominees to the county board whom other Democrats had alleged were election deniers. Also running are Penny Brown Reynolds, a former TV judge who also served in the Biden administration, and Adrian Consonery, a voting rights activist.

The Republican primary is a four-way race, led by Gabriel Sterling — the chief operating officer in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, who emerged as a public face of the harassment and threats that election officials faced following Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election — and Vernon Jones, a Trump ally who has consistently backed the president’s false voting claims.

In a brief interview with NBC News, Sterling said his views on protecting elections from Trump, or from anyone else at the federal level, could be summarized in a series of recent posts on X.

“There should never be a Federal takeover of our elections. I will never allow this, regardless of the party of the Administration in power,” he wrote. “If you want a Secretary of State that will follow the law, uphold the Constitution, defend the right of citizens to vote, and oppose a federal takeover, regardless of party, I’m your candidate.”

In an interview with NBC News, Jones repeatedly declined to answer whether he agreed with Trump’s comments about wanting to “nationalize” elections. The Constitution gives states the authority to administer and conduct elections.

“My concern is Georgia’s voters. To make sure Georgia voters receive a free, fair and transparent election,” Jones said.

Asked how he viewed the raid in Fulton County, Jones replied, “If your house is clean, why would you be concerned about somebody coming inside of it, if it’s clean?”

“There are too many questions, and there’s an effort by many to hide or to cover up what the facts are,” added Jones, a former Democratic state legislator who switched parties in 2021. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2022 as a Republican, calling himself “the Black Donald Trump” during the campaign. He’d previously launched a run for governor that year, basing most of his campaign message on the Georgia election being stolen, before quitting to run for Congress.

The other Republicans running for Georgia secretary of state this year are state Rep. Tim Fleming and business owner Kelvin King. Both have expressed concerns about the results of the 2020 election.

“We should not ‘nationalize elections.’ Conservatives know what a disaster it would have been to turn over the management of our elections to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or Tim Walz,” King wrote in an email to NBC News, adding that “accountability starts at the state level.”

“The federal government can set baseline standards without taking over elections,” King wrote.

In Michigan, Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who faced a torrent of threats for refusing to overturn the 2020 election results after Biden won, is running for governor this year. Democrats vying to succeed her include Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist and Ingham County Clerk Barbara Byrum, who have both framed Trump and his allies as threats to democracy.

The Republican candidates include Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini, who has leaned into allegations of noncitizen voting as a major focus of his campaign (Benson’s office says it has debunked those claims), as well as Monica Yatooma, a business owner and Trump supporter.

Forlini didn’t respond to questions from NBC News.

Responding to questions from NBC News about Trump’s call to nationalize elections, Yatooma wrote, “There is zero daylight between President Trump and myself on this issue.”

And in Nevada, Republican Sharron Angle is the only challenger at the moment to Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar.

Angle, a former member of the state Assembly who has run unsuccessfully for statewide office multiple times, was part of a group in Nevada that sued to block the certification of Biden’s 2020 election win in the state, citing allegations of widespread voter fraud.

Her campaign website features articles she’s written about election integrity and voter fraud, including one titled “Sharron Angle Will Enforce Trump’s Election Integrity Executive Order” — in which she promises to uphold a Trump edict ordering major election changes, including requiring people to prove their citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.

Others include “Election Fraud, How Much Is Too Much” and “The Imperative of a Fixed Election Day.” Angle didn’t respond to questions from NBC News.

Aguilar, for his part, framed the debate over elections as part of a broader battle over civil rights — and referred to efforts by Attorney General Pam Bondi to connect her quest for unredacted voter rolls to the federal immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota.

“That is just absolutely shocking and actually immoral,” he said in an interview Friday. “It was shocking to me they were conflating the two issues.”

Aguilar also expressed concern about the ramifications for the next presidential election.

“We know that ’26 is critical to ’28. Secretary races are happening in ’26, we know that secretaries administer elections, and with ’28 being a consequential presidential election, my strategic thinking and my antenna goes up to say, wait a minute, what’s happening here?” he said.

The approach from Republican secretary of state candidates to closely align themselves with Trump’s election views was unsuccessful in swing states four years ago. In Georgia, Raffensperger bested a Trump-picked challenger in the primary, while Fontes, Benson and Aguilar all defeated general election opponents who ran predominantly on disproven election claims.

“So-called election denial is not just alive and well, it’s more powerful than it’s ever been. It’s not embedded across the federal government,” said Joanna Lydgate, the CEO of States United Action, a nonpartisan group that tracks secretary of state and gubernatorial races. “But in 2026, unlike 2022, Trump has access to all the tools of the federal government at his disposal.”

“The major election threats that we’ve faced in the past are really even more supercharged today,” she said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com