This is powerful:
Howie Klein at Down With Tyranny has a fabulous new website. (Change your bookmarks!) He wrote about these races the other day, focusing on the fact that David Perdue is a lilly-livered coward.
Neither David Perdue nor Kelly Loeffler has much to say other than pre-digested, one-size-fits-all Republican Party propaganda. Even in a red state like Georgia, people are growing weary of their crap. Which is why neither was reelected on November 3 and why each faces a runoff against Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock on January 5.
Today, Perdue, who was beaten up pretty badly by Ossoff the last time they debated, declined to accept an invitation from the Atlanta Press Club to debate before the runoff. Loeffler hasn’t responded but observers say she is likely to follow Perdue’s lead on this, especially because Warnock is incredibly charismatic and she’s kind of a babbling wet blanket.
Ossoff was quick to respond, telling CNN that he had accepted the debate proposal and then tweeting:
Last time they debated Ossoff called him a “crook” to his face– and accurate assessment– and he was unable to defend himself. After that he cancelled a debate he had already scheduled. Ossoff has told crowds that debating is the “the bare minimum” voters should expect from candidates. ..
You can contribute to Warnock and or Ossoff by clicking on this Blue America page at ACTBlue.
You have no doubt heard by now about Lindsey Graham following in Trump’s footsteps and trying to exhort the Georgia Secretary of State to throw out legal votes to overturn the election results for Donald Trump.
The Republican party is a shitshow and there is a pretty good chance they are not going to get their act together before January 5th. This Washington Post reports says they’re worried about it. As they should be:
Republican leaders are increasingly alarmed about the party’s ability to stave off Democratic challengers in Georgia’s two Senate runoff elections — and they privately described President Trump on a recent conference call as a political burden who despite his false claims of victory was the likely loser of the 2020 election.
Those blunt assessments, which capture a Republican Party in turmoil as Trump refuses to concede to President-elect Joe Biden, were made on a Nov. 10 call with donors hosted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It featured Georgia’s embattled GOP incumbents, Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, and Karl Rove, a veteran strategist who is coordinating fundraising for the Jan. 5 runoffs.
The comments by the senators and Rove were shared with The Washington Post by a person who provided a detailed and precise account of what was said by each speaker on the call. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity since they were not authorized to divulge the contents of the private discussion.
Most striking was the way the senators nodded toward the likelihood of Biden’s presidency. While Trump keeps insisting that he won the election, making baseless claims of voter fraud and mounting legal challenges, Republicans on the call privately cast those efforts as an understandable but potentially futile protest.
“What we’re going to have to do is make sure we get all the votes out from the general and get them back out,” Perdue said of core Republican voters. “That’s always a hard thing to do in a presidential year, particularly this year, given that President Trump, it looks like now, may not be able to hold out.”
Perdue added that “we don’t know that” yet — and said he fully supports Trump and his dispute of the results in several states. But, he said, “we’re assuming that we’re going to be standing out here alone. And that means that we have to get the vote out, no matter what the outcome of that adjudication is on the recount in two states and some lawsuits, and others. Kelly and I can’t wait for that.”
Perdue noted later that he had confronted an “anti-Trump vote in Georgia” in the first round of voting and said the runoff is about getting “enough conservative Republicans out to vote” in the Atlanta suburbs and elsewhere who might have opposed the president’s reelection.
“I’m talking about people that may have voted for Biden but now may come back and vote for us because there was an anti-Trump vote in Georgia,” Perdue said. “And we think some of those people, particularly in the suburbs, may come back to us. And I’m hopeful of that.”
Perdue’s delicate approach — standing with Trump, but also privately acknowledging that the president’s time in power could be waning and that he carries possible political liabilities — extended to others on the call who tried to balance their loyalty to Trump with their apprehension about what is needed in Georgia to save the GOP Senate majority. It is revealing of the Republican dilemma in the winter of Trump’s presidency, with fear of offending him and his fervent supporters hovering over a cold political reality.
It sounds to me as if the Georgia Dems need to think about ways to make sure those Trump voters know their Senators didn’t stand firms with Dear Leader.