The fight in Georgia is a nearly perfect microcosm of
American politics in 2020
Opinion by
Columnist
November 17, 2020 at 10:33 a.m. CST
To
understand American politics in 2020, look at what’s happening in Georgia.
There
are two dramas playing out simultaneously in the Peach State, but what they
have in common is this: Democrats hope that a changing, modernizing state can
give them narrow victories, while Republicans use the levers of power they
control to tilt the playing field while deploying lies and slander.
The
GOP’s plans, however, are running into some problems, principal among them that
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is that rarest of creatures, a Republican
with some modicum of integrity.
Raffensperger, who says, “I’m a conservative Republican and
always have been,” is presiding over a hand recount of ballots after the
initial count in the presidential race showed Joe Biden winning the state by
over 14,000 votes. While it’s theoretically possible that the recount could
uncover miscounts large enough to give the state to Trump, it’s exceedingly
unlikely; recounts seldom move more than a small number of votes in either
direction.
But
that’s not good enough for those who believe that if a Republican is the chief
election official in a state, he had by-god better use his position to make
sure the Republicans win.
It was
just a week ago that Sens. David Perdue (R-Ga.) and Kelly Loeffler
(R-Ga.) attacked Raffensperger and demanded he
resign, on the grounds that … well, they made no allegations at all, other than
that he was guilty of “mismanagement and lack of transparency.” What he’d
mismanaged or hidden, they neglected to specify. The obvious truth was that
Raffensperger failed to engage in whatever voter suppression
or outright cheating might have been necessary to allow them both to pass 50
percent in November’s election and thereby avoid a runoff.
And
now, in an extraordinary interview with The
Post’s Amy Gardner, Raffensperger revealed that he received a call from Sen.
Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who has been aiding President Trump in his false
claims of a widespread Democratic voter-fraud conspiracy:
In
their conversation, Graham questioned Raffensperger about the state’s
signature-matching law and whether political bias could have prompted poll
workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures, according to
Raffensperger. Graham also asked whether Raffensperger had the power to toss
all mail ballots in counties found to have higher rates of nonmatching
signatures, Raffensperger said.
Raffensperger said he was
stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast
ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do
what Graham suggested because counties administer elections in Georgia.
Graham
denied that he pressured Raffensperger, saying that he called him only to
discuss the state’s methods of verifying absentee ballots. Just satisfying his
curiosity! But what the heck is a senator from South Carolina doing calling the
secretary of state of Georgia at all?
Let’s
not forget that Republicans moved heaven and earth to find Democratic voter
fraud in this election, and came up empty. They looked in every state in the
union, they had their poll-watchers out in force, they filed lawsuit after
lawsuit, and they found essentially nothing. All they have are wild theories
and comically absurd stories (I talked to a guy who talked to a guy who said
he saw a truck with Biden-Harris stickers unloading ballots!), none of
which could come within a million miles of overturning a single state, let
alone the election.
Thus
the party that spent months warning about voter fraud is doing everything in
their power to commit their own fraud — which was their plan all along. Their
attempt to find some way for the election to be handed to Trump is
simultaneously corrosive to democracy and utterly pathetic; Trump himself is
spending his time tweeting a deranged conspiracy theory about a plot to steal
the election from him that features George Soros, China and Hugo Chávez. That
Chávez has been dead since 2013 is not even the weirdest part of the theory.
So no,
Georgia’s results will not be reversed, and Biden will become president in
January. But now it’s up to the state to determine whether Republicans will
retain control of the Senate and have the power to kill every piece of
legislation Biden advocates, the agenda he ran on and that the electorate voted
for.
And
what’s the GOP strategy in the two runoff elections? It’s not kitchen-table
issues or anything else approaching substance. It’s to paint Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff
and Raphael Warnock as socialists who want to defund the police. (As Loeffler
revealed on a call with donors, she intends to talk a
lot about the fact that 25 years ago, when Warnock was a youth pastor at a
church in New York, Fidel Castro spoke there.) It’s a lie — neither Ossoff nor
Warnock is a socialist, and neither wants to defund the police — but we just
came off an election in which Republicans told the same lies about Democratic
candidates in every corner of the country.
One
would hope that voters would be smart enough to reject that nonsense, but
there’s no reason to think so. The Republican strategy isn’t really about
persuading anyone to change their votes, it’s about driving up turnout among
White conservatives; Loeffler’s ads already feature Jeremiah Wright (remember
him?) to insinuate that Warnock is some kind of radical black nationalist.
So, in
sum, we have a state slowly but steadily moving in the Democrats’ direction, as
Republicans desperately try to use raw power to suppress Democratic votes as
they run a dishonest campaign built on racial fears. It’s as clear a microcosm
of American politics in 2020 as you’ll find.
