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Tag: brian kemp
latinas to the polls

In Georgia Runoff It's Loud, Visible Democrats Versus Quiet, Covert Republicans

The margins are razor-thin in Georgia’s Senate runoff that ends on December 7, according to interviews with dozens of party insiders, grassroot organizers, and voters at polls and rallies across the state during the past week.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, appeared to lead as early voting concluded on Friday – a sentiment affirmed by CNN’s latest poll, which reached voters from Thanksgiving weekend through last Tuesday. But Republicans say that their base prefers voting in person at local precincts on Election Day, fueling their hope hat a surge will elect Herschel Walker, the Georgia football star whose Republican candidacy was propelled by Donald Trump.

As early voting closed, 1.83 million Georgians had voted in person or returned mailed-out ballots, according to the secretary of state’s office. While daily turnout broke records, including 350,000 votes cast on Friday, only 26 percent of Georgians with active voter registrations have voted so far. In contrast, during 2020’s runoffs when control of the Senate was at stake, about 4.5 million votes were cast.

In many respects, both parties are reverting to core values and loyalties to bring out voters. At Walker’s rallies this week, he presented himself as a man who has been redeemed by Christianity and, if elected, would oppose the "evil" policies put forth by Democrats and the Biden administration.

Such religious and party orthodoxies were well-received by his supporters, who, in interviews after a Walker rally, mentioned that Trump’s offensive behavior did not stop the former president from enacting policies they approved. And, of course, Walker’s status as a football legend and “good old boy” was appealing.

“Everybody in Georgia loves Herschel. You should have seen that boy run,” said Fran, a retired furniture store owner, who declined to give her last name while attending a Walker rally on Monday in Toccoa, in the state’s northeast corner.

Interviews with voters in Republican strongholds, such as Hall County north of Atlanta, suggested that party loyalty – including the last-minute endorsement of Walker by Gov. Brian Kemp, the state’s top-ranking Republican, who did not back Walker in the primary election, will push party faithful to vote on Tuesday.

“I do think it will have some influence on people,” Sloane Mattadeen, who serves in the U.S. Navy, said after voting. “I think there is some authority there.”

On the other hand, Walker has an uphill climb. He received 200,000 votes less than Kemp in the general election and was 38,000 votes behind Warnock out of nearly 4 million votes cast statewide. What makes Democrats nervous is that Walker’s campaign has been eerily quiet in all but the state’s remote regions.

“They ran a quiet, very covert campaign this entire midterm,” said a Democratic congressional staffer who asked not to be named. “You didn’t see Kemp. If it was not for Donald Trump and his big mouth, you may not even know what was going on with Herschel Walker. You don’t see them when they come for fundraisers… The Republicans are making phone calls, but it is not overt at all.”

The GOP’s latest lawn signs do not mention Walker’s name; they just urge people to vote Republican. Typically, one usually sees one or two lawn signs for Walker, which contrasts with a half-dozen or more signs for Warnock on busy streets.

A former state government press aide who recently took a private sector job said that many of Georgia’s Republican leaders are tired of all things Trump, including his hand-picked candidates like Walker. That partly accounts for the lower-profile messaging, he said, adding that the GOP base understands Kemp’s signals.

Whether that comment applies equally to men and women is another variable. As of Friday morning, about 10 percent more women had voted compared to men, the secretary of state's office reported. (Academic experts said that split was normal in Georgia elections.)

Walker’s anti-abortion stance, despite his history of previously paying for abortions and of domestic abuse, both of which Democrats have publicized, was downplayed by several women who said they had just voted for Walker. Other voters, women and men who said they were voting for Warnock, said that Walker’s character was deeply flawed. Black voters went further and said that his candidacy was perpetuating ugly stereotypes about Black men that they have worked for years to overcome.

More Visible Democrats

In contrast, the Warnock campaign and many get-out-the-vote efforts addressing constituencies likely to support him have been highly visible and vocal. Groups that barely existed a few years ago have been conducting voter drives as part of longer-term efforts to empower their communities.

In a warehouse district north of Atlanta on Friday, three dozen volunteers – mostly young women wearing black sweatshirts saying “Go VOTA” – assembled for a car caravan through nearby neighborhoods to urge Latina women to vote. They also planned to knock on 1,000 doors. Organizers from seven groups behind this effort said they already had made more than 90,000 phone calls to voters.

There are grassroot efforts like this across the state. By Friday morning, more than 800,000 white voters had cast ballots, 477,000 Black voters had cast ballots and 24,000 Hispanic voters had cast ballots, the state data hub reported. While the Hispanic numbers were low compared to other groups, this voter drive’s organizers said their voters could make a difference if margins are close.

“I was born in Georgia and raised in Gwinnett County, a lovely multicultural, multi-lingual community,” said Leslie Palomino, senior canvass lead for Georgia at PoderLatinx. “Growing up in a mixed-status family led me, the middle child in a household of five, to become the first eligible voter. Today, I’ll be casting my vote alongside my sister, Kimberly Palomino. Latinas are a powerful force and today we make our voice heard.”

A few minutes later, Palomino and a caravan of flag-waving, horn-honking volunteers left to visit one early voting site and then rouse voters. There was no comparable effort from Republicans anywhere in sight.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Just Another Day With Anti-Semites At The Former President's House

Just Another Day With Anti-Semites At The Former President's House

As we all certainly know by now, Donald Trump had some guests over for dinner last week at his home, the resort/hotel/club Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump claims he had invited his good friend Ye, formerly known as Kayne West, and was surprised when a well-known white supremacist, anti-Semite and public supporter of his, Nick Fuentes showed up as well. That Trump would be having dinner a couple of weeks after he announced his campaign for the presidency in 2024 with two notorious racists and anti-Semites is perhaps less surprising than the reaction to the fact of it.

You could have heard the collective gasp from the media sphere if you were at the bottom of a coal mine in Siberia. The horror! The outrage! The whole un-thinkable-ness of it! The story was beaten to death. How could it have happened? Could Ye/Kayne West really have sashayed past the Secret Service-protected gates of Mar-a-Lago with Fuentes in tow? Reports of the dinner by “sources” say that Trump’s reaction to Fuentes was as predictable as it was yawn-inducing: “I really like this guy,” Trump told his friend Ye/Kayne West. “He gets me.”

You would have had to have been at the bottom of the aforesaid coal mine for the past six years not to know that a little fawning goes a long way with our former president.

And then came the reports of the mainstreaming of Fuentes that has gone on since he made an appearance at the so-called “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Here is our boy Nick in the company of current members of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar and right-wing babbler Michele Malkin and former Rep. Steve King at something called the “America First Political Action Conference,” (AFPAC) which advertises itself as even further to the right than the “Conservative Political Action Conference,” (CPAC). Fuentes, it was reported, led cheers of “Russia! Russia! Russia!” and “Putin! Putin! Putin!” at the gathering, because…of course he did. The next day, he was roundly denounced – in a Tweet, naturally – by soon-to-be-former Representative Liz Cheney, because…of course she did: “All Americans should renounce this garbage and reject the Putin wing of the GOP now. The silence by Republican Party leaders is deafening and enabling,” because…of course it is.

Are you beginning to pick up on the fact that there is nothing new here, folks? Just another day at Mar-a-Lago, just another moment in the continuing saga of the descent of Republicans into less a political party than a herd of Brownshirts thundering through the media-scape without raising hardly a ripple? I mean, what has to happen in this country to rouse the decent against the dastardly? An election that was nearly stolen from the American people in front of their eyes didn’t manage to do it. A violent coup against the seat of our government, the Capitol, didn’t do it. Somewhere in the vicinity of 40,000 overt lies told by our former president while in office had no discernible effect.

And now we’ve got the same former president and current candidate dining in public at his resort/hotel/club with two out-of-control and out-of-their minds anti-semites, and all we’ve heard have been squeaks and chirps from the liberal media establishment about how terrible it is, and of course dead silence from the Republican Party, with the exception of a few brave souls like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (!) who found enough backbone remaining in his normally gelatinous spine that he told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “Racism, anti-semitism, and denial of the Holocaust have no place in the Republican Party and are completely un-American.”

Wow, you’d go that far, Brian? That’s taking a pretty big risk isn’t it, pal, given the political climate in your own so-called party. I guess we should consider it a story when a climate-change-denying, voter suppressing flat-earther like Kemp appears to come to his senses…but noooooo! In the next breath, he made a bunch of ads for his Texas-based Senate candidate Herschel Walker, and all was right with the world once again.

But the problem here isn’t that Trump refused to denounce Fuentes once he was caught consorting with him, because of course he didn’t. The problem isn’t that the “leadership” of the Republican Party has stayed silent, because of course they have. The problem isn’t the matter of fact-ness of Trump dining with these monsters. The problem is that 80 years after the Holocaust, we are still dealing with people like this piece of scum, Nick Fuentes, who deny that it happened and get attention for their criminal lies. Holocaust denial just never goes away. The anti-semitism of “Jews will not replace us” chants at the torch-lit Charlottesville rally of buttoned-down and khaki pants-wearing white boys just never goes away. The age-old lies that Jews somehow control the world’s banks and stage-manage economic inequality to their own benefit just never goes away.

But it’s the denial of the Holocaust that is the worst of it. The systematic murder of millions of Jews and Gypsies and gay people and political opponents of Nazism and intellectuals is something that not only happened decades ago but keeps getting repeated again and again and again. Nearly an entire people, Native Americans, were massacred during this nation’s founding. Certainly that was a genocide. It is unknown how many Black Americans were lynched and murdered during slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, but certainly that was a genocide as well. Nearly a million were murdered during the Rwandan massacre in 1994, another genocide. The violence and destruction and starvation in Darfur killed 400,000 in 2003, another genocide. In Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, some 200,000 Muslim civilians were systematically murdered, and nearly two million became refugees at the hands of the Serbs, yet another genocide.

And now it’s happening again in Ukraine, where thousands of civilians are thought to have been murdered by the Russian army since February of this year. They are still digging up mass graves and single graves in Kherson after the Russians were driven out recently. There won’t be an authoritative total of the murders for months, even years, but it is clear already that the killings have been planned, sanctioned, and carried out by the Russian army.

History repeats itself because it is denied and swept under the rug and is unstudied and forgotten. Donald Trump and Nick Fuentes and before them David Duke and his ilk are not just propagandists for a lie. They are facilitators of modern genocides. Lies beget murders which beget more lies which beget more murders.

As a species, we seem unable to stop the ongoing Holocaust that is humanity. But we can fight against it by teaching and learning and remembering.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this column is reprinted with permission.

This Time, Let's Honor The True Heroes For Saving Democracy

This Time, Let's Honor The True Heroes For Saving Democracy

In Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp was rewarded Tuesday night with a win by voters, who approved of his policies and appreciated his stand against former President Donald Trump, who tried and failed to get Kemp to toss out ballots that contributed to Trump’s narrow 2020 defeat in the state.

But it always bothered me that Kemp and the similarly Trump-resistant secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, earned kudos and votes for simply doing their jobs, and that both, flush in the praise for standing up to Trump, went on to support more restrictive voting rules that were not needed in the first place, rules that disadvantaged voters like Jennifer Jones.

The Guardianrecounted the arduous odyssey of Jones, a Ph.D. student at Morehouse School of Medicine in Georgia, who, like any good American citizen, showed up to cast her early vote in her Fulton County precinct for the midterm elections.

She hit a roadblock.

Despite dotting every “i” and crossing every “t,” she was told she could not cast a ballot for the candidates of her choice — Stacey Abrams for governor and incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock. Why? Someone she didn’t know and had never met had challenged her right to do the right thing.

The culprit was her state’s ironically named Election Integrity Act, supported by Kemp and Raffensperger, which allowed such a scenario and, in fact, invited it. Those who denied the results of the 2020 election of President Joe Biden, who were none too happy about the close election of two Democratic senators, Warnock and Jon Ossoff, enthusiastically used the law to cast doubt on the kinds of voters who made those results a reality.

Her mystery challenger might not have known her but probably knew a few things about her by following the clues and determining that Jones, a Black woman, was not quite “right” in some way.

It’s annoying, but not surprising, considering the history of Georgia and the country — white men of privilege taking two steps back for every step forward, when others doing the hard work don’t get much credit.

Remember, Georgia is the state where Black poll workers in that 2020 election were falsely accused of election mischief by Trump and friends, and hounded from their homes and patriotic duty. Mother and daughter Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss were still clearly shaken when they testified about their ordeal before the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021.

They were the true heroes of democracy in Georgia.

The results of Tuesday’s 2022 midterm elections are still uncertain. While the “red wave” predicted by Republicans, prognosticators and pollsters whose profession is becoming increasingly suspect did not emerge, control of the House and Senate is still up in the air.

One thing is certain, though. When results are this close, there will inevitably be rumblings about how Black voters could have done more to help Democrats, especially Black candidates who fell short. That was clear in preview stories that wondered if Democrats were doing enough, if Black voters expected too much, and whether or not Abrams was doing enough to appeal to Black men, in particular.

A Washington Post headline stated it pretty clearly: “Democrats count on huge Black turnout, but has the party delivered in return?” “Politicians need to mobilize Black male voters ahead of the midterms, experts say,” warned a story on NPR. Abrams spent an inordinate amount of time swatting down the narrative that Black men didn’t much like her.

I am already hearing whispers about the Senate race in North Carolina, which saw GOP Rep. Ted Budd defeat former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, an African American woman who campaigned across the state — one a Democratic Senate candidate had not won since 2008, and one once defined in the Senate by Jesse Helms and his opposition to civil rights.

I don’t think Black voters are the major problem for any of these candidates.

Missing has been much in-depth examination of white voters, and there are still more of them in this country than any other group, throwing support behind election deniers, reproductive rights hard-liners and those, like Budd, who refused to certify the free and fair election of President Biden.

How does that work? Give a pass to those who vote for those who like or look past the most un-American of actions, and place the blame on Black voters whenever Democrats or Black candidates fall short?

That’s asking African Americans to save democracy, a request we are used to, despite obstacles like the efforts of reelected Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, hailed as the new face of the Republican Party. His administration’s public arrests of formerly incarcerated Floridians, many of them Black, for breaking intentionally complicated election laws they had no idea they were violating, struck fear in prospective voters, even beyond his state’s borders, reported The Marshall Project, achieving the desired effect — voter hesitation and intimidation.

Certainly, those who choose not to vote earn my criticism. Any of today’s challenges, from voter ID laws to last-minute changes in the proper polling location, pale in comparison to the violence visited upon voting rights icons from Medgar Evers to John Lewis.

But I understand the exhaustion and occasional despair when, election cycle after election cycle, only some Americans are blamed for not doing the thing a lot of your fellow citizens don’t want you to do and construct barriers to stop you from doing.

In Abrams’ second loss to Kemp this week, it wasn’t Black voters who let her down.

In important ways, though, Stacey Abrams counted. When Jennifer Jones needed the information to correct misinformed poll workers, she knew who to call for help — Fair Fight, a national voting rights organization based in Georgia, founded by Abrams.

She is a winner, whether or not she gets credit.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Mike Pence

Tweaking Trump, Pence Will Campaign With Kemp In Georgia

In a scathing rebuke to his former partner at the White House, former Vice President Mike Pence has announced plans to campaign with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp on the eve of Georgia’s May 24 Republican primary.

Pence will headline Kemp’s election eve rally in defiance of former President Trump, who has repeatedly assailed the state governor for refusing to partake in a collective Trumpworld effort to subvert and overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.

Pence called Kemp “one of the most successful conservative governors in America” in a statement and on Twitter.

"Brian Kemp is my friend, a man dedicated to faith, family and the people of Georgia,” Pence stated. “I am proud to offer my full support for four more years of Brian Kemp as governor of the great state of Georgia.”

The endorsement, as US News put it, is the “ political equivalent of a raised middle finger” at Trump, who attacked the former VP repeatedly for certifying the results of the 2020 elections despite numerous calls from Trump and delusional far-right elements in his circle to overturn the elections.

"Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution," Trump said in a tweet on January 6, 2021, shortly after Pence refused to overturn the election results and right as a pro-Trump mob was breaching the sacred halls of Congress.

Two months later, in an exclusive interview, Trump defended the rioters who called for Pence’s hanging. “No, I thought he was well-protected, and I had heard that he was in good shape … because, uh, I heard he was in very good shape,” he said.

In February, Pence refuted Trump, saying the former president was “wrong” in alleging that then-Vice President Pence had the sole power to overturn the 2020 election results.

A month after that, Pence came swinging again — this time, at Trump and the Russia-loving arm of the Republican party. “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin,” Pence said at a Republican National Committee retreat.

Prominent Republicans have endorsed candidates who Trump opposes, but Pence, who might be the most prominent of the group, has shown his willingness to buck the former president and his political ambitions.

Still angered by the stinging loss to the then-Democrat candidate for president Joe Biden, Trump has doled endorsements to his loyalists and attacked those who refused to parrot the Big Lie.

Trump has campaigned, raised money, and ran TV attack ads for Kemp’s opponent, former Senator David Perdue, who has long since pledged allegiance to Trump and his false claims of widespread voter fraud.

However, Kemp remains the strong favorite in polls, leading Perdue by an average of 22.3 percentage points in the hotly-contested primary. Leading GOP members are confident Kemp will win 50 percent of the vote to bypass a run-off with Perdue, per Politico.

Despite commanding the increasingly vocal MAGA wing of the GOP, Trump has endorsed some candidates who eventually failed to win their primaries. Last week Charles Herbster, the GOP candidate Trump endorsed in Nebraska’s governorship race, lost to a candidate endorsed by the state’s governor.