Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger won his GOP primary on Tuesday — and narrowly escaped having to participate in a runoff against Jody Hice, the man Trump had picked to defeat him.
Excellent! The Dem is better, of course, but less crazy is better than more crazy and it’s good to see that crossing TFG(the losing loser who endorses losers) isn’t a career ender.
“Then, suddenly, a small child at the back of the GOP shouted, ‘But the emperor has no hair!’…”
(h/t Hans Christian Andersen)
Hice even quit his job as a member of Congress to serve as Trump’s weapon against Raffensperger.
previously
Perhaps Tom Price should be stripped of his medical license?
Go for it.
I posted, because Hice isn’t the first Georgian to lose because of Trump.
A resounding showing by Raffensperger. It is a stunner for Trump.
Trump has very sensitive antennae for this type of thing and we still have the J6 Hearings awaiting.
and narrowly escaped having to participate in a runoff against Jody Hice
Um, up 18+% is “narrowly”? Utter horseshit.
Raffensperger had to get above 50% to avoid the runoff, that’s the narrowly part.
On the one hand, it might have been better for the Democrat to run against the crazy Republican that promised to ignore voters. On the other hand, keeping those crazy Republicans from having a chance to take office is probably a good thing…Hice might have won despite his anti-democratic impulses, and that would be a bad thing. Raffensperger at least believes in counting the votes and declaring the winning based on the count, even if he’s willing to game the system to help Republicans have an advantage.
I guess we will have to hope that the Democrats have a good night in November and can win at least some of the races.
Reading through the tea leaves of these GOP '22 primaries, I think there is some good news for the Dems.
GOP pollsters vastly overestimated the Trumper/Qanon vote in competitive contests in OH, PA, AL and GA. Trump voters are generally regarded as Election Day voters. There was no e-day surge for Josh Mandel, Kathy Barnette, Oz, Jody Hice, David Perdue or Mo Brooks. They underperformed the polling for the most part and certainly did not experience a surge above polling estimates. The establishment candidate’s share of the vote from EV to E-Day held up reasonably well. Mo Brooks made it to a run off but this will not be a close race as he was 17 points behind Britt in Round 1, more than double the margin the polls predicted.
There are 2 reasons for this. One is that where there were competitive open primaries, a lot of Dems and Indies voted in the GOP primary against the crazy. The most stark example of this is the GA races. Brad Raffensberger, who ran well behind Kemp’s numbers in his quest to be re-elected as Secretary of State, almost certainly got over the 50% run off threshold because of Dem voters. Kemp also outperformed the polls b/c Dems and Indies voted against Perdue.
However, Dems voting in the GOP primary does not explain these big polling misses by itself. A second factor appears to be that Trump surge voters just didn’t turn out to vote. They don’t appear to be voting in large numbers. I’d like to do a deeper dive, but I suspect that the rural vote wasn’t as large a percentage of the total vote as a lot of these GOP polls had predicted.
These Trump surge voters may be checking out of politics, and there may not be as many of them as that group has experienced a high death rate due to COVID and other ailments exacerbated by the pandemic. If they’re not voting in the primary for Trump endorsed candidates, then it stands to reason that the GOP will have a tough time getting them to vote in the general election. For his part, Trump is going to have to undermine the GOP establishment candidates, because if they win, he loses and he loses the political cover needed to shield himself from prosecution.
What this suggests is that the electorate that will show up in October/November will be more educated, suburban, centrist and less ideological. An issue like abortion will cut in favor of the Dems very starkly amidst such an electorate.
I’m also sensing a more unified Dem coalition because we’ve been jolted collectively to fear what GOP rule would look like in a post-Trump era, and also because some progressive candidates are demonstrating growth and maturity and are getting broader acceptance by the party, which keeps lefties invested in the party rather than trying to tear it down or be preoccupied with internecine battles and neglecting the larger fight vs the GOP.
None of this is the CW, but the data are telling us that this electorate isn’t going to be as harshly unfriendly to the Dems like prior midterms in 1994, 2002, 2010 and 2014.
This one stings TFG find me some votes more than any of them. I just don’t see the MAGA orcs voting for Raffensperger in the general, however. They hate him for stealing the election for Biden.
Probably because there just aren’t that many left. Like you say, they all died from covid. I wouldn’t underestimate the impact of this. I’d love to see some statistics on this. I think it must be quite high due to their unvaccinated status.
Rural and Republican-dominant areas of Georgia experienced the highest Covid deaths in terms of population per 100K. There are areas in Georgia where the number of sick and dead threatened to shut down municipal services. I am too lazy to look up the stories –but you can find them if you were to do a search of news articles from the past year. These are Republican strongholds prior to Covid. I suppose you could say they still are, minus the thousands of people who succumbed to the disease.
Time to write Trump’s political obituary. In Cockney. 'E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed 'im to the perch 'e’d be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E’s off the twig! 'E’s kicked the bucket, 'e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-TRUMP!!
No dissonance to be found - I live in a small city in s GA (43,000 in the whole county) and because of my job I know people all over rural south GA. I know plenty of Trump supporters who are actually vaccinated just like Trump and blame the deaths on the disease and the unvaccinated. And I know plenty of unvaccinated who cling to their echo chamber claims about vaccine inefficiency and Democratic power grabs with shut downs.
The only person I know who switched from Trump to Biden in my little town is a college educated working mom who grew up in the Atlanta suburbs and was never overly political. Which gives me hope about the demographic voting shift - except she prefers Kemp over Abrams and Warnock over Walker. I’m not sure the National picture truly shows Abrams as a campaigner - she has a penchant for saying things that can sound pretty demeaning about GA when the context isn’t fully in line with core liberal beliefs. It makes her vulnerable to attacks that she is anti business and anti farming - two of the biggest issues most working GAs all seem to agree on.
Trump is splitting them, such that they can’t get a common theme, nor a common purpose going.
He’s running a GOP civil war.
And Trump’s only theme/purpose is grift, vengeance and staying out of prison.
Not much of a reason for excitement to vote.
Raffensperger at least believes in counting the votes and declaring the winner based on the count, even if he’s willing to game the system to help Republicans have an advantage.
This^
Exactly. Raffensperger appears to believe that it is okay to make it difficult to vote but does believe in counting all the votes if you manage to do so.
Democrats believe that it should be easy for everybody entitled to vote to do so.
Or they’ve moved on to just being happy in their outsider-grievance-bearer status. Works for me.
Trump keeps saying that he wants paper ballots which can be counted. Raffensperger counted all the paper ballots and Trump didn’t like it.
That’s a pretty stark set of facts. You have to work very hard to convince yourself that Trump was robbed.