Stacey Abrams, speaking generally on The Colbert Report on Tuesday, offered her take on the Democrats financial strategy: “To raise all the money that we can as fast as we can from anywhere we can.”
Abrams also took the interview as a change to call President Trump “an orange menace of putrescence.”
They are eating their ownin Georgia for the moment, but who knows how long before they all fall in line:
“Republicans in disarray.” That was the three-word response from Senate Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff late Monday to the extraordinary infighting that’s divided the Georgia GOP over President Donald Trump’s effort to taint Joe Biden’s victory.
This was supposed to be the week that Republicans united behind U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue for a pair of Jan. 5 runoffs that could decide control of the Senate.
Instead, the two senators leveled unfounded claims of a disastrous “embarrassment” of an election at fellow Republicans who oversaw last week’s vote – and called for the resignation of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
It was a brazen effort to appease Trump, who has falsely claimed electoral fraud despite no evidence of any wrongdoing as he and his supporters try to discredit Biden.
We’re told the president and his top allies pressured the two Republican senators to take this step, lest he tweet a negative word about them and risk divorcing them from his base ahead of the consequential runoff.
And shortly after, Trump and some of his inner circle started tweeting attacks at Raffensperger, who was already unpopular with many in the Georgia GOP base long before Tuesday’s vote.
WSB radio analyst Jamie Dupree called it “an orchestrated election move the likes of which I’ve never seen before.” Perdue’s camp pushed back on Tuesday:
“Neither senator nor anyone on their campaigns discussed with the president, White House or the president’s campaign before issuing their statement,” said Perdue spokesman John Burke.
On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins jumped in. He’s leading Trump’s effort to recount Georgia’s race and he called for several steps, including a hand-count of every ballot cast in each county due to “widespread allegations of voter irregularities” but offered no evidence to back that up.
“We can – and we will – petition for this in court after statewide certification is completed if the Secretary of State fails to act, but we are hopeful he will preemptively take this action today to ensure every Georgian has confidence in our electoral process.”
The intraparty war included Gov. Brian Kemp, who echoed the two senators’ criticism of Raffensperger but didn’t go as far as supporting his ouster. Georgia GOP chair David Shafer, who has recently staged “Stop the Steal” rallies as Biden’s lead in Georgia has grown, joined in.
Along with election officials, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan was on the other side of the dividing line. He took to CNN in the morning – before the senators’ statement – saying there was no evidence of any systemic wrongdoing. He has been lit up by Trump supporters for speaking the truth.
The AJC’s Jim Galloway has an exclusive interview with Raffensberger posting today, with plenty to sift through. Here’s an insight to the lack of communication he’s had with Perdue and Loeffler:
“In the business world that I live in, if we have an issue with people, we call them directly and we have our conversation. We don’t just send it out to the world.”
“If that’s how they want to do business, that’s how they do business. I just don’t do business that way.”- AJC
Among other remedies Collins and Team Trump are calling for from Rafensberger, Collins said he wants “a check for felons and other ineligible persons who may have cast a ballot.” That detail caught our eye because Collins has been a vocal champion for criminal justice reform in Congress and, in the final days of his own campaign against Loeffler, brought in Roger Stone, a convicted felon whose sentence was commuted by Donald Trump, to join him on the stump.
What they are asking these Republican officials to do is prostrate themselves before Donald Trump and lie, saying they ran a sloppy or rigged election that benefitted Joe Biden.
The sad thing is that I don’t know for sure that they won’t do it. Trump and the Republicans are a symbiotic organism at this point and if these GOP politicians are ambitious, the pressure on them to put their thumbs on the scale in whatever way they can is going to be immense. After all, nothing, nothing, is more important to the organism at this point than Mitch McConnell being allowed to retain power in the US Senate. Even two minutes, much less two years, in the political wilderness is more than they can even contemplate so they’ll do whatever is necessary to ensure that those Senate seats go their way.
Update — Speaking of eating their own …