The Patriot Post® · Georgia's 'Voter Suppression' Increases Turnout
If recent Republican-led voting reform laws were designed to suppress turnout and usher in “Jim Crow 2.0,” then Georgia voters must not have gotten the memo. On the eve of the Peach State’s 2022 primary, turnout for early voting is at record levels.
As of the middle of last week, total early turnout topped 615,000, with 567,000 of those showing up in person and the balance being absentee ballots. Republican voters accounted for more than 350,000 and Democrats came in around 260,000. That’s a 153% increase in early voting over the 2018 primary election and a 189% increase in early voting over the 2020 primaries. Well over 100,000 more black voters cast early ballots this year than in the last midterms in 2018, and black voters constitute nearly 3% more of the total electorate than in 2020. Early voting ended Friday, and the primary election is tomorrow.
Republican Governor Brian Kemp has a more-than-comfortable lead over former Senator David Purdue, who was endorsed and encouraged to run by Donald Trump. Kemp was always the odds-on favorite in the contest, and his lead has only widened since March.
On the Democrat side, Stacey Abrams is running unopposed, most likely because the state party cleared the decks of any other candidates. Democrats are the party of choice, after all. In Abrams’s mind, however, she’s actually running for reelection. Her stubborn and childish refusal to concede the 2018 contest to Kemp was wrapped in baseless accusations of voter suppression, which she’s since parlayed into nationwide celebrity.
President Joe Biden, himself the victor of an election that didn’t pass the smell test, has also spread the false gospel about Georgia’s voter integrity laws. In 2021, he repeated stump phrases like “Jim Crow 2.0” and “Jim Eagle” (whatever that lame joke is supposed to mean), claiming that, for example, requiring a person to show a valid picture ID is racist and would suppress minority turnout. (In fact, what’s racist is the notion that blacks and Hispanics are somehow less capable than whites when it comes to proper identification.)
Georgia’s 2021 voting law fine-tuned mail-in voting, ballot security, and voter ID, all things leftists hate because it makes it harder for them to cheat in elections. That’s why they went into attack mode. Hollywood leftists wanted to boycott the state and pull their productions from Georgia’s sizable entertainment industry — an industry that exists only because California’s exorbitant taxes chased much of Hollywood out of the Golden State in the first place. And now Hollywood wants to punish the state that helped keep it in business? It’s an irony only a leftist could miss.
That wasn’t enough, though. Major League Baseball, another virtue signaler extraordinaire, caved to pressure from Abrams and pulled the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta as punishment for passage of the then-new voting law. The stunt cost the state $100 million in revenue, a loss that was felt predominantly by minority businesses and employees. Abrams caught flak for that little stunt, and deservedly so, which is why she’s been careful to distance herself from Biden in her home state. But the Atlanta Braves, that “culturally insensitive” baseball team with the Native American mascot, had the last laugh: They won the World Series last year.
And now Republican voters are showing up in record numbers at the polls in Georgia and elsewhere, and for a primary no less.
Just wait till November.