After Getting Spanked In GA Runoff, Republicans Wonder: Is Early Voting *Good* Actually?

Herschel Walker won, y’all.

No, not the election — the nation will at least be spared the ignominy of a Vampire Sperm Donor
cum FBI Agent in the Senate. (Sorry not sorry.) But he did win the in-person vote by a lot.

On Election Day, Walker got 927,588 votes to Senator Raphael Warnock’s 703,024 — almost a quarter million vote advantage. But Warnock walked into Election Day with a 321,187 vote margin already banked thanks to his overwhelming performance with mail-in and early voters, who made up 64 percent of the electorate. And 321 > 225, all day, every day.

None of this was unpredictable. The Republican Party spent years telling their voters that there was something insidious about voting by mail or drop box. Attorney General Bill Barr told outright lies about prosecutions for “ballot harvesting” and fanned the flames of paranoia by claiming that absentee voting is plagued by “substantial fraud and coercion.”

Less than two weeks before the Georgia runoff, Trump attempted to boost Arizona gubernatorial race loser Kari Lake’s ridiculous election fraud claims by screeching into the ether, “REMEMBER, YOU CAN NEVER HAVE FAIR & FREE ELECTIONS WITH MAIL-IN BALLOTS – NEVER, NEVER, NEVER. WON’T AND CAN’T HAPPEN!!!”

But as with the party’s belated attempt to distinguish between mail-in ballots — which are bad and illegitimate! — and early voting in-person — which is good and patriotic! — the distinction seems to have been largely lost on the GOP faithful. And so the GOP marched into this Election Day with a deficit of hundreds of thousands of votes. Also their candidate sucked, but that’s not the point of this post.

Politico reports this morning that “top GOP officials and conservative luminaries are acknowledging voters were led astray with calls to reject early and absentee voting.” Apparently there is “a growing sense of alarm among the GOP ranks that the conspiracy theories Trump pushed about early voting and mail ballots not only hurt them dearly in the just completed midterms, but could take multiple cycles to remedy.”

YA THINK?

But don’t worry, Gippers, the people who pretend to control your party are on it.

“Our voters need to vote early,” RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel said Tuesday on Fox. “There were many in 2020 saying, don’t vote by mail, don’t vote early, and we have to stop that, and understand that if Democrats are getting ballots in for a month, we can’t expect to get it all done in one day.”

Who is “many,” Ronna?

Certainly not Donald Trump, RNC spox Nathan Brand hastened to add, telling NBC, “We were not talking about the former president, who has encouraged his base to vote early and has himself voted by mail.”

But Republican strategist Karl Rove is willing to say the quiet part out loud.

“He’s creating a class of people who may for a long time believe the elections are stolen as long as there’s a presence of mail-in ballots, and that causes people to say my vote doesn’t count, I don’t need to bother to vote,” he told Politico, referring of course to Trump’s malign influence on voter turnout.

Naturally Trump has an answer for that, and it is to brag that he put guys like Blake Masters, Mehmet Oz, and Herschel Walker over the top with his endorsement.

“RINO Karl Rove is a Fox News loser, a pompous fool with bad political instincts. In other words, he loses a lot. Only good at taking peoples money, and wasting it. I was 12 and 0 against him in Senate Endorsements, not something I’m proud of, but something people, especially candidates, should know!”

He also refers to Rove as “a DINIER of DINIERS, which makes him a fool.” Whatever the hell that means.

It has belatedly occurred to the party and its media shills that shouting ELECTION FRAUD for years on end is not a terrific way to get their people to the polls.

Soon to be House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — well, presumably — sat down with Fox’s Sean Hannity to discuss “the reluctance some Republicans in many states have about voting early and voting by mail.” The California congressman described his state’s election laws as “the worst,” but brags that Republicans hold their own there thanks to efforts to “educate” their voters. Why is the national Republican electorate so uneducated? These two have no idea!

And while we are loath to give credit to wingnut wankstain Charlie Kirk, he did at least see this problem coming after the November elections.

“If you are a conservative you should VOTE EARLY IN PERSON in Georgia. Don’t trust the Election Day madness. Learn from Maricopa and vote early and securely,” he tweeted on November 22.

But after years of preaching otherwise, the choir supplied many versions of this tweet in reply: “Voting early gives them time to know just how many votes they need to steal a win. I prat [sic] everyone surprises the system and shows up on election day. Do not leave the line until your vote is counted.”

In summary and in conclusion, we’re all trying to find the guy who did this. “Many” say he’s an orange-hued septuagenarian farting into his phone from a golf cart in Florida. Maybe after we hunt him down, we can find the guy who saddled the GOP with so many godawful candidates.

[Poiltico]

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