All eyes on Georgia today as the Senate hangs in the balance. In the meantime, fallout continues from the leaked call where Donald Trump pressured Georgia officials to alter election results. Here’s Michelle Goldberg’s take at The New York Times:
At this point, demanding such accountability feels like smashing one’s head into a brick wall, but our democracy might not be able to stagger along much longer without it. Republicans already often treat victories by Democrats as illegitimate. Their justification for impeaching Bill Clinton was flimsy at the time and looks even more ludicrous in light of their defenses of Trump. Trump’s political career was built on the racist lie that Barack Obama was a foreigner ineligible for the presidency.
Now Trump and his Republican enablers have set a precedent for pressuring state officials to discard the will of their voters, and if that fails, for getting their allies in Congress to reject the results.
More on the call and the GOP’s philosophy from Jamelle Bouie:
It’s worth emphasizing the bad faith and dishonesty on display here. At least 140 House Republicans say that they will vote againstcounting certain electoral votes on Wednesday. Among them are newly seated lawmakers in Georgia and Pennsylvania, two states whose votes are in contention. But the logic of their objection applies to them as well as Biden. If his state victories are potentially illegitimate, then so are theirs. Or take the charge, from Ted Cruz and 10 other Senate Republicans, that multiple key swing states changed (or even violated) their election laws in contravention of the Constitution. If it’s true for those cases, then it’s also true of Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, unilaterally expanded voting, however meagerly. And yet there’s no drive to cancel those results.
The issue for Republicans is not election integrity, it’s the fact that Democratic votes count at all.
Charles Bethea at The New Yorker takes a deep dive into Georgia’s elections and turnout:
Bernard Fraga, a professor of political science at Emory and the author of “The Turnout Gap,” told me that turnout tends to drop by forty per cent or more for runoff elections. In Georgia, he explained, the drop-off is typically more severe among Democrats. But he didn’t expect this runoff to be typical. We might see a drop-off as small as fifteen per cent, he suggested. “But will that historically low drop-off be disproportionately Republican or Democratic?” he asked. “That’s what these groups on the ground are trying to decide.”
More on Trump’s attempt to disenfranchise Georgia voters from Sasha Abramsky at The Nation:
It’s part shakedown and part lunatic raving, but it’s also simply pathetic. Trump can be heard wheedling and begging and bargaining. If there are five stages to grief, Trump, in defeat, is immersed in all of the first four simultaneously. It’s increasingly looking like he’ll never reach stage five, acceptance.
On a final note, here’s David Graham’s analysis of Trump’s election night eve rally in Georgia:
the event was a chance—perhaps one of the last—for Trump to revel in a large campaign rally, COVID-19 be damned. From the moment he announced his candidacy at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015, he has loved occasions like this one. They are a chance for him to listen to his own voice as long as he wants, free-associating all the way, and to bask in the glow of adoration without reality intruding. [...]
Now he is getting involved in the race, but it’s not clear whether his bull-in-a-china-shop approach does more harm or good. By continuing to claim that the November election was rigged, he risks dampening enthusiasm among Republican voters, who might feel that their vote won’t count. He has also exacerbated internecine battles within the GOP. Tonight he promised to return to Georgia to campaign against Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who has declined to assist Trump’s attempts to overturn the vote in the state. (If he follows through, it will only be because that would give him a chance to talk about himself, not Kemp’s challenger.)