Vampire Beats Werewolf
Photo by Lance Cpl. April Price, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Well, our long national nightmare is FINALLY over. If you live in 49 of America’s states, you got to enjoy your Thanksgiving without another election looming over you. But those of us here in Georgia were forced to endure and additional 30 days of one of the ugliest, most depressing elections in our history. After almost a year of this, I honestly don’t care who won. The ads. There were SO MANY ADS. First, I would see a commercial with Herschel’s ex wife telling the harrowing tale of how he held a gun to her head, and often that would be immediately followed by an ad with police camera footage of Warnock’s ex wife claiming he ran over her foot with his car and declaring “he’s a very good actor.” My personal favorite was the one where voters watched video of Herschel campaigning, moths agape at the sheer stupidity. “Did you know that werewolves can beat vampires? Now I want to be a werewolf!” Surely, a pressing issue in America today. My recycling bin overflowed with flyers. I was bombarded with texts and emails chastising me that if the wrong guy won it would be THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. Having their campaign ads inflicted on me repeatedly during every news broadcast and football game convinced me that I didn’t want EITHER ONE of these guys representing me in the Senate. So much so, I left the office blank in November.
But it’s finally over. I can watch the playoffs in peace. The vampire beat the werewolf and Raphael Warnock gets to spend 6 more years in the Senate. And I have some thoughts on this whole mess.
My first thought is that Warnock should send Donald Trump a lovely flower arrangement. Or maybe a truckload of Big Macs. Because without Donald Trump, the only way Raphael Warnock would be seeing the United States Senate would be as a tourist. I know this isn’t a particularly brilliant political observation. Others have made it. But I’m repeating it because it clearly hasn’t sunk in yet. Donald Trump cost Republicans 2 Senate seats, and he cost them this one twice. There’s been a lot of handwringing in the GA GOP over how they lost the suburbs. Come on, people. We all KNOW the answer. You just don’t want to say it out loud. Donald Trump repels suburban voters. You traded away your most reliable base of support in exchange for more rural white voters. And you got lucky ONCE in 2016 because Democrats put up the worst presidential candidate in history and then got complacent that she was certain to win because Donald Trump was a buffoon. But when Trump managed to eke out 70,000 extra votes in 3 swing states, you became convinced that the path to victory was to embrace Trumpism in all its forms. It was not. I know. You’re convinced you can’t win without him. But you need to face the fact that you can’t win WITH HIM either. Three losing election cycles in a row should be enough. Let’s not make it four. I spent last night chuckling with some of my friends. We were called RINO cuck shills and shoved out of the Republican party. We were told you didn’t NEED our votes. You didn’t WANT our votes. You could win WITHOUT our votes. Well, turns out you can’t. And all your pleas that we HAD TO suck it up and vote for a man clearly unfit to be in public office were unheeded. Consider this your intervention. It’s time for some tough love. In the words of the great Rick Wilson: everything Trump touches dies. He will kill your party if you don’t break this addiction. Your choice.
As for Georgia Democrats: don’t get too cocky. You didn’t win this election. Republicans threw away this election. Yes, Warnock ran a great campaign. But you lost every other statewide office last month. You lost the state legislature. You lost a majority of the US House races. This state is not blue. Despite what the NY Times and Washington Post are saying today, it’s not even purple. It’s still a red state. It’s just that there are limits to what a majority of voters can agree to support and the Republican party has managed to find Senate candidates so despicable that even Georgia and Alabama voters couldn’t support them. It only took Alabama one losing race to wise up. It’s apparently going to take the GA GOP two. But you can’t count on Republicans picking a total loser 3 cycles in a row. You can’t keep choosing primary candidates like this is California or New Jersey and expect to win.
To all the pastors who rushed to cover for Hershel Walker: do you have any idea how much damage you are doing to the Christian faith? To quote pastor Andy Stanley: is it more important to you that your children become Christians? Or Republicans? Because that may be a choice you will have to make. I too believe that God forgives all sins. That doesn’t mean I have to vote for someone just because he claims he’s been forgiven. Especially if I’m not seeing a whole lot of repentance.
To the pro life movement: you have actually besmirched your cause with this one. By supporting this candidate you are telling the world “We don’t care if this man is actually responsible for the deaths of babies we claim to care so much about. We need his vote in the Senate.” I left the Democratic party when “feminists” told me I needed to get out my knee pads for Bill Clinton because he kept abortion legal. I don’t care how many pastors you trot out for him, I’m still not supporting a candidate with a history of abusing women, who neglected his own children and who probably sent more than one off to be murdered. Voting doesn’t make you virtuous. If you believe that abortion is such a grave sin that God will judge our entire nation for it, then you need to come up with some solutions. That might mean supporting more financial aid to parents, taxpayer funded birth control and better sex education. Abortions increased during Trump’s administration. The numbers haven’t gone down since all of these new laws went into effect. There’s more to being pro life than voting against abortions. And to be fair, there are a lot of pro life activists walking that walk. They’re just not getting as much notice for it. Show us what you’re doing to make things better.
The biggest takeaway from election 2022 is that the crazy people lost. Republicans only needed to flip one Senate seat. Georgia was their best option. And they failed by picking a bad candidate. Same goes for Arizona, Pennsylvania and Nevada. (But to be fair, Democrats lost a seat they could have won in Wisconsin.) Candidates still matter. Experience still counts. There are still those of us who care about the same issues we did back in 2016: limited government, freedom, fiscal responsibility, national defense. We haven’t changed. The party we used to support has changed. That party doesn’t even bother to put together a platform anymore. “Whatever Trump says this week” and “Hunter Biden’s laptop” aren’t policy goals. You have 2 years to figure out what the Republican party stands for and what issues you want to run on. Think harder. Do better. Get back to me when you decide.
The problem the GOP has is that its own polling shows its policies to not be widely popular. Thus its easier to adopt no new platform and run on culture war issues – which don’t generally require policy preferences.
But good luck!Report
You have 2 years to figure out what the Republican party stands for and what issues you want to run on. Think harder. Do better. Get back to me when you decide.
Nope. They’ve got to decide this month. In January the Republicans will control the US House and many state legislative chambers. They’ll choose what to support. Hector Hunter Biden? Refuse to raise the debt ceiling and crash the stock market? Ban abortion in 20 states? Do nothing? In the run up to the 2024 elections, the party doesn’t get to say, “Ignore what we’ve done for 18 months, here’s what we’ve decided to run on.” They’ll have a record to defend.Report
…you do remember that Biden won the state in 2020, right? But..maybe you think Trump is also past the line what Georgia voters will support also?
Except…wait. In the 2020 election, Warnock also beat Kelly Loeffler, who was not a great candidate, but wasn’t a horrible one like Walker.
And Perdue lost too. Perdue was an even better candidate, pretty well respected and the incumbent. There really wasn’t anything that stuck to Perdue, unlike the problems that Loeffler had with the whole ‘incredibly rich carpetbagger’ look she had going on. But he lost too.
Perdue and Loeffer and Trump lost in 2020 because there are, in actual fact, more Democratic voters in Georgia than Republican ones, and they actually voted that election.
This isn’t very hard to notice to notice and do the math on.
Republicans, for now, win midterms due to low turnout…except when Republicans screw up very badly and nominate people who clearly shouldn’t be anywhere near elected office, in which case Republicans can lose there also.
That makes Georgia a purple state, however much you might dislike it.Report
Loeffler and Hice got more votes in the jungle primary and Perdue got more votes in the general than Ossoff. But Republicans lost both runoffs when Trump convinced his supporters not to turn out for the runoff. Walker got fewer votes than Warnock in the general and even fewer in the runoff. Kemp got 200,000 more votes than Walker in November. A lot of voters split their votes and a lot of Republicans (like me) just refused to vote for EITHER candidate. That means more people voted for every single Republican candidate than every single Democratic candidate on the statewide ballot – except for the Senate race.
And turnout was NOT low this year. It was historically high for a midterm election.Report
And your excuse for _Trump_ not winning to start with is…?
‘For a midterm election’ is doing a lot of work there.
You understand the premise is that Democrats do well the better turnout is? And _this_ midterm, which had good turnout for a midterm but still low compared to presidential elections, had in turn the Democrats doing better in one race but still poorly in other race?
I have postulated two facts:
1) Democrats beat Republicans in a good turnout, do poorly when there is not.
2) Midterms generally have worse turnout.
And thus, Republicans generally win midterms. This election, there was exceptional turnout for a midterm, thus causing Democrats to win a single race.
Yes, in a midterm.Report
I was also one of those voters who went for Evan McMullin in 2016 and Biden in 2020. There aren’t a lot of us, but we’re enough to swing an election. That doesn’t make us Democrats. We would prefer to vote for Republicans. Just not crazy ones.Report
So your theory is that there is some hypothetical mass of Republican voters that won’t vote for Trump or anything he supports, and _also_ there’s the hypothetical mass of Republican voters who will do anything Trump says, including not vote in the 2020 runoff.
That seems reasonable.
And both these groups of people should be counted as Republican voters (Despite both of them being defined as ‘people who deliberately don’t vote Republican at certain times’), and because they are both ‘Republican voters’, this means outnumber Democratic voters in Georgia enough to make Georgia a red state, despite these hypothetical Republican voters not actually voting in any sort of unified manner to actually _elect_ Republicans. And in fact not being able to do so, because they both choose to not vote for literal opposite positions…one votes anti-Trump and the other votes pro-Trump.
This feels fairly absurd to me.
Georgia has repeatedly, constantly, elected Democrats to a national election for an entire election cycle at this point. A Presidential election and _three_ Senate elections. You can’t just keep saying ‘Republican make bad choices’ to justify that…if Republican make bad choices, and this causes Georgia to vote for Democrats, than Georgia is, in actual fact, voting for Democrats! That makes it purple.
You can’t hypothesize some sort of better Republican party and assert Georgians would vote for that, and thus the state is _hypothetically_ a red state.Report
I swear, this feels like someone saying ‘I know Fred has gotten in a lot of car accidents recently, but he is actually a good driver, objectively speaking…those car accidents were just because he was really drunk. So you shouldn’t call him a bad driver, it’s just he has a habit of driving drunk’.
But…that does indeed make him a bad driver! In fact, he’s a worse driver than someone who just gets unlucky!
In some alternate universe where the Republican party did not drunkenly pick people who horrified suburban Republican voters in Georgia, Georgia would probably not be a purple state just yet…that should have been about a decade away according to demographics, IIRC. But we are in this universe, where Trumpian antics have, indeed, caused this to happen early.
This isn’t some weird fluke. It really seems unlikely it will stop, there’s no actual way that Georgia or the Republican party can make it stop…their primary voters are complete wackjobs, end of story.
Honestly, it’s unclear even that stopping at this point would undo things in Georgia…these victories had Democratic voters turn out in massive amounts and the party has been revitalized by this.Report
Not just my personal theory. the NYT has the numbers. Republican voters turned out in November. They just didn’t vote for Republicans. And I already mentioned all the Kemp/Warnock or Kemp/no Senate choice voters. https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=277&emc=edit_nc_20221208&instance_id=79614&nl=the-tilt&productCode=NC®i_id=78598859&segment_id=115371&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F17d4e133-5dad-5308-b755-112bf386c34b&user_id=03613f985f6b6a38e7d80eab2f2964df&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=emailReport
… if Republican voters will not vote for Republicans at a national level, they are no longer national Republican voters.
And thus Georgia is a purple state.
You keep trying to argue some other hypothetical Republican party that might have more voters for it in this state. But that party doesn’t exist.
At the national level, in a choice between Republicans and Democrats, as the parties literally exist in the actual world that we really live in, Georgia has more Democratic voters than Republican… Or, at least, roughly the same amount, which is the argument for calling it a _purple_ state.Report
You keep trying to come up with justifications as to why that doesn’t really count, but ‘purple state’ is an observation of reality, not some hypothetical ideal universe in which people vote based on…I don’t even know what you think they’re based on.
If you want to argue that the reason Georgians are picking Democrats at a national level is that Republicans have become entangled with Trump, I do not disagree with that in any amount, but it does mean it is true that Georgians are voting for Democrats at the national level!
And have done it enough times that it is reasonable to call the state a purple state at this point… At least when speaking on the national level, locally it is still very red.Report
We haven’t changed. The party we used to support has changed. That party doesn’t even bother to put together a platform anymore. “Whatever Trump says this week” and “Hunter Biden’s laptop” aren’t policy goals. You have 2 years to figure out what the Republican party stands for and what issues you want to run on.
Sigh.
I want to be sympathetic here, but look let’s face facts.
The party of DeSantis, Abbott, Youngkin, of Boebert, Taylor Greene and Gohmert HAS figured out what it stands for.
And it is NOT “limited government, freedom, fiscal responsibility, national defense”.
Sorry, it just isn’t, not at any level on anyone’s part. No one of any stature anywhere in the party gives a rip about any of these things.
B-but here’s a platform statement from Congressman So&So mentioning all those things!
No, sorry those thing aren’t important enough for the Congressman to fight for.
Genital inspections for students, drag show bans, book bans, unfunded tax cuts, and foolish and destructive tariffs all get a vast majority of votes from “reasonable, moderate” Republicans.
At this point, after 6 years of a horror show of freaks and weirdos, it’s a bit much to hear yet another chorus of “Well I’m Giving Them One More Chance And I Really Mean It This Time!”Report