Haha GA SOS: “Senator Perdue still owes my wife an apology for all the death threats she got after he asked for my resignation,” he told Fox News' “Your World.” “And I have not heard one peep from that man since.” “If he wants to call me face to face, man to man, I will talk to him off the record,” Raffensperger continued. “But he hasn’t done that.”
I am surprised that Republicans in Texas are not embarrassed that this sniveling coward represents the state of Texas.
The powe(R) of the pa(R)ty matters more than anything else, no matter how sniveling and obviously self-serving the candidate is.
Certainly her campaign built some momentum but Georgia democrats were building an organization even before her run. Democrats in Georgia are far more organized than they are in Texas and African Americans in Georgia (including those in rural Georgia) vote at better rates than African Americans in other parts of the Deep South. Democrats have been far closer to flipping Georgia than Texas for a long time. Plus Georgia was still electing Democrats statewide until 2010 (including electing African Americans statewide). Democrats were wiped out in Texas in 2002. The big thing is Georgia's demographics line up perfectly for a potential longer term flip. The Atlanta metro is 60% of the state's population and African Americans still make up 1/3 of the state's population. Consequently, trading suburban voters for rural voters is a terrible trade in a state like Georgia. So while Abrams's campaign in 2018 was important, the bigger difference is Trump sped up the suburban shift from the Republican Party in a state that has a disproportionately high number of suburban voters. But Democrats in Georgia were ready for this because unlike Texas, the Democratic Party hasn't been a doormat for 20 years.
Sorry but that's the problem. The GOP went down this rabbit hole awhile ago and eventually cynical ploys to go along with the insane people living in alternate realities of consume you and become something much worse I don't believe all the people like Cruz, Hawley (populists via Harvard Yale Stanford Princeton) who should theoretically know better actually still do. They consume a diet of right wing news pablum and are pretty divorced from the world they came from. Swinging into autocracy is very easy for them to do, believe them when they do it. I mean if you want an example look at Viktor Orban, hungarian dictator, he went from post soviet liberal reformer to autocratic president for life.
It gets especially cringe worthy when Cruz tries to play the machismo tough Texan for pandering purposes and hopelessly fails. He is the poster child for what right wingers call "cucks".
I get that, but I don't think it's just residual effect from her campaign. I think it's that she has dedicated her time post campaign to be a part of that organization the Democrats have there and to help get out the vote of African Americans as well as others.
She got a lot of press for it but I dont like the media narrative that frames her as the only reason why Georgia turned blue. Abrams did leverage her celebrity status into raising a huge heap of money for Fair Fight and other groups. However, Georgia has both a competent party organization (and a strong history of organizing) and really favorable demographics in the state. And I think sometimes we forget those details. Abrams brought in a ton of resources to supplement all of that but the fundamentals have been there for some time.
This can't be said loudly enough or heard by enough people. Absent any structural pressure around weak humans, autocracy is the easiest, laziest, most-appealing path. Never forget that. It doesn't matter how smart someone may have been or where they were educated. We have avoided autocracy (with notable shaky stretches) by having a large systematic current like a stream. It kept weak and evil people mainly in line b/c they can't risk swimming against the current. Limbaugh, Trump, and the like have created major eddies in the stream of our history. Now people feel like they don't have to go along with the (much more difficult and time-consuming) path of real democracy and abiding by established rules. Orban is a great ****ing call. Everyone should read about him, and when they say, "Well we ain't Hungary," reply rationally: "Yeah, Cruz, Nunes and company are even crazier and less principled than your average Hungarian." All the craziest genes in Europe came to America over the last 200 years, and it shows. LOL.
Even Erdogan started out this way. His time as mayor of Istanbul was largely heralded for his strongly technocratic government in a city that was run on patronage politics. His claim to fame in Istanbul was actually tackling corruption and installing qualified and competent officials to run the country. His original campaign issues included items such as Kurdish reconciliation, joining the European Union and human rights reforms (including new employee rights laws, joining the European Convention on Human Rights, etc..) And then over time, he became the Islamist and authoritarian dictator that we know today. Turkey traded away its history of secularism and democracy (although its democratic institutions were always on thin ice because of repeated coups). India is doing the same thing right now with Modi.
geeimsobored, your description is correct, but usually, the signs are there early on. Question - at what time can we expect first reliable results?
Listened to NPR this morning and they had called just about every county in Georgia. Earliest results would be 10:00 p.m. eastern time, but if it's close, (probable), we could be waiting a couple of days.
Bovada has Warnock and Perdue as top odds. Lmao. Ladies and gentlemen say hello to your new overlord, Susan Collins.
I believe this election counting is flipped compared to November. Back then, I believe the election day voting came in first, as mail votes weren't allowed to be counted until election day and is a slow, manual process. I think I read for this election, ballot counting started when received. So instead of starting out Pro-GOP and slowing moving to Dems, we might see early Dem leads that slowly move GOP as the counting goes on. Just something to be aware of with early results. Of course, Atlanta could also be slow at counting and reporting as they were last time.
