With a win for President-Elect Joe Biden in the rearview and a double-header Senate runoff ahead, the Georgia campaigns are trying to predict what role President Donald Trump’s absence from the ticket will play in Republican turnout for the January races.
As long as he’s in this mode, the GOP is in trouble. (GOOD!)
Hard to follow the logic of Republicans “coming home to roost” if there was split ticket voting Nov 6. Are those people going to vote for the Republican even harder somehow without president traitor on the ticket? Still only one vote.
I’ll be ok if the GOP vote is individually suppressed, leaving the winning to people who actually have some sanity.
I don’t see the issue here.
If I were the campaign managers for Ossoff and Warnock, I would assume that every possible Trump voter will enthusiastically turn out to vote for Perdue and Loeffler.
These managers don’t have to necessarily dwell on it, but they certainly have to strategically plan on it.
And I know that Stacey Abrams is one-upping even what I say.
Well, conventional wisdom would be that a president who loses reelection would drag down the vote. But because it’s Trump, the opposite must be true. So I would expect a strong showing by Republicans. 
Actually, now that I think about it, all the rest of the Republicans did just fine. It’s only the guy at the top who lost his job, so I think Democrats should be nervous about these run offs. Gonna have to work to get out the vote!
Perdue added, though, that there is an “anti-Trump” contingent in Georgia, Republican voters in the suburbs who were turned off by Trump but who may come home to roost if there are blander Republican candidates on the ballot.
David Perdue’s vote total in the November 3 election tracked Trump’s total almost precisely, and Jon Ossoff only ran about 1.5 points behind Joe Biden.
Sheila Levy, secretary of the Dekalb County Democrats, noticed the trend when she was serving on voter review panels for the presidential elections: a check mark for Biden, then a reversion back to Republican candidates further down the ballot.
“We’re not gonna have same slant that we had because people decided to vote for Biden to get the cancer out of the White House and to restore some type of order there, but then they continued to vote for down-ballot Republicans because they do believe in the Republican cause,” she told TPM.
Hmm, I wonder what GA republicans want out their Republicans Congress critters? And this is going to be hard for Perdue and Loeffler to figure this out. And then there’s the district where MTG won with Qanon shit.
I see landmines all over the place.
And if the voters are afraid of ANYthing Biden might do in the next two years, they’ll turn out so that the Senate can be the obstacle to anything useful being passed and continuation of unqualified judges being confirmed.
This is crucial and needs to be at the base of everything that happens with these run-off campaigns.
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`Durbin:
—
“The worst pandemic public health crisis in modern times in
America, & we are being challenged as to whether there’s
going to be a peaceful transition… [but we decided] what’s
important was to determine whether or not social media was
discriminating against Republicans” pic.twitter.com/Mtyj6mQycQ
Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November
17, 2020
Randy Rainbow is like an extremely gay, very out Danny Kaye.
Right. I’m sure there’s data out there to this effect, but I strongly suspect that a fair number of Republicans nationwide voted against Trump but for GOPers down-ticket. There won’t be Trump or other candidates to distract people’s attention this time around. I do hope that Republicans, in full eat-their-own mode there in Georgia, won’t come out in droves for the run-off, but, well, if wishes were horses . . .
OT: I’m gonna be a bit nit-picky here, because I am genuinely curious about the headline on the front page.
Why, with all that’s going on, is TPM spending great resources on the Falwell story? This is more a New York Post kinda thing, isn’t it? Why is this a thing now? Help me out here - I genuinely want to understand how it is, with thousands getting sick, and hundreds dying, a day, and a presidential election under threat and ANWR being re-opened and a wealth of other truly relevant things happening, why is this a thing?
Biden’s low-key (and disappointing to many) statements about “moving forward” and “reluctance to prosecute Trump” may have been made with this in mind.
Because it’s about sex and therefore juicy and the people who run TPM are making a bet that people want to talk about it.
I took one look at it and asked myself would Time Magazine or Newsweek or any of the other relatively reliable news media outlets have wasted time on it? I answered my own question.
And at the same time, I didn’t see where TPM activated comments on it - they may be there now - so how would any discussion be started? I can avoid this story going forward. I know too much about the Falwells, dating back to his dad. I don’t need to know any more.
Well the whole Lincoln Project and lots of other Republicans are still Republicans who just got tired of the daily White House embarrassment. So I’m not super optimistic.
In fairness, “Republicans Gone Wild” reportage is something that’s been very consistently in their wheelhouse from day one. They even have an awards program recognizing greatness in conservative seaminess, grift and ratfuckery.
When the top headline on TPM is an in depth about the pool boy/sex toy to the Falwells and how horny the Mrs was/is you know the GOP is not doing well.
This is why:
Becki heralded a luncheon for Trump’s visit to Granda as access to “an exclusive club,” Granda recalls. At Liberty, Jerry affably introduced Granda to Trump as “our friend from the Fontainebleau” in a greenroom that, Granda says, also contained Michael Cohen and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).
Granda felt bewildered to find himself in the inner circle of Liberty, surrounded by students bound by biblical stricture while he went off to drink, shoot guns, and ride around on ATVs with the Falwell sons, Trey and Wes, at the family’s 500-acre estate.
But it seemed to be only Cohen who, Granda remembers, registered that he was out of place.
Cohen looked over his shoulder at Granda while on a campus tour with Trump and his entourage, and shrugged to a Liberty employee, asking “who’s that guy?”
“He’s a business partner of the Falwells.”
“Huh,” Cohen nodded.