Why did two Democrats — including a cop-hating racist — get elected to the Senate in Georgia, giving Democrats control of Congress? Donald Trump! He suppressed conservative turnout by making it seem like voting was futile. If Republican turnout had been even a tiny bit higher in Georgia, Republican Senator David Perdue would have been reelected, because he lost by less than 1% of the vote in the runoff election, after leading by 1.8% in the November election.
Voting is not futile. Vote fraud happens every year in lefty cities and counties, but Republicans still manage to win many statewide elections by turning out in big numbers. Most Americans don’t want socialism. And conservative counties don’t stuff ballot boxes in favor of left-wing candidates.
Ryan Saavedra is a staunchly conservative columnist for the Daily Wire. What he found is that Trump’s rhetoric robbed Republicans of victory in Georgia. As he explained on Twitter:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
“Have spoken to people who were knocking on doors in Georgia trying to get out the vote for Perdue in Loeffler and they said that the one thing they heard consistently from Republican voters was that they were not going to vote because the system was rigged.”
“And they believed that because of what *Trump* was saying.”
Trump wildly exaggerated the fraud way beyond what was needed to challenge the election outcome, to the extreme level of making voting itself seem pointless.
Trump falsely made it sound as if there were way more than ten million fraudulent votes across the county. Nobody who knows anything about election statistics or demographics thinks that’s true. There are a few conservative researchers like John Lott who think Trump eked out a narrow win in the Electoral College, and was cheated of victory by fraudulent votes in left-wing enclaves like Allegheny and Fulton Counties.
But no election expert — absolutely none — thinks that Trump won the popular vote, which would require insane conspiracy theories to be true, and require even officials in conservative bastions to conspire with leftists to come up with millions of fake votes nationwide. As the pro-free-market law professor David Bernstein points out, such claims are ridiculous. Witness Trump’s claim to have won the popular vote by a “landslide.” Biden led Trump by 7% in public opinion polls in late October 2020. The polls were off, but not by 7%. Biden is simply less hated than Hillary Clinton was, and that gave him an advantage over Trump going into the election.
The fact that leftist activists in Fulton County might be “ballot harvesting” or letting people vote twice does not change the fact that your vote in your community counts in full, and can cancel out an urban left-winger’s fraudulent vote. Refusing to vote because of such fraud is helping the fraud achieve its intended purpose of disenfranchising you and stealing the election. By refusing to vote, you are effectively collaborating with those who committed fraud. Trump foolishly encouraged such refusals to vote, through his inflated and exaggerated claims.
Saavedra’s findings are consistent with what LU’s Liam Bissainthe found, in his article, “Why the Republicans lost in Georgia.”
Another reason for the Republican loss is that “Republican supporters across Georgia stayed home,” reports the Washington Post, turning out at a lower rate than Democrats. …
Go to the comment thread for blog posts at conservative web sites…. and you will find many comments discouraging people from voting, explaining that it is futile to vote due to vote fraud. These defeatist comments were posted by people who are, or claim to be, Trump supporters. But their message helped reduce turnout in Georgia’s conservative counties. Turnout in conservative counties fell more in Georgia between the general election and the run-off election than it did in liberal counties, enabling the Democrats to win.
The fall in conservative turnout was much bigger than the effects of any vote fraud. … It was Republicans staying home, not fraud, that did the most to cost Republicans Georgia’s senate seats.
If there really were millions — rather than thousands — of fraudulent votes, one would have expected Trump to submit concrete evidence of that in court. But he never did. He made wild claims without pointing to specific evidence. That damaged Trump’s credibility with swing voters, who punished Georgia’s Republican Senate candidates for backing Trump’s claims:
Some voters viewed Trump’s actions as being an assault on free and fair elections. He alleged fraud. They viewed that claim as insincere, and as a pretext for overturning a valid election that reflected the will of the people. One cited the fact that 60 court rulings have rejected challenges to the presidential election results. That includes over a dozen rulings by judges appointed by Donald Trump himself. Others cited the fact that the Georgia election results were not suspicious, but totally predictable based on public opinion polls. Those polls showed Biden leading Trump by 1.1% in Georgia in November 2020.
Those centrist voters punished the Republican Senate candidates for echoing Trump’s fraud claims, which they viewed as bogus, and for agreeing with Trump’s demand that Biden’s apparent victory in Georgia be overturned. One called that “an attack on democracy and free and fair elections.”
Some of those voters previously voted Republican in the Senate races but changed their vote to the Democrats in the January run-off election.
