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:
Bingo. They’re still telling us we are delusional, even in this article.
Well, I am not in the habit of rewarding people who tell me I’m crazy with my vote. Deal with it.
“People believed the election was stolen, that their vote didn’t matter, etc., and stayed home.”
Okay, but whether the election actually was stolen or not is a key piece of information that should color our opinions of the above facts as well.
Voting doesn’t matter anymore...c’mon man...
It was the call centers all over CA which did part of it.
Ba omen for GOP candidates in 2022. I wonder if the GOPe is noticing? In what should be a major GOP blowout in 2022 could be the opposite. I predicted the result of the low turnout a few weeks before the GA election, kinda obvious that accepted the corruption w/o an investigation is going to demoralize GOP voters.
Even if 100% of registered repubs voted the mechanisms were firmly in place to nullify them. There was not a chance in hell Warnock and Ossoff were going to lose!
The Never Trumpers & DNC Media do love working together.
Shorting the stimulus to Americans (thanks China Mitch!) and the fraud seen in Fulton County had nothing to do with anything.
These people are shameless.
Of course they did.. the fraudulent presidential election and the GOP doing nothing about it, showed folks votes don’t matter...
GOP is going to lose 10s of millions of loyal dependable voters for this..
They committed suicide, and don’t realize it
Amen. I couldn’t have said it better. The struggle session as Bannon calls it where you are forced to renounce what you know is true is ongoing from the media and the dems. They lost in Ga because they gave in to their tormentors with only tepid support for Trump when they knew they were in trouble .
“So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit thee out of my mouth.”
Hogwash and codswallop.
A stolen election, pure and simple.
They are peeing on us and telling us it’s lemonade.
It will make GOP voters go away.
The peoples of USA, if they can’t see how completely fake their _election_ was, they deserve what they are about to get. They are a lost civilization.
* Fake elections = fake government
* Fake elections = non-representative government
* Our fathers began to revolt based on non-representative government
* Anyone who supports fake elections, is not in any way defending USConstitution.
* If you do not defend USConstitution, you are an enemy of it
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
—Geothe
The Democrats played us and they played us very well.
They made it look like they stole the election
That is a huge win for them
They got their opponents to think the system is rigged, who would vote in a rigged system? nobody
This was genius
They out smarted us here
I don’t think the ‘rats cheated, well to the point of victory, not saying some hijinks weren’t done here or there. But I don’t think it was massive, systemic or coordinated
The ‘rats outsmarted us, we need to admit this or we will never win again.
The repub.icans were ahead on the day of the vote, but then counting was shut down, just like in the general election for presidency, and viola, just like that the next day whe counting resumed again, the dems jumped ahead.
Heck they got away with it in general e,eating, why not runoff where the senate was at stake too? It was evident they left xkuld cheat with impunity at that point. No republican would challenge seriously, and no courts would take up the accusations of cheating no matter how much evidence was claimed.
I disagree, the vote harvesting was enough fraud alone to win the Blue cities ad turn the election to Biden.
It will make GOP voters go away.
And that is the goal of the left
They just need us to think it was stolen and we won’t vote again.
They are playing us, wake up people
I wish Trump would have realized this early on, but the ego got in the way again.
NOT FIGHTING ELECTION FRAUD killed the turnout.
Is ballot harvesting illegal? Because in some areas it isn’t
We can not call it “fraud” if it is legal and our side did not partake into it as well.
It wasn’t stolen election “claims” that cost Republicans the Senate majority.
It was actual stolen elections, and Republican leadership’s failure to contest them.
All that Republican MAGA voters demanded of Georgia’s Republican Senate runoff candidates was that they refuse to accept the stolen election of November 3rd and fight on behalf of President Trump to overturn it.
They ignored those demands and not only alienated the base, but they allowed their own elections to be stolen!
What complete idiots.
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