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:
Exactly.
Right or left, anytime you are blaming the voters, it means you screwed up.
There really are two parties. The Republicans and the party of Trump. You are completely right.
That only solidifies the position that no national GOP candidate will ever get my vote.
“Dur hur Imz a moron and I vote for the people who don’t do anything once elected.”
There are pictures of voter overseers being kept out of the counting room. Has that been checked out?
The simple fact is that there are a lot of Trump voters who don’t give one whit for the Republican party, and vice versa.
There are people for whom “Never Trumper”is some sort of curse or insult, one of the worst things they could call someone, and these people are NEVER going to be happy as part of the Republican party.
Sorry, this is false.
Exact same story as presidential election- Corrupt Republicans did NOTHING to correct the fraud the first time, so dempcrats did it again.
So sick of the lies they are trying to push on people.
Truth hurts
They had the power to do *something* and they all did nothing
Actually, it was true
Because you need to think the election was stolen. You can’t think for a moment that the left out smarted us and played us and beat us.
The election wasn’t stole, we lost it.
The sooner we all figure that out, the sooner we can rebuild, fix our platform and our messaging and kick some commie butt in 2021 and 2022
None of that is true - you have swallowed all the Left’s lies.
“We lost the election, the left brought out their side in unprecedented numbers.”
We didn’t lose - they cheated. The “unprecedented numbers” were due to harvesting and counterfeiting of mail-in ballots under the guise of “covid safety”.
“We got screwed by not taking advantage of mail in ballots.”
Mail-in ballots are for cheaters - do you think the solution to Democrat cheating is for us to out-cheat them? Do you think we should also tell better lies, since they do? Should we burn down more cities? Have more abortions? Open the borders? Job killing environmental regulations? Gun control?
“We told out people to vote on election day and risk the virus. That cost us ballots.”
No, our Election Day turn out was record-breaking. President Trump got 75m votes. Far more than any President in history... unless you believe Biden’s numbers (which apparently you do - LOL).
BULL SHIT! Cheating voting machines is what caused the win for the traitors.
People don’t like the truth sometimes.
It’s a simple fact that more and more voting is going to be done by mail; either the Republican party adapts and becomes better and absentee voting or they lose.
Adapt or die; an increasing percentage of voting is going to be done remotely, we can whine, bitch, scream about ‘cheating’ or we can get an order of magnitude better at getting out the vote remotely.
When you had idiots telling Republican and conservative voters not to vote, what did you think was going to happen.
When you don’t vote, you only affirm that you are a moron and a coward.
People who don’t vote simply remove themselves from the equation when it comes to hearing their voices.
You lose the right to be heard and for your moronic opinion to matter if you aren’t going to vote.
You also lose the right to complain when Democrats run roughshod over you.
The Democrats were not shy in saying that they were working their butts off getting people registered in the state. Over a million new registrations BEFORE the run off and another 78,000 or so after. We just sat their saying, “Ha. We don’t believe you.” We as a collective are stupid as heck.
Over 752,000 Georgia voters who cast ballots in the presidential election didn’t show up again for the runoffs just two months later ......
Exactly. Why bother when your elected Republican State Congressional Representatives sit on their hands and do nothing to stop Raffensberger, Duncan and Kemp...and of course, Abrams. If Abrams threatened them with more riots, so f*cking what? All the riots happened in Atlanta. That place is a dump anyway.
When you have the Mayor saying teenagers, selling water on the corner who then pull a gun on folks are just young entrepreneurs, why would anyone care what goes on in that city?
When you have a Mayor that knows that her teenage son is going downtown to “protest” and she’s worried for his safety, why would anyone care what goes on in that city?
Perdue was up by 120k votes at one point. The lead vanished on live tv.
When you have a guy supervising the counting talking about how 90% of the mail-in ballots are being adjudicated, by an unknown board of people, to determine “voter intent” and then cast that ballot how they want to(the two Commies), why would anyone care?
When you have Jovan Pulitzer hack an voting computer, while testifying to the state Senate, and then tells them he just hacked the system, why would anyone care?
When you have a county election board test their Dominion machines, feed the machine with an equal number of ballots from CornPop and President Trump, and then machine takes votes from the President and gives them to CornPop....no one does a thing...why would anyone care?
When the state legislature “found out” that Raffensberger ILLEGALLY signed a Consent Decree with Abrams’ group and with the same in Gwinnett County and they did nothing to rectify it, exercise their Constitutional duty and authority, and declare it invalid, why would anyone care?
The party needs to provide compelling candidates and ensure honest elections.
WTF??? How do you suppose they do that? Voter ID, Signature verification, No Mail In Ballots. Not Changing the Rules in the middle of the game.
Georgia has some of the best laws in the country when it comes to voter registration and voter ID. Everything that is normally on the wishlist for those that want “honest elections”. Every single one of those was tossed out the window by a supposed “secret deal” between Raffensberger and Stacy Abrams. Just like they did in all the other battleground states. And the Republican Controlled, Georgia legislature REFUSED to do anything about it.
Those election results were razor thin again. I knew, before, in the run up to the the Senate elections that we were likely to lose both. There was too large a contingent of dumbasses here on Free Republic who were arguing in favor of letting the Democrats win out of spite. I could see it in the general population of conservatives as well. No doubt a large enough section of Georgia conservatives decided to stomp their feet, act like babies & sit out the election for two easily winnable seats because throwing a tantrum was more important than anything else. You dumbasses lost those seats. Nobody stole them from us. You argued in favor of boycotting & convinced enough fellow dumbasses to do the same & we lost two seats. Now Chuckle Schumer is majority leader & we will likely get the worst massive amnesty bill ever proposed (which all Senate Republicans- even Rubio, Graham, Collins are opposing because of how extreme it is) passed on a party line vote through the reconciliation process or a filibusterless Senate. What the hell is the point of being in a conservative political coalition with kamikaze types? I love President Trump- but ultimately it wasn’t him we were fighting for- it was us & our values & ideas & philosophy!! No one should have sat out any election for any reason. You don’t willingly hand your adversaries the keys to power. If you do, there’s NO difference between y’all & RINOS 😡
This ship is lost. People living in a country lead by non-representatives voted for by imaginary voting systems which produce whatever result the high configurable algorithms are asked by their foreign owners to produce.
So many, lost in the delusion of what an election used to be; what USA used to be. Lost in the delusion of the illusion.
Intelligence is the ability to see patterns from what appears to be coincidental data, e.g.:
“When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen, and when we see these timbers joined together and see thst they exactly make the frame of a house or mill, all the lengths and porportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective pieces, and not a piece too many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding, or if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in; in such case, we find it impossible not to believe that they all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon A common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.” —Abraham Lincoln
Fake elections require USAians to reject fake governments:
“They have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents and trustees, for the people; and if the cause, the interest and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed.” —John Adams
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