Was in the form of a Boston Globe reporter looking to steal a couple of Senate seats and something I just happened to have on my mind:
"Georgia Republicans vow to vote in January, ‘rigged system’ or not, as Democrats steel for a turnout battle; Republicans worry Trump’s claims of election fraud might keep their voters at home. Democrats aren’t counting on it" by Jess Bidgood Globe Staff, December 9, 2020
SAVANNAH, Ga. — At campaign events in Georgia in recent days, President Trump’s most committed supporters vowed to turn out anyway, suggesting his war on the system and the officials who run it may not necessarily keep them from the polls, and Democrats in the state are not counting on them staying home.
Well aware that the results will hinge on turnout, many Republicans campaigning for the two senators have been trying to thread a delicate needle: Stoking distrust of November’s results while urging — and in some cases begging — people to vote on Jan. 5 anyway.
“Don’t let anybody tell you not to go vote,” said Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, a Trump ally who spoke before Vice President Mike Pence during a Savannah rally last week, while also alluding to “problems” in the November election.
Cognitive dissonance has not been an obstacle to very much during the Trump years, and if the crowds who flocked to see Trump and Pence campaign in the state were any indication, the effort is working.
Tammy Prince, of Albany, Ga., fully believes the election disinformation she has seen on right-wing cable channels like Newsmax, but she also believes this: “We’ve still got to vote,” she said at Trump’s rally in Valdosta on Saturday night.
Democrats, who are working furiously to turn out their own voters, say they aren’t expecting the Republican infighting to depress the party’s turnout.
Runoff elections take place in Georgia if no candidate in a race gets a majority of the vote in the general election. They generally favor Republicans, who historically have turned out for runoffs at higher rates than Democrats. In 2018, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad P. Raffensperger, edged his Democratic opponent by just 0.5 percentage points in the general election but won his runoff by about 4 percentage points when turnout cratered after the midterms. Saxby Chambliss, a former Republican senator from Georgia, won his 2008 runoff by nearly 15 percentage points, five times his margin in the general election.
Republicans are no longer taking that edge for granted. They know the state’s demographics and politics have changed since then and Democrats have built a powerful voter registration and turnout machine, largely through the efforts of Black women activists.
God help you if you argue with them!
Alarm among Republicans grew last week when two Trump allies, Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, held a “stop the steal” rally outside of Atlanta. They urged the president’s supporters not to vote in the Senate runoffs, which pit Loeffler against the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Perdue against documentary filmmaker Jon Ossoff.
The party has been in damage control mode ever since, creatively finding ways to entertain the delusion that Trump actually won the election, while encouraging people to vote in a system they think was rigged.
Campaigning in Savannah, Pence suggested any problems with the November election would magically evaporate in the January voting.
At Trump’s rally at the Valdosta airport, there was an even sharper contrast between the president’s rhetoric and his dutiful efforts to get out the vote. Before the rally, the crowd milled around the tarmac below an enormous television screen urging them to sign up for absentee ballots, a form of voting Trump has railed against.
“They cheated and they rigged our presidential election,” Trump said during a 100-minute speech mostly devoted to such complaints. His supporters shouted down Loeffler and Perdue at certain points, while Trump insulted Raffensperger and the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but Trump ultimately said the magic words: “You have to get out and you have to vote.”
Kemp was sent a message when his daughter's boyfriend, who also worked for Loeffler, was killed in a flaming car wreck.
The relief among Republicans was palpable.
“He said what he needed to say,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist in Georgia, but he warned that, while Loeffler and Perdue need Trump’s base to turn out for them, they also need the support of moderate Republicans who are frustrated by Trump’s damaging election claims.
I'm sure the Dominion voting machines will work this time.
Meanwhile, Democrats are seizing on Trump’s involvement in the runoffs in hopes that it will keep their own base motivated.
“The efforts to discredit our election, to overthrow the results, that’s also going to bring new voters out who understand it’s not just about two Senate seats — it’s really a referendum on Trump and those who continue to push forward his agenda, which has been riddled with misinformation,” said Nguyen.
Democrats know they go into the runoffs at a disadvantage: Ossoff was 88,000 votes behind Perdue in November’s general election, and Warnock garnered fewer votes than the combined total of Loeffler and Collins, who also ran in a multi-candidate field in that Senaterace.
They are hoping to gain votes from the 23,000 Georgians who will have turned 18 between the general election and the runoff, and Democrats see signs of promise in early absentee ballot data. So far, 71,000 people who didn’t vote in November have requested absentee ballots, and they are disproportionately young and nonwhite. About 1.6 million people already have applied for absentee ballots and voters of color are returning them at the highest rates.
Those ballot boxes must be busting at the seams with the unabashed fraud.
There was a time that I thought it mattered, but I have to laugh now at the the thought of Republicans needing to prevail to preserve the Republic, freedom, and fair elections.
Have we ever had a fair election? Maybe George Washington, I suppose, and as for freedom and Republic, where they been?
That doesn't mean the Democrats are not batshit crazy Communists, they are, but Americans literally have a devil's choice when it comes to which strain of Zioni$m will rule.
“We’re phone banking like crazy. We’re text messaging. We’ve got mobile billboards. We’ve got radio ads. We’ve got digital advertising,” said LeWanna Heard-Tucker, the chair of the Democratic committee in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, and they are not anticipating Republicans like Sean Polwort, who blames “deep-rooted corruption” and fraud for Trump’s loss, will help them by staying home on Jan. 5.
“I will try to be the first person in line,” Polwort, an employee of a company that makes AR-15 rifles, said at Pence’s event. “We’re scared for our country’s future.”
David Newlin, a charter boat captain who runs fishing tours off the Georgia coast, is apoplectic over the “illegal voting” he believes stole this state — and the whole election — from President Trump.
“We are all adamant that this election has been a sham,” Newlin, 60, said, repeating the false allegations of fraud Trump himself amplified when he appeared at a rally in Georgia last weekend, but Newlin’s anger at the state’s voting apparatus doesn’t mean he won’t use that same system again on Jan. 5, the day of two runoff elections that will determine control of the Senate.
“We will crawl to the polls if we have to, to vote for Perdue and Loeffler,” Newlin said, referencing the two Republican candidates.
For a full month, Trump has attacked Georgia’s state Republican officials and railed against the reality — now confirmed by two separate recounts — that he lost this typically red state to Democrat Joe Biden by nearly 12,000 votes. That’s triggered a war within the party and left some Republicans worried Trump has withered his supporters’ resolve to vote for Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the runoffs, yet Abigail Collazo, a Democratic strategist in Georgia, said, “we are acting and campaigning as though this will be a very, very close race, and every single vote will matter.”
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It's the economy, stupid:
"Crucial Georgia Senate runoffs are shaped by economic pain" by Jess Bidgood Globe Staff, December 18, 2020
FAIRBURN, Ga. — Candice Williams felt awkward, but she pulled her car into the long line curling out from the food pantry anyway, her daughter cheerfully ensconced in her car seat in the back.
She rolled slowly past the low-slung industrial buildings on the outer edge of Atlanta, toward the empty church that was now a staging ground for a phalanx of volunteers packing food into bright purple bags. It wasn’t so long ago that she was helping others instead of asking for help, but that was before the pandemic, before she lost her job as an early childhood educator and fell six months behind on rent. Her wife still works for the Postal Service, but it’s not enough to keep the family afloat. The $1,200 stimulus check she received last spring is long gone, and her unemployment benefits have run out.
OMFG!
That's the voter the Globe found?
Democrats’ critiques of two Republican incumbents, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, whom Democrats have relentlessly pounded as out-of-touch millionaires profiting off average people’s pain and blocking the relief that would help them, have taken on a personal edge, since they relentlessly portray the two incumbents as self-dealing millionaires who sought to profit from the pandemic through stock trades. (Both candidates have denied wrongdoing.)
Barr memory-holed that malfea$ance, and it was Pelosi who blocked the aid because it was good politics.
“How do we wind up with two senators who saw this pandemic as an investment opportunity, while they lied to us about the risk to our health and blocked relief to ordinary people?” said Ossoff, the candidate running against Perdue, at a rally with labor leaders last week.
Republicans in the state are hoping that a stimulus bill from Washington will boost the incumbents’ standing.
“It’ll certainly shut off one line of attack, and could take some of the air out of the balloon with voters who are scared because their economic situation is in a crumbling position,” Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist in Georgia, said.
They think that $tinking turkey is going to save them?
Democrats are vowing to keep pressing their economic case — and they have also reshaped some of their organizing efforts to account for the economic pain.
At the food drive, a group of volunteers with the New Georgia Project, a civic engagement group founded by Stacey Abrams that is credited with aiding Democratic victories in the state, handed out toys in orange bags as people drove by.
They were not urging people to vote or sign up for absentee ballots; instead, they said, they were trying to build trust in a hard-hit community.
You know what they say: "Trust, once lost, is hard to restore."
“We definitely don’t want people going to the polls basically hungry,” said Erica Clemmons-Dean, the group’s organizing director. “They have a lot of other things on their mind.”
The families coming through the line were an embodiment of how suddenly people’s economic standing has changed.
Lori Ellis, 59, has a job at an insurance company, but she said her household had swollen from four people to nine after some of her family lost their home in the downturn.
“I have a disabled mother. A disabled husband, and a daughter whose job was cut off because of the pandemic,” Ellis said, gazing at the line stretching outside of the parking lot. “I’ve never seen Margie’s line this long.”
She was planning to vote for the Democratic candidates because she believed they had a better sense of “what the people need.”
Debra Carroll, 66, cried out in frustration when she thought about how much time had passed since the last economic relief bill. “They need to do something quick, fast, in a hurry,” she said.
UNREAL!
It was PELOSI who BLOCKED it for POLITICS, this whole fucking thing is a scam along with the BS narrative being supplied by the partisan Globe.
During the pandemic, her rent has risen, and her Social Security checks can’t cover food, personal protective equipment, and the cleaning supplies she thinks will keep her safe. She visits three different food pantries to get everything she needs.
“We need some help now,” Carroll said. “Everyone keeps saying, on down the road, on down the road, but we need it now.”
It has been only six weeks since voters went to the polls, but in that time, some key economic indicators and public health measures have worsened. The country is reporting more than 200,000 new virus infections on average each day, and in Georgia, the caseload has shot up 70 percent over the last two weeks.....
All based on the diagnosis of a PCR "test" that doesn't detect COVID-19 or infectiousness.
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Related:
The Globe did notice that death, as he was the first Black American to receive a full athletic scholarship to the University of Georgia, battled racism in the Deep South, and set a path that dozens of young athletes have followed.
The incidents are under investigation as potential hate crimes which one religious leader likened to a cross burning.
Investigators are first working to rule out any accidental causes, but they believe the fire may have been intentionally set and possibly linked to three other fires in the neighborhood in the past three weeks.
She is disavowing a photo circulating on social media of her posing with a longtime white supremacist at a recent campaign event, with less than a month to go until the runoff elections that will determine the balance of the US Senate.
The number that rivals the turnout at this point in the November election and points to intense enthusiasm in a pair of races that will determine control of Congress.
Democrats must oust both Senator Kelly Loeffler and Senator David Perdue to give their party power over both houses of Congress, in addition to the White House.
The New York Times doesn't like the drumbeat of misinformation from Diamond and Silk or Mark Levin, but I'm sure they would have been fine with Tammy Bruce congratulating gay Grenell on his appointment to the Holocaust Museum board by Trump while subbing for Hannity because we all love Israel and the Jewish people -- as their channel pushes war with China over its alleged control over America.
Bah, humbug!
