The Patriot Post® · Georgia's Not-So-Peachy Runoffs Today

Mercifully for every one of Georgia’s nearly 10 million residents, the state’s two Senate runoff elections finally take place today. Nearly $500 million has been spent since Election Day, and the nonstop ads and phone calls are grating. But we in our humble shop, some of whom live in Georgia, will be glad for Wednesday only if the U.S. Senate isn’t captured by Chuck Schumer and his radical Democrat legions.

Republican Senator David Perdue faces Democrat challenger Jon Ossoff, the inheritance welfare liberal who gets all his money either from Dad or California leftists.

GOP Senator Kelly Loeffler, meanwhile, is in a matchup with Raphael Warnock, the radical pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the Atlanta congregation once pastored by Martin Luther King Jr. However, whereas King preached that character mattered more than skin color, Warnock spews racial hatred such as demanding that America “repent of its worship of whiteness.”

To help their case with aggrieved Georgia supporters of President Donald Trump, both Perdue and Loeffler have encouraged their Republican Senate colleagues to oppose certification of the Electoral College vote on Wednesday. Loeffler explicitly announced Monday that she’ll join them. Trump himself of course spent a large portion of his stump speech Monday on the subject.

The good news for Republicans is that, with the exception of the (contested) presidential race, the Peach State has been red for more than two decades. The bad news is that it’s trending blue.

For one thing, Georgia’s Republican legislature made a Faustian bargain with the devil in the form of Hollywood, offering huge tax breaks for the production of movies and TV shows in hopes of generating an economic boon. Georgia is indeed now the “Hollywood of the South,” and everything from Netflix shows to Marvel movies are filmed and produced in the state. Well, guess what? Hollywood doesn’t vote Republican. In fact, the glitterati even used its mere presence as a political boycott threat over pro-life legislation.

More importantly, the state’s Democrats have mobilized to register voters. Mark Alexander asks the BIG question: “Given that the state’s leading leftist protagonist, Stacey Abrams, has registered more than 115,000 additional Demo voters since November in a state where even Republican Governor Brian Kemp is not backing Trump’s election challenge, can either GOP Senate candidate win?”

According to Alexander: “Democrats are, once again, following the model perfected by Barack Obama and his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who declared, ‘You don’t ever want a good crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.’ Leftists have masterfully used the ChiCom Virus pandemic as national justification for their ground game. They have registered tens of millions of new voters who are not politically informed or engaged by using the loosest criterion for identification. Democrats choose those who would not otherwise show up at a polling place in states that still require an ID, and then ensure they will receive absentee or bulk-mail ballots. This accounts for the enormous surge in voters in November, and the vast majority of those mail ballots came from Democrats.”

So, what’s the problem with mail-in ballots, particularly those bulk-mailed to all registered voters in some states? Alexander notes, “Beyond the loose identification requirements for voters in many states, the authentication of those ballots is done by signature comparison — authentications being verified by rooms full of bureaucrats and hourly contract workers who have only the most tangential instruction on signature verification and very limited time.”

More than three million Georgians cast ballots before today’s official election, and it’s almost certain that Republicans turning out today face a steep deficit. Perdue bested Ossoff by a little more than 100,000 votes in November, while failing to crack the necessary 50%. The margin was roughly the same for Republicans vs. Democrats in the Loeffler contest, though it was split among 20 candidates.

Again, Stacey Abrams has registered more than 100,000 voters since Election Day.

Remember what’s at stake. President Trump certainly does, telling a rally in the north Georgia town of Dalton that if both Democrats win, handing them control of the Senate, it would give them “the power to ram through every deluded piece of left-wing legislation that they’ve ever wanted, that they’ve ever dreamt of.” He added, “Your religious liberty will be gone, your Second Amendment will be gone, your borders and great new wall will be gone, your police departments will be gone as we know them, and your life savings will be gone.”

The moment isn’t lost on Joe Biden either. He told a rally in Atlanta, “It’s a new year, and tomorrow can be a new day for Atlanta, for Georgia, and for America. Unlike any time in my career, one state — one state — can chart the course, not just for the four years but for the next generation.”

Indeed it can.