More post-Georgia-runoff musings
Fewer people on the right and left voted in the Georgia runoff than in the general – why? Yes, I know that’s pretty much always true of runoffs, but this was no ordinary runoff. Are people more interested in their state elections, for posts such as governor and state legislators, than in the direction the federal government goes for the next two years? Or have many people on the right in Georgia just not been paying attention? I know the turnout yesterday (and in early voting) was large for a runoff – but still, winning depends on turnout, and a little more for the right might have done the trick.
Or is it because they think the Senate is lost anyway? Do they not realize numbers matter even then? Or did the continued “leadership” of GOPe leader McConnell turn them off? Did depression after the 2022 general turn them off? Or is it possible they actually listened to Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan who bragged about not voting for Walker or Warnock?
Or all of the above?
I’ve seen people commenting in sites around the conservative blogosphere angrily and morosely saying that Georgia is now a blue state. Untrue. It is decidedly purple – or, rather, it’s layered, with a purple outer (federal) layer and a red inner (state) core:
The Republican Party controls the [Georgia] offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature.
What’s more, Georgia has 14 members of the US House, and in the 2022 election nine of the winners were Republicans and five were Democrats, for a gain of one GOP seat over the 2020 reults.
And yet Warnock won, and Georgia’s other senator (Osoff) is a Democrat as well. Georgia is not the only state like that – for example, New Hampshire has a similar but even more dichotomous pattern with – in New Hampshire’s case – two senators and two US House members who are Democrats, and all state entities controlled by Republicans. Why? Do the residents of these states think that Congress members are too distant to matter, compared to state officeholders? They should think again. Do voters in those states think that the state officials affect their pocketbooks more directly, and so they elect more fiscally responsible Republicans at that level and save the virtue-signaling voting for their national candidates?
I wrote prior to the November 2022 election that I thought New Hampshire’s incumbent Hassan was vulnerable but that Bolduc was a fairly extreme candidate who was not a good fit for the state, with little ability to appeal to more moderate voters there. However, no better candidate had presented him or herself in New Hampshire and so although Bolduc won the primary in a state that is not especially Trump-friendly, he lost the general. The situation with Warnock and Walker in Georgia was different in its details, but similar in its result – Warnock was somewhat vulnerable there, but Walker was not the person to do capitalize on that.
Why, obviously Walker was not of the quality to enter a chamber containing Mitt Romney, Thom Tillis, and led by Mitch McConnell himself.
Given how close it was, either Mitch’s JPCA betrayal was decisive for Warnock, or they had more votes in reserve if they needed them.
Ticket splitting seems to have happened a great deal in Georgia as well as other states this past election. There’s a pretty significant contigent of clearly very mercurial voters who will vote for a Governor from one party and a Senator from another. I can’t understand it personally, but it is most definitely real. Perhaps these people are extremely persuadable on an emotional level and less so on a rational one?
Eeyore:
It’s not a question of “quality.” It’s a question of whether he could be successfully harmed by harping on certain facts of his history, and/or how he came across to the Georgia electorate.
The Republicans had a poor candidate and he was not enthusiastically supported by the national or in some cases by the state party.
Walker won 129 counties. Warnock won 30, mostly in metro areas where the abortion issue worked for him. Social media would seem much more effective in these areas too.
Hershel Walker joins the crowd of Douglas Mastriano, Mehmet Oz, Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Roy Moore, and countless others who are/were absolutely abysmal. Also I always felt that no matter what your personal opinion of Roe v. Wade is, the abortion issue was going to one day come back and bite the Republican Party on its backside good and hard.
@neo
Eeyore:
It’s not a question of “quality.” It’s a question of whether he could be successfully harmed by harping on certain facts of his history, and/or how he came across to the Georgia electorate.
________
Well, Loeffler was a vanilla a Republican as you could ask. She did no better. And I’ll stick with the point that Mitch, all by himself, did enough harm at the last minute. to throw the election.
Eeyore:
Loeffler had different problems than Walker, but she was one of the worst – in terms of boring, colorless, standing for little or nothing – candidates I’ve ever seen, in a completely different way from Walker. As far as GOP analogies go, she resembled Bolduc’s main GOP primary opponent in NH, Chuck Morse, one of those people who disappear into the woodwork. I don’t ask for perfect or near-perfect candidates, but those three had big problems.
Eeyore:
What specifically did McConnell do in the runoff? He apparently gave Walker a lot of money for the runoff, as I said.
As far as I know Pennsylvania is the same, Democrat Governor and 2 Senators but Harrisburg is mostly Republicans
Skip:
PA is a little the same, but the Democrat governor makes a big difference and can veto anything.
Unfortunately elections just don’t start with the runoff. Funding, or lack of, before the runoff had an impact.
The the Lt Governor grandstanding has me a bit suspicious of actual GOP state support.
And who knows how clean the elections were:
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/something-stinks-in-georgia-again
Following up on Ray SoCa’s link, the Senate election in Georgia was stolen.
Scroll down and you will see the vote tallies at 9:59 pm and 10:03 pm. In that four minute period Walker loses 21,586 votes while Warnock gains 4,036 votes. How does a candidate lose votes except by cheating. Vote fraud is like an iceberg, 90% is out of sight. This is a replay of the Georgia vote fraud in the 2020 election.
There’s nothing subtle here or anything that can be lawyered away, they are cheating in plain view.
Don’t get me started on Thom Tillis. Recently, I have spent far too much time sending him polite but irritated emails. At least we have replaced the also-useless Richard Burr with an actual Republican.
And don’t get me started on Warnock. On Monday, he went on MSNBC to tell us that unlimited abortion on demand is what Jesus would have done. Oh.
“…[T]hey are cheating in plain view….”
Indeed. And why shouldn’t they? Riddle me this!….
(Well…because it ain’t right, that’s why!!…
It ain’t right!!! So you’re telling me that it ain’t right to MAKE SURE that the DEVIL doesn’t get elected??…It ain’t right TO DO EVERYTHING in your power to prevent THAT? Is that what yer sayin’…)
Nope. NO ONE can imagine(!!) the TOUGH moral choices that Democrats have to make!! No one…
And don’t get me started on Warnock. On Monday, he went on MSNBC to tell us that unlimited abortion on demand is what Jesus would have done. Oh.
And Jesus would have called Warlock a Kalba (dog)
I find that Walker’s vote ‘loss anomaly’ in just four minutes prima facie evidence of electoral fraud.
What other explanation might there be?
Same tactic led to Kari Lake’s ‘loss’ in Arizona.
That the GOPe condones it is proof positive of the UniParty’s existence.
@BrooklynBoy
Concern Troll Goes Trolling Again.
If being “absolutely abysmal” was decisive, than the elections elsewhere in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Alaska, and Ohio would have been very different. There have been a lot of absolutely abysmal candidates on slate for the past few years, and many of the worst WON. You don’t seem to want to acknowledge that because people like Fetterman and Warnock were Leftist Democrats, and it also kneecaps your “Blame Trump All The Time” train precisely BECAUSE it points to deeper issues that can’t be explained by your one stop shop for understanding Life, the Universe, and Everythin.
But it has been biting the Republican Party for many decades. We know the difference
We also know from persistent election returns and polling that it isn’t biting them THAT hard. Something else is at play, and it isn’t abortion, or Trump, or the other pad examples you and other concern trolls like to play at.
Yesterday’s result was not surprising; and I really can’t work up much anger or sadness about it either. Oh sure, I understand the serious national impact is will have. And were I a Georgia resident, I would have voted for Walker without hesitation (I’m pretty much a Yellow Dog Anti-Democrat). But c’mon, Walker was an awful candidate. Truly terrible.
I’m not against celebrity candidates per se, but they need to be competent, articulate, clever and not have a sordid past. Walker was none of those things. Oz in Pennsylvania was only slightly better. Both of the seats were winnable (and thus, control of the Senate) with stronger candidates. Instead the GOP has the ignominy of having lost to a guy with serious brain damage who can barely utter a coherent sentence and to Jeremiah Wright, the next generation.
When the topic is Georgia elections, it’s hard to forget those stacks of pristine ballots that got counted in 2020.
I call them “The Pristines.”
When Fulton County, Ga., poll manager Suzi Voyles sorted through a large stack of mail-in ballots last November, she noticed an alarmingly odd pattern of uniformity in the markings for Joseph R. Biden. One after another, the absentee votes contained perfectly filled-in ovals for Biden — except that each of the darkened bubbles featured an identical white void inside them in the shape of a tiny crescent, indicating they’d been marked with toner ink instead of a pen or pencil.
Adding to suspicions, she noticed that all of the ballots were printed on different stock paper than the others she handled as part of a statewide hand recount of the razor-thin Nov. 3 presidential election. And none was folded or creased, as she typically observed in mail-in ballots that had been removed from envelopes…
OK, OK…but when yer sending in ballots hot off the press, why would anyone in their right mind expect them to be folded?
(Especially when there is a huge time constraint…I mean you can’t just STOP COUNTING BALLOTS for as long as you want to!… Someone might just notice…)
No, BB is not a troll.
He’s just very, very upset…and, understandably (well, in some cases, and for some people), if you’re very, very upset—I mean terribly, outrageously upset—YOU HAVE TO lash out. YOU HAVE TO blame someone…
QED.
(It might be what others would consider the easy way out…but c’est la vie…)
File under: In sorrow AND in anger…
Best analysis so far of the GA Election I have read. And from the Federalist, where the co founder Ben Domenech is married to Megan McCain (so not a huge supporter of MAGA).
3 Unsexy Reasons Warnock Beat Walker
https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/07/3-unsexy-reasons-warnock-beat-walker-in-the-georgia-runoff/
1. Walker was outspent 3X
2. Dem Ground Game was 10X the size of the GOP. GOP spent minimal on ground game (gotta pay those consultants).
3. Dem Lawfare was substantial.
With all these negatives, it’s amazing that Walker came that close.
Just think what the results would have been if the GOP Establishment fully supported Walker, and the funding was equal.
@Barry Meislin.
I disagree, or at a minimum their conduct is so repulsive and dishonest that there is basically little difference.
I was prepared to accept this explanation and gave due benefit of the doubt until I saw the pattern of their comments.
Especially the one on here.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/12/07/divided-party-united-party/
Which is what really triggered me to lose it.
In a discussion about the unity of the Democrats and the division of the Republican Party – which our host (who again hardly worships at the golden calf of God-Emperor Trump) pointed out long ago – BB immediately went on to rant about Trump. Completely and solely blaming Trump, in spite of the obvious fact to those of us with a historical memory going back before 2015 that the splits in the Republican Party well pre-date Trump, and while he exacerbated and changed some of them he obviously did not cause the fundamental situation.
So I lost it and let BB have it for his disgusting smears and dishonesty with both barrels. And I completely stand by what I wrote.
Moreover, I’m far from the only person who noticed this and agreed, and far from all are uncritical Trump worshippers.
Simply put, BB is a troll or their conduct is so atrocious, two-faced, and disingenuous that they are essentially no different from a troll. Made all the worse because they are barely able to give even a cursory denunciation of Biden, and never on a level exceeding that of Trump in spite of how all of us in our right mind can see that for all the problems with Cheeto Champ, he is a far better man than Biden and his ilk.
I’m sorry, but I worked in counseling for months as a volunteer. I have no sympathy for this.
The urge to lash out is understandable, but actually lashing out against people who -at a minimum – do not deserve it nearly as much as claimed is a despicable act. One I have no sympathy for in this case. The fact that BB prefers to engage in holier-than-thou friendly fire (and often on nakedly false pretenses) while lashing out is just the clincher.
If BB wishes to have my sympathy or even my tolerance, they need to grow the hell up and hate the Leftist radicals more than he does Trump.
I’d be more prepared to understand or tolerate this if it actually was a way out, easy or not. But it’s not. It is sophistry and attacking someone who is not primarily responsible for our problems.
I’ve dealt with plenty of more or less sincere Trump critics, and our host is now increasingly one of them. And the kicker is they tend to have consistent standards and more depth and consistency than a puddle.
If BB does have such, they have shown absolutely zero indication that I have seen, and I have no reason to suffer it any further.
I file it under “Dishonest Concern Troll Scum.”
There might have been a similar drop-off in voter turn out if it were the governor’s race than needed a run-off. People find it easier to take the time to vote on election day than a month later. But there wouldn’t have been a run-off for governor. In state and local elections people vote for incumbents, for competence, and for pocketbook issues. Federal elections are more of a “free vote” when you can vote your ideology, rather than your immediate concerns, so people who voted Republican in GA or NH state elections could indulge their emotions in the US Senate races.
If you are in New Hampshire, you may remember or may have heard of when what never happens actually did happen. The 1974 US Senate race was so close (2 votes?) that there actually was a “do over.” That wouldn’t happen now. The country, and probably New Hampshire, are different and more divided, and cheating ensures that a margin that close will probably be “fortified” to ensure a more defendable outcome.