As the clocked ticked into the day that the electoral college would officially record his defeat in the 2020 election, President Donald Trump focused his anger on Georgia – and on two top Republicans. The Twitter message sent just before midnight:
Democrats weakened the Signature Verification (and other) safeguards in Georgia. @staceyabrams played @BrianKempGA & Secretary of State, for fools. Consent Decree, which is terrible for Republicans (and honest people!), must be opened up NOW - David, Kelly, and I will then win!
The second message, sent just after midnight, appeared to threaten U.S. Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both locked in runoffs that will be settled early next year:
What a fool Governor @BrianKempGA of Georgia is. Could have been so easy, but now we have to do it the hard way. Demand this clown call a Special Session and open up signature verification, NOW. Otherwise, could be a bad day for two GREAT Senators on January 5th.
Both of those Twitter messages followed this one from former House speaker Newt Gingrich, which underlined a slow shift in the GOP vocabulary from alleged “voter fraud” to “voter dilution.” To wit:
Why is Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger working so hard to add drop boxes and take other steps to make it harder for Republicans to win. Is he really that intimidated by Stacey Abrams?
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The Washington Post this morning has a retrospective on the yearlong, tumultuous relationship between President Donald Trump and Gov. Brian Kemp. A spicy taste:
In phone calls and conversations with allies and advisers, Trump has griped that Kemp was not pushing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to do more to reverse President-elect Joe Biden's victory; that Kemp was not defending the president on television; and, perhaps most indefensible in Trump's mind, that Kemp moved forward with certifying the results of the election.
“Republicans fell into a trap by expecting Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp to cheat for them," said Jordan Fuchs, a longtime Republican strategist in Georgia who is a deputy secretary of state under Raffensperger, and who says the ongoing civil war in her party will have long-term consequences at the polls, including in the state's two Senate runoff races on Jan. 5.
“The Democrats only have one, singular turnout model, and that's the argument of voter suppression," Fuchs added. “They say it in their litigation — it's the number one poll-tested message they have. This has fed into the hands of Democrats."
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Shortly after noon on Monday, Georgia’s 16 electors will gather at the state Capitol and cast their ballots for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, formally sealing the former vice president’s win in Georgia and marking the first time since 1992 a Democratic presidential candidate carried the state.
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And we don’t want to overlook the fact that early voting starts today.
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Significantly, this morning, the Wall Street Journal is calling on the GOP to end its Trump-driven denial of election returns: “President Trump’s legal challenges have run their course, and he and the rest of the Republican Party can help the country and themselves by acknowledging the result and moving on.”
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This weekend, when Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms let it be known she turned down a Cabinet-level position in President-elect Joe Biden’s administration, she also signaled the start of her 2021 re-election bid.
The mayor’s refusal of the gig -- presumably, the job to lead the Small Business Administration -- paved the way for what could be a contested bid for her second term.
Among the potential challengers she could face: Meria Carstarphen, the former Atlanta schools superintendent; and former Atlanta councilwoman Mary Norwood, who narrowly lost to Bottoms in 2017. In an affidavit accompanying a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn Georgia’s presidential returns, Norwood pointed to her suspicions about the 2017 results -- and also to her narrow loss to Kasim Reed eight years before that.
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Texas Republicans already claimed sovereignty over Georgia this week, and they might have gotten away with it if not for a pesky U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Now a Texas congressman wants to mount a one-man invasion of Georgia.
U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw released a polished 3-minute video over the weekend featuring him as a soldiering crusader who, with the help of a British-accented computer, parachutes into Georgia to battle “antifa.”
At one point, his bodyguard mispronounces U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s name. At another, he calls for Republicans to “bring everyone” to help ahead of the Jan. 5 runoffs -- right before he jumps off a plane solo.
Republicans have warned of legions of out-of-state Democrats seeking to infiltrate Georgia to help Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. Now there’s splashy video evidence of a Texas congressman urging Republicans to do just that.
It wasn’t lost on many that Texas had, a few days earlier, filed a lawsuit riddled with conspiracy theories and specious claims that sought to overturn Georgia’s election results.
“For real though, Texas has done enough this week,” said state Sen. Jen Jordan, D-Sandy Springs. “You can sit tight, hoss.”
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For the next three weeks, Georgia will serve as a laboratory for both Republicans and Democrats. From Politico.com:
Top Republicans are using the expensive Georgia Senate runoffs to sell their party on a deeper investment in digital fundraising, pointing to the surge in donations for next month's races in Georgia as an example of what GOP candidates could reap in 2022 and beyond — if they put the right infrastructure in place early.
National Republican Senatorial Committee executive director Kevin McLaughlin urged Republican senators at their Nov. 10 weekly lunch to capitalize on the “manna from heaven" opportunity in Georgia, where intense interest in the runoffs means senators can grow their own online fundraising programs by making appeals to donors to help Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, according to Republicans with direct knowledge of the meeting.
Meanwhile, over at fivethirtyeight.com, Perry Bacon Jr. looks at how Georgia is changing the way Democrats approach candidate recruitment in
[A]s long as Ossoff and Warnock do decently well — getting at least 46 to 49 percent of the vote or winning — I suspect we are going to see more young, non-Christian, women and/or people of color as Democratic candidates in key races in the South (as opposed to just older centrist white men). In fact, soon after these Senate races are over, Georgia is likely to have another Democratic candidate running statewide and playing up her ties to the Black community: Abrams, who is expected to launch a second campaign for governor sometime in 2021.
I doubt we have seen the last of Biden-Edwards-Jones-style candidates in the South. But what [Stacey] Abrams has dubbed the “Abrams playbook" for Democrats in Georgia in particular — trying to win a coalition of progressive white voters and people of color with candidates and strategies that connect with those two blocs — may eventually be the default Democratic Party playbook for the South.
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