What Caused the GOP’s Georgia Train Wreck
The two Georgia Senate runoff losses that cost Republicans control both houses of Congress were a slow-motion train wreck over a two-month period since the November election.
Here are just some of the likely reasons behind the wreck:
Donald J. Trump
Normally the party elected to the White House does worse in elections when its party controls (or is about to control) the White House.
But the Georgia runoffs broke from that pattern, and Donald Trump had a lot to do with that.
Eliana Johnson, in Politico’s Playbook newsletter, wrote, “One GOP pollster involved in the races told me that Loeffler was narrowly ahead 72 hours before Election Day.” Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were likely to fall below 50 percent of the vote — just as they did in the November election. She added:
But the release of Trump’s call to pressure the Georgia elections chief, combined with the flood of Republican senators who followed Hawley in vowing to challenge Biden’s win, changed everything. “When you’re in a really close race the imagery of the last 48 hours makes a difference because you don’t have to move that many voters,” the pollster said.
Trump’s involvement in the race before those final days may also have dragged down GOP turnout. The Los Angeles Times reported that Erick Erickson, a conservative talk-show host, said,
Donald Trump toured the state telling everyone the race was stolen, the fix was in. The president of the United States literally stood on stage in Dalton, Georgia [the night before the runoff], and told Republican voters: “The decks are stacked against you, they’re cheating and stealing it. Go vote anyway!”
Some of them didn’t.
Political Polarization
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who first became active in the Georgia Republican Party in 1960, laments how the country has become so polarized into pro- and anti-Trump factions. At FoxNews.com, he wrote, “What would have normally been powerful attacks against Democratic Senate candidates Ossoff and Warnock were simply ignored or shrugged off by their polarized supporters.”
African-American Voter Surge
Black voters are why Democrats have a Senate majority. In the November election, only 27 percent of voters were African American. In the runoffs last week, some 30 percent were African-American. That turnout was fueled by the massive work of grassroots mobilization groups.
The increased black turnout generated by those groups meant that Perdue’s vote among African Americans fell from 11 percent in November to 8 percent in the runoff.
So many commercials attacking the “radical” record of Raphael Warnock, the Democratic opponent of Perdue, were run that some in the black community felt that Warnock, the current pastor of Martin Luther King’s old church in Atlanta, was unfairly targeted. While some voters were repulsed by Warnock’s history of extreme statements, more apparently concluded that the tsunami of negative ads was an over-the-top campaign tactic.
Lost Opportunity
GOP senator David Perdue won an impressive 43 percent of the vote among Hispanics back in November, but in the runoff, he won only 37 percent. Republicans did better among Asian voters (4 percent of the vote in Georgia), with Perdue winning a slight majority of their votes in the runoff. But the potential for an even better showing was lost. Gingrich noted: “The Georgia GOP should have spent far more resources on the Latino and Asian American votes.”
Georgia’s Flawed Election Code
Georgia election procedures didn’t inspire confidence in the November elections.
Signature verification processes were far less secure and reliable than in the past thanks to a “consent decree” settling a civil-rights lawsuit foolishly signed last spring by Republican Bruce Raffensberger, Georgia’s Secretary of State. That decree led to an overwhelming flood of mail-in ballots that many local election offices weren’t prepared for.
Afterwards, a lawsuit challenging the election results was slow-walked by local courts in the Democratic stronghold of Atlanta. A judge eligible to hear the case was not assigned to it until Christmas Eve — a full eight weeks after the election — a time when the case was soon going to be moot.
Gingrich noted “the failure to address or clean up the allegations of a corrupt election process that arose from the November 3 election,” adding:
This failure is the most amazing thing I have seen in six decades of Republican politics. Despite serious concerns from many Georgians, Gov. Kemp and Secretary of State Raffensperger took the position that everything was fine — or simply unfixable. This did nothing to increase public trust or credibility.
Conclusion
Republicans will be tempted to bury their mistakes in the Georgia runoffs and place the blame instead solely on Donald Trump. That would be a mistake.
The chaotic and slipshod approach to the all-important races that would dictate control of the Senate was a party-wide failure. If Republicans don’t learn from this debacle, they may find themselves in a minority position for a lot longer than they expected.
