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meIt appears, as I write this, that the Democratic candidates have won both US Senate elections in Georgia, with the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff defeating Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. If these results are confirmed, the incoming United States Senate will split 50-50 between the two parties, but the Democrats will retain de facto control, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote. This will further mean that the Republican party under Donald Trump lost control of the House of Representatives in 2018, the White House in 2020 and the Senate in 2021, a trifecta of defeats that may finally convince the party of the need to break free from politics. of Trump. evil domination.
Credit for victories should go to the candidates themselves, to the organizers of voting in Georgia’s minority communities (especially Stacey Abrams), and to Democratic donors and volunteers across the country. But the Republicans did as much to lose this election as the Democrats did to win them.
Although Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes in Georgia, as the nation was recently reminded with the launch of the phone call in which Trump blatantly attempted to pressure state election officials to overturn the results, Republican candidates in the negative vote they obtained good results in November elections. Perdue actually ran ahead of Trump and led Ossoff by about 88,000 votes, getting 49.7% of the vote to Ossoff’s 47.9%. In almost every other state, this would have meant Perdue’s re-election, but a Georgia law from the 1960s requires a runoff when no general election candidate receives an absolute majority.
Loeffler ran in a special election in November: Republican Governor Brian Kemp appointed her to the Senate in 2019 following the resignation of the previous incumbent for health reasons, and she was behind Warnock in the vote count. Yet overall, the Republican candidates outperformed the Democrats by one full percentage point. And both Loeffler and Perdue benefited from the ticket split in wealthy Atlanta suburbs, where predominantly white and traditionally Republican voters rejected Trump (or at least withheld their votes for the presidency) but continued to support Republican candidates for other. charges.
These factors, combined with a track record of Republicans outperforming Democrats in past elections, meant that the odds favored Loeffler and Perdue. And if the rematches had taken place in mid-November, they probably both would have won comfortably.
But in the nine weeks that followed Election Day, Trump broke with the tradition of admitting defeat (gently or not) and facilitating a peaceful transition of power, the tradition that makes our national experiment in Republican self-government possible. Instead, he claimed without proof that the elections had been stolen from him and dragged much of the Republican party on his grotesque crusade to overthrow democracy.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, Republicans could have made a strong case for re-electing Loeffler and Perdue in order to maintain control over the Senate as control of the incoming administration. But evidently, in the minds of many undecided Georgia voters, the Trump-dominated Republican Party has become the threat to the nation that needs to be overhauled.
Georgia’s election results show a consistent pattern of Democrats running to the polls at rates close to their turnout in the general election, while a significant number of Republicans stayed at home. Democrats did an excellent job mobilizing voters, including door-to-door efforts that they chose not to undertake for reasons related to the pandemic in the run-up to the November elections. But they also clearly argued that the Georgia elections mattered because Biden’s success in appointing officials and passing progressive programs would depend on Democrats regaining control of the Senate.
Yet Republicans were forced by Trump’s pretensions to address his voters in Georgia with a tortured syntax that could be called the fraudulent conditional future: If control of the United States Senate was at stake in this election, then no it was because Trump really won. a second term, then voting for these Republican candidates would be important, although the Democrats would likely steal this election as well. The Republicans thus reduced their own electoral turnout and secured their own defeat.
Furthermore, since Republicans have largely resigned from governing, they had no positive program to execute other than supporting Trump and they had no policies to advance to address the economic and human cost of the pandemic. And the extent to which Loeffler and Perdue humbled themselves over Trump’s demands, including his call for Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to resign over alleged “mismanagement and lack of transparency” in the November elections, he confirmed. public cynicism about the will of politicians. do and say anything to get re-elected.
Republicans will push this self-sabotage program even further by opposing the electoral college vote recount in the United States Congress. A dozen Republican senators and more than a hundred Republican representatives are likely to try to disenfranchise millions of voters to launch the election for Trump. The fact that it is doomed does not diminish the dishonor of the attempt or the damage to American democracy.
The Republican National Committee is unlikely to engage in the kind of agonizing reassessment that followed Mitt Romney’s defeat in the 2012 presidential election, because any new “autopsy report” would have to confront the extent to which Trump has divided the party. . The Republican civil war in Georgia, in which populist radicals claim that establishment leaders such as Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp colluded with Democrats and nefarious elites to betray Trump, will unfold across the country.
An honest autopsy would also have to acknowledge that even many of the establishment’s Republican leaders who defended the law in the face of Trump’s authoritarian demands have acted undemocratic by attempting to suppress minority votes, as Kemp did in 2018 when he was secretary. of State of Georgia. . The results of the current elections in Georgia demonstrate that such efforts are not only immoral but counterproductive, as the high turnout of African Americans was driven by a determination not to allow Republicans to deprive them of the civil rights for which their ancestors They fought and died.
The next few years will witness a titanic struggle within the Republican party between the fanatical grassroots Trump supporters and the party elements that still care about governing and holding the country together. But even the comparatively responsible actors will have to change course if the Republican party is ever to merit retaking power.
