Thoughts About Yesterday’s Results

I have thoughts about last night, but first:

1.) Congratulations to Stacey Abrams on her reelection as President of United Earth.
2.) Congratulations to Beto O’Rourke on winning the Triple Crown of losing a bid for President, losing to Ted Cruz, and losing to Greg Abbott.

Alright, now, with that out of my system.

A Red Wave did not wash across our nation, but Georgia is still a Republican state. I’m a bit surprised by the former but not the latter. Brian Kemp and other statewide candidates (minus US Senate) won comfortably. That’s a positive that Georgia Republicans should take to heart. That doesn’t mean Georgia is a de-facto Republican state. The quality of the candidate matters. Herschel Walker is not a good candidate. Here are some numbers:

Kemp outperformed Walker by 202,379 votes.
Warnock outperformed Abrams by 131,679 votes.
Democratic Lt.Gov. candidate Charlie Bailey outperformed Abrams by 1,931 votes.

Walker didn’t do well, and, to a greater extent, neither did Warnock. There were 3,957,598 ballots cast yesterday. There were 3,928,640 votes cast in the US Senate race and 3,946,421 votes cast in the Governor’s race–nearly 29,000 voters either wrote someone in or just skipped the US Senate race. There were around 11,000 voters who wrote in a name or skipped the Governor’s race. Nearly 3x more voters chose not to choose R, D, or L for US Senate. Had the grassroots of the Georgia Republican Party nominated a quality candidate (and there were plenty during the primary who had less baggage and better character), I think we would have easily won back the US Senate without a runoff seat as neither Abrams nor Warnock are great candidates either.

But we do have a runoff. Party faithful will lawyer for their candidate about why their candidate is less bad than the other. We will see the grifter class spread a message of doom and gloom to scare people about the future during the season when we are supposed to be mindful of gratitude and thanksgiving. Who wins, and who loses? The political consultants and general electorate, respectively.

I honestly don’t know who wins the runoff. I believe that there was a rejection of Donald Trump the person in 2020, and I think that was reiterated last night by the body politic in the United States. That doesn’t mean they favor the bill of progressive goods that Democrats are trying to sell either…I think it goes back to what I said earlier: candidate quality matters. Dear Republicans: I plead with you to heed that in 2024.

Do Georgians go with the “devil they know versus the devil they don’t” (Note: I’m not calling the incumbent US Senator the devil), or are enough Georgia voters going to put on blinders to look past the past and reject the Biden agenda? I think it will be a race to the wire, and I don’t know who will drag themselves over the finish line first in December.

One thing that I do know is that our elections are, indeed, safe and secure. There are *a lot* of moving parts to get an election to be successful across the precincts in all of Georgia’s 159 counties. That doesn’t mean there aren’t failures or errors, but I believe most issues are handled appropriately. The 2022 General Election in Georgia was fair. Accusations of widespread voter suppression by Abrams and widespread voter fraud by Trump should be put to rest now. Full stop. That is something that should be encouraging to all Georgians.