Posted on 02/04/2021 9:47:00 AM PST by SeekAndFind
During a week in which Democrats formally finalized their takeover of the US Senate's instruments of power, and flexed their legislative muscles by pushing through a party-line vote to pave the way for a massive spending bill, it seems like an opportune moment to reflect on how we got here. Republican voters largely held the line, despite a daunting Senate map, in November. After election night, it very much looked like Democrats would net just one single seat in the upper chamber, allowing Mitch McConnell to remain majority leader, and force the Biden administration into tough negotiations on a wide range of issues. All they had to do was not lose both Georgia runoffs, which seemed eminently achievable. After all, Republicans had received more votes than Democrats in both races in the first round, and the runoff format has traditionally heavily favored the GOP. But then January 5 happened, and the Democrats swept both contests.
As a result, Chuck Schumer is now majority leader, and Kamala Harris is the tie-breaking vote. In the immediate aftermath of that debacle, we cited early evidence that David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler lost because Democrats were united and motivated, while GOP turnout was underwhelming amid conspiracies and intra-party anger. Republican fears had come true. More support for this theory has continued to trickle in:
Story of the lost #GASen runoffs: Decreased GOP turnout pic.twitter.com/grZnpYHeMC— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) January 15, 2021
More data, via the Atlanta Journal Constitution:
Over 752,000 Georgia voters who cast ballots in the presidential election didn’t show up again for the runoffs just two months later, according to a new analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of recently released voting records. More than half of the no-shows were white, and many lived in rural areas, constituencies that lean toward Republican candidates...Trump’s message that the election was stolen discouraged voters such as Craig Roland, a 61-year-old Rome resident. Roland said he didn’t believe his vote would count. “What good would it have done to vote? They have votes that got changed,” Roland said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever vote again."...The AJC’s analysis found that the drop in turnout was most severe in northwest and South Georgia, areas where Trump held rallies, in Dalton and Valdosta, to bolster support for the state’s Republican senators.
That quote from Mr. Roland must haunt Georgia GOP operatives' nightmares. When the most prominent and influential Republican in the country repeatedly and baselessly tells his ardent fans that the election was rigged and stolen – including by members of their own party, in their own state – a significant number of those fans will internalize and believe that message. Follow-up exhortations that they turn out to vote anyway will invariably fall on a lot of deaf ears. And that's precisely what happened. The "Trumpiest" areas (including the North Georgia district represented by a certain congresswoman who was a loud "stop the steal" adherent, and who evidently is predisposed to believe literally any conspiracy that crosses her desk) saw the biggest dips. The statistics tell the story, Allahpundit writes: "Eleven percent fewer whites who voted in the presidential election turned out for the runoffs. By comparison, just eight percent fewer black voters did. Warnock defeated Loeffler by 93,000 votes while Ossoff topped Perdue by just 55,000; the number of whites who showed up for the Trump/Biden race but didn’t show up for the Senate races was on the order of 400,000 people." And both GOP Senate candidates were essentially forced to go along with the incoherent, "stop the steal," but also vote' two-step, in what a former campaign official described as a daily "hostage situation":
"It was a hostage situation every day," said one Republican strategist familiar with the campaigns who only agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. "We were always trying to guard against the tweet [from Trump]," the strategist said. "Every week we had some new sort of demand," said another strategist involved with the campaigns. "Calling for the hand recount. The signature match. A special session. $2,000 [coronavirus relief] checks. Objecting to the electors." "It was, 'If you do not do this, the president will actively work against you and you will lose,' " he recalled.
Can't win races without the base, can't win races in certain key states and districts with only the base. That's the very real dilemma moving forward as the party goes to war with itself, replete with purges and loyalty tests. And the GOP fratricide runs a very serious risk of turning a red state into a purple state into a blue state in a matter of a few cycles. Internal Republican animosity and dysfunction are boosting Democrats in Georgia, to the point that at this stage, it's hard not to see both Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams as early frontrunners in the 2022 Senate and gubernatorial elections, respectively:
You are truly full of crap! Nothing new here lately. It wasn’t just people on FR boycotting. FR was representative of what was happening with conservatives as a whole. I had friends & prolly family from Georgia who sat the Senate election out in protest. There were a lotttttt of people who did.
You can hear it in the tone of everything. When you are more at war with your own side than your opposition- which is precisely the stance of so many on our side- you are doomed to fail in politics. The reason Democrats are successful in a center-right country is because they manage to coalesce & oppose us first and foremost.
Our goal in all sincerity should be overtaking firm control of the Republican Party- starting in the primaries. Get enough people to show up for primary elections, be willing to donate money to those folks, be sensible about what’s possible in each state & district, form a coalition & govern. Pass election security measures, establish that a majority of the partys voters now favors a reduction in immigration, that we are free market generally but not globalist, that we care about American jobs, that our values are basically traditional & that we believe in liberty.
In the meantime, sitting around pretending that Mitch McConnel or even Susan Collins is the same as Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi is about as sensible as burying your head in the sand. I know you and others have convinced yourselves that you stand on principlal- but you dont! It’s vanity pure & simple. You think you’ll be influencing anything as a party of one standing on principle? Nope. You’ll be a vote for you, but the country will go to hell while you pat yourself on the back 🤦🏼🤷🏼
*principle
We heard a lot of things. Turns out that Democrats were far better at three dimensional chess than we were. Qanon, Sidney Powell, etc. can kiss my freckled backside. We’ve already lost enough but some seem content in losing more. What a waste. We will devour ourselves if things don’t change soon 🙄
I state often, I want a Republican Party that Ike would recognize and agree with. Not one with lunatic conspiracy theorists, neo-birchers and most of all people looking for a strong charismatic LEADER. I liked a lot of stuff Trump was for and did, but to hold him up as a font of Truth, or anything other than an ordinary lying and greedy politician (albeit one trying to get stuff I like done) makes me sick of cultists who want an infallible man on a white horse.
If the GOP had actively fought to correct the fraud, the voters would have responded.”
I read a book that talked about the American Monomyth. He started by talking about the Joseph Campbell Power of Myth stuff, about the Hero's Journey that is found in folklore all over the world, where the hero has to set out from home, face challenges, and return with some treasure, internal or physical. The author then goes on to talk about the uniquely American version of the monomyth--The edenic community, once happy and prosperous, now fallen under some evil. The people are helpless, but then a mysterious hero arrives from outside with special powers or skills, who confronts the evil, sets things right, then disappears. It's Superman, it's Batman, it's a hundred westerns. It's deeply engrained in us to want the man on a white horse to set things right.
Navel gazer...there is no dilemma here. Either vote for people willing to stand up against the uni-party or don’t bother voting at all. Doesn’t matter. Nope. The base should just go Galt and flip off the whole gop establishment. No money. No support. No votes. It won’t matter. Do you really think a party of Romneys is any different than a party of Schumers?
I could have told you this was going to be the official script a month ago. Gop can’t stand you. They hate you...except those who will stupidly give them money and show up and vote. And at that they only hate you a little less. Page 2 of the script will be the republicans in the senate standing up against the democrats ... more speeches. More tv appearances. More sound bites. More BS.
Ain’t that the Truth. Describes people of both political parties who want to hold up the Leader as ‘the One’, some emissary of God, and those that criticize them shall be attacked!
thanks
If you call fraudulent ballots “turnout”, then you are right.
But the answer isn’t to cheat like they did. The answer is to stop them from cheating.
Any guesses?
Anyone?
You are still under the notion that they “cheated”
But what if they didn’t?
What if they just did a better job at utilizing the mail in ballot better then we did?
Think about it
sometimes you need to unclutter from the rhetoric of the past three or four months to see it. I did early on, I figured it out. And we got hosed. They did better then we did. They planned their turnout for years.
They had facebook, twitter, tik tok, snap chat, and others, they had the media, they had the coronavirus, they had suburban moms, the young white males, they had everything they needed to win. And that they did. They won, we lost, we need to face that fact. I have no evidence that they cheated to victory. Sure some unscrupulous people voted for dead people and filled out ballots or did things that were illegal but none of these races Biden won, were close. Biden won Michigan by 180,000 ballots
Biden won Georgia by 12,000 ballots
Biden won Arizona by 12,000 ballots
Biden won Wisconsin by 20,000 ballots
Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,000 ballots
None of these numbers are consider close.
Bush V Gore was decided within 700 ballots
Put things in perspective here
Does finding a few dozen dead people voting in philly change the fact that Biden still won by 80,000 ballots?
No it doesn’t. Not saying the dead people voting is right, but it doesn’t change the victory
And that is the problem we have. And in the end, the left loves it when we talk about voter fraud and saying the election is stolen because will push down out turn out in the future, and benefits from that? The left!!!!
So stop helping the left
Stop giving them credit for something they didn’t do but wants us to believe they did so we stay home in 2021 and 2022 and so on.
It worked for them in the Georgia senate races, they got exactly what they wanted.
I had so many texts and phone calls urging me to vote I felt like I was a VIP. Several times, I opened up a discussion with the text senders, I assumed they were connected to the campaigns or the RNC. I pointed out that since nothing had been done to change the Vote by Mail scam, why should we bother? Also, if they really wanted to fire up the base, both candidates should step up and challenge the Georgia electors. Loefler finally did, the day before election day, but it was she was losing anyway. (and then she backed out on 1/6)
They could have won it if they had played it properly, but I think Perdue in particular just couldn’t bring himself to stand with Trump.
And all of those GOP legislatures had the power to do something, none of them did anything.
Just as example:
They had been given advice that they couldn’t do anything.
PA asked for their votes back and a 10 day delay. Pence said they couldn’t.
Arizona legislature is STILL trying to get an audit of the ballots, and the legislature has been fighting it out with the County election officials, and is at the edge of having them arrested.
Speaking of ‘ballot harvesting’...
Vote by Mail allowed for a boost in democrat turnout. It always will. Republicans are traditional, vote-on-election-day types. As long as voting was kept that way, we had a fair shot. But when the guy next door, who would probably never get up and go vote in person is allowed to sit at home and vote, not only can he vote, but he can vote for his wife too (she never votes and doesn’t care).
Even better, in Georgia when Zuckerberg spent big money on ballot drop-boxes, you don’t even have to face anyone - just drop yours and hers and maybe the dog’s too, right in the box.
Really??? You are blaming Trump here?? That may be the most interesting thing that I have heard here on FR and I have been through a number of flame wars.
So...you think that hundreds of thousands of voters did in fact show up in those reliably Republican counties and their votes were simply deleted by the machines with no Republican poll worker or election official noticing? Or were they all in on it?
Hard to release anything when the courts stick a gag order on you over and over again.
And to her credit, they did get the State Farm Arena video which in any normal law abiding country would have destroyed the Democrat party.
You actually believe that they didn’t cheat?
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