COLUMBUS, Ga. — Former president Donald Trump may have been the star of the Georgia GOP convention here over the weekend, but the runner-up was almost certainly David Shafer, the outgoing state party chairman and a top target, like Trump, of an Atlanta-area investigation of efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

Shafer’s legal jeopardy stems from his leadership of a meeting of alternate electors who convened in December 2020 to cast their votes for Trump because of pending litigation contesting Joe Biden’s victory in the state — an act that he and other convention speakers proudly referenced.

Shafer emceed portions of the program, basked repeatedly in the adulation of more than 2,000 delegates, and introduced Trump on Saturday and conservative firebrand Kari Lake of Arizona the evening before. As Shafer prepared to end his term and hand over the reins to a successor, party activists sent him off with a lengthy tribute and lifetime status as “emeritus” party chairman. They cheered his actions that are now under investigation and made clear that they are unfazed by concerns that the state GOP’s continuing drumbeat that the 2020 election was stolen will scare off voters next year.

“David Shafer stood with the alternate electors in the election for President Trump in 2020,” Salleigh Grubbs, who chairs the Cobb County Republican Committee in suburban Atlanta, said in a speech that drew standing ovations, whistles and cheers. Grubbs went on to say that Shafer helped conservative firebrand Dinesh D’Souza produce the debunked movie “2000 Mules,” which purports to document a national conspiracy of illegal ballot harvesting.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to announce a charging decision in early August after more than two years of investigation into Donald Trump’s attempt to reverse his defeat in Georgia. AP file photo

Trump’s choice of Georgia to deliver his first public speech after federal prosecutors announced charges on Thursday related to his alleged retention of classified documents after leaving the White House seemed fitting, because it is widely expected to be a deciding state in the presidential contest next year — and it is also likely to be the next setting for the ongoing battle between the former president and law enforcement. Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, is expected to announce a charging decision in early August after more than two years of investigation into Trump’s attempt to reverse his defeat in the Peach State.

The hundreds of Republicans who gathered in this historic mill city, perched across the Chattahoochee River from Alabama, made clear they are standing firmly by the former president and Trump allies including Shafer. They eschewed concerns that Trump’s legal troubles, and the continuing embrace of false fraud claims, will weaken him — and the party — if he is the GOP’s nominee next year.

“There is a narrative out there that we are somehow weak, and that is a false narrative,” Shafer said before Lake took the stage Friday night. “This is the biggest convention in the history of the Republican Party. And the second-biggest convention was two years ago.”

Shafer declined to comment for this article.

While the die-hard Trump fans appeared to leave the convention jubilant and victorious about the state of their party, the few dissenting voices in the room said they were going home with a sense of dread that the party has not moved on from a narrative that may be pushing more and more voters away from the GOP.

“Donald Trump may be the only national Republican who could lose to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” said Ken Carroll, a longtime GOP activist who lost his bid to serve as the party’s second vice chairman on Saturday. “I’m going to get barbecued for saying that, but it’s true. And I know a lot of people inside the party who feel the same. . . . I like Trump, but he’s alienated so many people; I don’t know if he can pull off another win.”

Perhaps a more telling sign of the peril were the absences at the state convention. Three top statewide officeholders who won their reelections last year handily — Gov. Brian Kemp, Attorney General Chris Carr and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — did not attend.

Kemp, while attending a GOP donor retreat in Nashville earlier this spring, told donors that “not a single swing voter in a single swing state will vote for our nominee if they choose to talk about the 2020 election being stolen,” according to attendees.

Raffensperger, who in a January 2021 phone call famously rejected Trump’s entreaties to help him find enough votes to overturn his defeat, was not even invited to the convention, he said. When his name came up in various speeches and presentations, the crowd roundly booed him. The secretary of state instead made an appearance on “Cavuto Live” on Saturday morning on Fox News, ahead of the convention’s official business, during which he tacitly rebuked the party’s embrace of Trump.

“People need to have character,” Raffensperger said. “They have to have integrity. But I think they also need to have courage — the courage to stand up and make a stand, make a stand for the rule of law, make a stand for principled leadership.”

That rejection of Trump was certainly a minority view in the cavernous Columbus Convention and Trade Center, a former Civil War-era munitions factory where delegates milled about under rough-hewed beams in the usual fare of party activists — Uncle Sam costumes, glittering U.S. flag clutches and provocative T-shirts with slogans such as “Defund the FBI” and “These colors don’t RUN. They RELOAD.” Some even questioned the voting technology used to determine party elections, booing when they didn’t like the outcomes.

Janet Shepard, 68, a retired postal worker from Morgan County, Ga., who attended the convention, said she had been unsure whether she wanted to support Trump again next year and was taking a close look at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). But after news of the federal charges broke last week, she became more resolved than ever to support the man she has already voted for twice, she said.

“It’s just going to cause more people to think the system is unfair,” Shepard said. “It’s like a vendetta. It hasn’t been fair, and it’s not the way we’ve been used to doing things in America.”

Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a pro-Trump Republican who spoke at the convention, took advantage of his fellow statewide officeholders’ absence to gin up applause lines for himself. Jones also served as an alternate elector in 2020.

“I’ve gotten calls from all our dear friends in the media, who I’m sure are here in full force today, calling me and asking me why I’m the only statewide official that was going to be at the convention today,” Jones said, prompting titters and outright laughs in the crowd. “I told them, I said, ‘I think they like me.'”

More than half of all delegates at the convention had never been active in the party before 2020, according to state party officials, and they rejected every candidate for party office who had been involved pre-2020, with the exception of incoming state chairman Josh McKoon, a former state senator who won with Shafer’s backing.

Two other party winners — David Cross for second vice chairman and Caroline Jeffords for secretary — are among the state’s leading election deniers, affiliated with the organization Voter GA, which has led numerous legal battles to inspect tens of thousands of absentee ballots cast in the Atlanta area in 2020, challenge voter rolls and decommission machines made by Dominion Voting Systems. Garland Favorito, the founder and leader of Voter GA, gave a 45-minute presentation outlining his unsubstantiated claims of fraud in a breakout seminar Friday that attracted a standing-room-only crowd.

“If anybody says that they’re going to secure the 2024 elections without understanding what went wrong in 2020 and 2022, then they’re lying to you,” Favorito told the crowd.

While such presentations animated the audience, the question of whether Fulton investigators would seek charges against state GOP officials loomed. Willis, the Fulton County prosecutor, has said she is focused on the phone calls Trump made to multiple Georgia officials seeking to reverse his defeat; his campaign’s efforts to persuade the Georgia legislature to declare Trump the winner; the gathering of Trump’s electors to cast electoral college votes for Trump after Biden had been declared the winner in the state; and the Trump campaign’s potential involvement in an unauthorized breach of election equipment in rural Coffee County, Ga.

Carroll, one of those electors, said he has been interviewed by Fulton prosecutors — and defended his actions. “I still believe we did nothing wrong,” he said. “I would do it again because it was the right thing to do.”

Carroll said that he believes there was fraud in the election, but that he doesn’t know whether the fraud was sufficient to make a difference in the outcome. Either way, he said, he is resolute that stewing over 2020 is not a winning path for Republicans in 2024 — especially in Georgia, an increasingly purple state where moderate voters have increased in numbers and have rejected Trump’s claims.

“There are different mindsets to being a successful activist and a successful party official,” he said. “Being an activist is about being right. Being a party official is about winning elections. You can be right and win elections, but if you’re right and you lose elections, then you are missing the point.”

The Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.