Incumbent Brad Raffensperger held off a challenge from his Trump-backed opponent, Rep. Jody Hice, in Georgia’s Republican secretary of state primary Tuesday, NBC News projects.

With 98 percent of precincts reporting, Raffensperger had 51.9 percent of the vote, while Hice had 33.8 percent. Two lesser-known candidates — former Alpharetta Mayor David Belle Isle and former Judge T.J. Hudson — were in single digits.

Because Raffensperger got more than 50 percent of the vote, he was able to avoid a runoff against Hice, which is required under Georgia state law if no candidate wins an outright majority.

As political insiders essentially declared him a dead candidate walking, Raffensperger toured the state. He said he spoke to chambers of commerce and to Rotary and Kiwanis clubs and spread the word that claims of widespread voter fraud were not true.

“I put over 40,000 miles on my truck in the last year, just visiting people, all parts of the state,” Raffensperger said Tuesday night.

Raffensperger’s win lands a significant blow to the broader movement of candidates backed by former President Donald Trump who have run primarily on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Tuesday’s secretary of state primary pitted an incumbent who refused to bow to pressure from Trump to overturn the election in his favor against a challenger who voted to undo the will of his state’s voters. Strategists and politics watchers had viewed the race as a key early test of the endurance of the lies Trump and his allies have perpetuated about the 2020 election.

Veteran Republican consultant Chip Lake said Raffensperger’s win was astonishing because, early last year, internal GOP polls showed him pulling less than a fifth of the GOP primary vote.

“This is the biggest political comeback I’ve seen in this state,” Lake said.

Raffensperger will go up against the winner of the Democratic secretary of state runoff election on June 21. State Rep. Bee Nguyen is one of the candidates who will advance; NBC News has not projected who will be her opponent.

Across the board, Georgia voters Tuesday night repudiated Trump-backed candidates who parroted the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. GOP Gov. Brian Kemp was on track to rout his Trump-backed challenger, David Perdue, by a stunning 50 percentage points, while Attorney General Chris Carr ran ahead of his Trump-endorsed opponent by a similar margin.