1/6/21
In the wake of their defeat in the Georgia runoff elections, when control of the US Senate slipped from their grasp, Republicans will be asking who was to blame. Insider and Decision Desk HQ called the election early Wednesday morning, projecting victory for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock over the Republican incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. And a key factor in the GOP defeat is likely President Donald Trump. Georgia was until 2020 reliably Republican. And, historically the opposition performs strongly in elections after a new president is chosen, as voters seek to balance out the power of the incoming administration. But both these trends were overturned. For weeks Republicans strategists in Georgia, in comments to publications including The New York Times, warned that Trump risked seriously damaging the party's performance. They cited t the president's doomed attempts to reverse the result of the presidential election, and his relentless attacks on state GOP officials who have refused to erase Biden's win in Georgia. Trump's conspiracy theories about the integrity of voting systems in Georgia, they warned, would undermine trust in the contest among GOP voters.
As recently as last week, GOP strategist and pollster Frank Luntz in a Fox News interview warned that the party's candidates in the state "may well lose on the fifth of January because of what the president is doing right now." Sources told Jonathan Swan of Axios that Trump was so fixated with his election fraud grievances that he was reluctant to campaign in Georgia. Top Republicans, according to the outlet, think Trump is to blame for the loss for alienating suburban moderates with his "craziness" and eroding trust in state election machinery. As it became clear on Tuesday night that the Republicans were headed for defeat, one of the Republican officials whom Trump had attacked returned the favor. In the event of a Republican defeat, blame "falls squarely on the shoulders of President Trump," Gabriel Sterling, voting systems implementation manager for the Georgia Secretary of State's office, told CNN. His boss, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had been a repeated target of Trump in a clear sign of Republican civil war.