Many GOP faithful in Georgia are still stewing over Donald Trump’s loss in 2020. Trump loyalists are at war with Republican elected officials, reports Politico:
After the presidential election, lost by Republicans in Georgia for the first time since 1992, the party crumpled in the January Senate runoffs. In the Atlanta suburbs, once a citadel of conservatism, Republicans were blown out.
Yet if that was cause for any introspection, it was not readily apparent as Republicans gathered at county conventions in recent days to chart their course for the midterm elections and the next presidential race in 2024.
Republicans are still nursing their grievances in Georgia and elsewhere. Almost as if they are addicted. It helps that harboring a grievance “activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.” Rush Limbaugh based his radio career on it. It’s the right-wing media business model.
A few Republicans recognize how self-destructive it is.
“Huge mistake,” says Deanna Harris, chair of the Cobb County Georgia Young Republicans, a Black woman reflecting on simmering anger directed at Governor Brian Kemp over his failure to hand Georgia’s electoral votes to Trump. “We’ve got to get out of this mindset. It’s almost like insanity.”
Almost like insanity?
To traditionalist Republicans in Georgia, the infighting between fervent Trump supporters and the establishment wing of the party has become increasingly alarming as the midterm elections come into focus. The GOP is desperate to regain its footing in the suburbs after Trump’s collapse there. But it was moderate Republicans and independent voters, not Trump loyalists, who abandoned Trump in November, and the party’s fixation on the former president may only alienate them further, with potentially disastrous consequences for 2022 and beyond.
Democrats can dream, can’t they? Even though odds are against them, historically, in mid-term elections.
Diversification in Atlanta’s suburbs is shifting power away from Republicans. The mostly white Republican county convention in Cobb elected Salleigh Grubbs as the new chair. Described by a supporter as a “female version of Donald Trump,” Grubbs defeated two other women, one presenting herself as a data expert and the other, a Latina originally from New York, who cautioned the party had “an image problem.”
The suburbs in Atlanta and elsewhere might still be up for grabs, says Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster. But the infighting could be damaging.
“Picking a fight with your own party’s governor and lieutenant governor and secretary of state,” he said, “doesn’t strike me as the wisest of political moves.”
Anger over the loss of Georgia’s electoral votes and two U.S. Senators is fueling activism however, including attendance at off-year conventions across the state. The negative fallout over Georgia’s new voting (suppression) law has hardened Republican resolve.
But the GOP in Georgia is not yet done cannibalizing itself. Outside the party convention in Cobb County, David Gault, a local precinct chair, said that “people just need to really calm down and, I think, perhaps we just need to mind our own store right now.” The party, he said, should be “all about the future.”
Grievance may motivate Republicans’ declining base. Trump may have pulled in some working-class whites and Latinos. But Trump is not on any ballots in 2022.
Joe Biden in recent polling is far more popular than Trump ever was. If Democrats can add a wildly popular infrastructure bill to the relief package that put dollars in Americans’ pockets, historic trends for mid-term elections could be suggestive rather than determinative. Democrats in Georgia themselves are fired up over the Republicans’ voter suppression efforts. And it is a political eternity until Tuesday, November 8, 2022.