I wrote about this for Salon yesterday speculating that Trump may actually be pushing it, but today Politico has some new details on the MAGA plan to boycott the Georgia runoff:
President Donald Trump’s demonization of mail-in voting may have cost him votes in the recent election. Now, his demonization of Georgia’s entire electoral system is hurting his party’s chances at keeping the Senate.
Driven by Trump’s insistence that Georgia’s elections are indelibly rife with fraud, conspiratorial MAGA figures are calling for a boycott of the two Senate runoff races, slated for Jan. 5, that will determine which party controls the upper chamber.
Their reason: The two GOP candidates, Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, are not only insufficiently pro-Trump, they may be complicit in Georgia’s electoral fraud.
It doesn’t matter that both candidates are essentially lock-step with Trump, or that there is no evidence of links to electoral malfeasance. On Twitter and its less-restrictive alternative Parler, Trump’s more hardline followers have linked the duo to the president’s favorite — and untrue — voter-fraud theories. Hashtags like #CrookedPerdue and #CrookedKelly are flying around. The two lawmakers’ Parler accounts are brimming with posts accusing them of being secret “liberal DemoRats.”
The swelling anger is not just emanating from everyday QAnon believers in the MAGAverse. It’s also coming from prominent lawyers working on Trump’s behalf, including Sidney Powell, who was briefly a lead attorney in Trump’s push to overturn the election.
The growing chorus has caught the attention of some of Trump’s top surrogates, who have scrambled to push back against the movement. “I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote for @KLoeffler and @Perduesenate. That is NONSENSE. IGNORE those people,” implored Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son and typically a MAGA world leader, in a Monday tweet.
The top comments below the tweet disregarded the plea: “We’re telling everyone to write in Donald J Trump!” one read.
The tensions symbolize the broader fights likely to erupt as Trump’s presidency dwindles. Trump was always an insurgent figure who grafted his loyal base onto the GOP. Once Trump is no longer the top elected Republican, that base may simply follow him wherever he goes — attacking anyone who shows daylight with Trump, spinning up “evidence” for Trump’s preferred conspiracies and, as in Georgia, boycotting the political system as punishment for betraying their leader.
And while it’s hard to tell exactly how much of the online chatter reflects wider voter sentiment, some Republicans are worried the conspiracy talk could shave off just enough MAGA voters to hand a tight race to the Democrats.
“Whenever you have a close election, any distraction can be decisive, and by all accounts, the runoffs in Georgia are going to be close, just like they were in November,” said Alex Conant, a political strategist and the former communications director for Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016. “I think Republicans need to focus the runoffs squarely on stopping Joe Biden’s agenda. If it’s about Trump and conspiracy theories, that only divides our party and emboldens Democrats.”
[…]
Powell, Trump’s erstwhile attorney, turned parts of the MAGA community against Loeffler when she started pushing an untrue allegation that Loeffler had somehow conspired with a voting technology company, Dominion Voting Systems, to suppress votes for Collins.
The QAnon-leaning MAGA community has long looked to Powell as a leading authority on such deep state plots against Trump’s supporters, especially after she took over as Michael Flynn’s attorney. The one-time Trump national security adviser had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, but Powell came in and started alleging the authorities had actually duped and coerced him, a narrative that played well to Trump’s base. Trump on Wednesday formally pardoned Flynn after months of speculation.
And Powell isn’t the only Trump-affiliated attorney demeaning Loeffler and Purdue to the MAGA crowd.
Lin Wood, a prominent Georgia attorney who filed his own suit to overturn the state’s results, has repeatedly called for Loeffler to drop out of the race, pressed Perdue to show more Trump loyalty and for them both to begin “investigations” into the election.
“Threaten to withhold your votes & money,” he directed his followers on Twitter.
Wood seems to hold a special ire for Loeffler, tweeting about unrealistic scenarios in which she could be replaced by Collins and threatening to turn his “patriots” against her.
[…]
It might seem counterintuitive that QAnon adherents, a group of pro-Trump diehards, would actively try to damage his Republican allies. Yet the Q mythology has little to do with the fortunes of Loeffler and Perdue, much less the Republican Party. At its core, it’s a theory that Trump is the sole savior from a cabal of satan-worshipping, pedophiliac Washington elites.
“It’s really hard to put aside that worldview, even for just a couple months, to get behind a conventional election,” said Mike Rothschild, a writer and researcher on conspiracy theories who is working on a book about QAnon.
“When you’ve been spending years thinking all elections are rigged, the deep state controls everything, nothing you do matters and the only way to stop it is for Donald Trump to win every state, be president for life and destroy his enemies — you’re so caught up in believing this radically enormous thing, that you miss the very small thing right in front of you,” he said.
Even endorsements for the senators from popular QAnon figures, such as Congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, wouldn’t be enough, Rothschild noted.
And the pleas from people like Trump Jr. have done little to stop the disagreements.
“Some leaders in GA & National GOP complain I am hurting chances of @KLoeffler &@sendavidperdue to win runoff & save Senate control,” Wood tweeted on Wednesday to his 613,000 followers. “They are ones hurting those chances by failing to publicly demand investigation of fraud & special session of legislature. Look in mirror.”
The MAGA conspiracy theorists are turning on the RINOs. Who could have predicted?
Perdue is telling people that the anti-Trump suburbanites will come out to vote for him and that might be true. But he needs the QAnon people too. Appeasing both isn’t going to be easy.
I honestly don’t know if this is a real problem. The odds are that the two Republicans will win simply because Perdue and the combo of Loeffler/Collins got more votes in November. But the stakes are so high for the Democrats and the MAGA crowd is so nuts that you just don’t know. And who knows where we’ll be with the pandemic on January 5th? (I shudder to even speculate …)
Trump is the one who has poisoned his people about the voting system. And he doesn’t give a damn about Mitch McConnell’s majority unless he’s the president. So, I wouldn’t count on him stepping in to calm those waters. He might. But I suspect he’ll exact a price and I can’t imagine what it will be.
By the way, Sidney Powell “released the kraken” on Wednesday and as one might expect, it was a dumpster fire.