Doubting Democracy (Part 7 of 8)
The 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and some connections to 2020 (with a few introductory thoughts on 2024).
Click on the below links to view the other parts of this series:
Doubting Democracy 1: Introduction & the Prelude to 2000
Doubting Democracy 2: The 2000 Presidential Election in Florida
Doubting Democracy 3: The 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio
Doubting Democracy 4: The 2008 ACORN Scandal
Doubting Democracy 5: The 2008 Minnesota Senate Election & the Post-2012 Narratives
Doubting Democracy 6: The 2016 Presidential Election Narratives
This final segment in my series on the growth of election denialism from 2000 to 2020 was written before election day, but I had not yet found time to finish polishing it off for posting purposes. After Trump’s decisive victory on Tuesday, I started to feel as if maybe it just wasn’t relevant anymore. After all, we were only really going to have to confront the consequences of election denialism if Trump had lost, not if he won. However, as I was proofreading this piece on Wednesday, I decided that it still feels relevant to today’s events (as all history does). So I decided to go ahead and post the closing chapter of this saga — then if Trump does become the fascist dictator some seem to think he’ll be, I’ll scramble to take this all down before I get put in the gulag.
I’ll probably have some thoughts of my own on the 2024 election soon enough. But as usual, I prefer to digest a little before I rush out and offer up my opinions (which is why I will never be good at developing a social media following). In the meantime, I agree with the more pragmatic voices on the left that have implored their people to respond with “contemplation, not contempt.” And quite frankly, it’s a lesson the Republicans would be wise to heed as well — although perhaps it would be better to advise them to respond with “contemplation, not smug, self-satisfied delusion.” After all, this election was still close, turnout does not appear to be dramatically different from 2020, and roughly one-third of the electorate will have still voted for “none of the above.”
If there’s one constant in American politics, it’s that things are always changing and they can change very quickly. We have been living in a world where the pendulum of whose in power has been constantly swinging back and forth for a very long time now, and I see no reason to think that pendulum is going to slow down any time soon. Yes, every pundit likes to feed their own egos by saying they “called it” but the truth is: Nobody knew who was going to win this election. And nobody knows what the next four years under President Trump will look like — nor do they know what the next hundred years afterwards will look like either. So just take it as it comes. Because the next election cycle will probably be starting in about six months (sigh)…
9. THE 2018 GEORGIA GUBERNATORIAL ELECTION
The 2018 election for the Governor of Georgia, between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, is the last episode I wanted to discuss before wrapping up this narrative of how we got to this high-water mark in election denialism. Brian Kemp ultimately won this election, but Stacey Abrams bluntly refused to concede (although I will note that she did not instigate and/or support a riot on the Georgia state capitol). And I would totally sympathize with anyone out there reading this wondering, “Why in the world would Eric spend his last chapter criticizing Democrats over this one state election in 2018, and then not talk at all about the Republicans’ behavior in the 2020 presidential election?”
I can actually answer that pretty easily: Everyone knows what happened in 2020 by this point, and most of us recognize how indefensible, despicable, and bat-shit crazy it was. Yes, there are a shocking number of Americans who are still in denial about it, but I’m not going to pretend that there is anything I can do about that. Because if you happen to be one of those Americans who has white-washed your memory the January 6th riots in order to convince yourself that it was “overblown” by the media, or that it was in no way Trump’s fault, or that Ashley Babbitt was a “martyr,” or that the J6’ers are “political prisoners” — then let’s just be honest about the fact that nothing I, or anyone else, says on the issue will ever matter to you anyway. Besides, for those of you who are genuinely curious about interrogating the 2020 fraud claims, there are plenty of other sources out there that can break it down for you better than I can.
I do fully recognize that a lot of Democrats have gotten fed up with hearing Republicans use the 2018 Georgia Governor’s race as a way to argue there is an “equivalency” between Democrats’ behavior that year and their own behavior in 2020. And although I will continue to argue that there can be no doubt that the Republicans are by far the worst offenders when it comes to election denialism (by this point at least), I would caution folks on the left not to dismiss or downplay the election denialism that Democrats showcased during this period (or any previous period). Because I think it is always important to hold yourself accountable even if your opponents refuse to do the same (two wrongs don’t make a right).
The only real defense of Democrats’ behavior over 2018 was that Stacey Abrams and her supporters never carried their rhetoric into action in the way that Trump and his followers (and the Republicans in Congress) did. Still, even if we’re just talking about rhetoric, we should never dismiss the profound effect that rhetoric alone can have in this, or any, political age. The rhetoric coming at us both from our elites and the masses has greatly contributed to the toxic state of our politics. Because that toxicity is centered around the narratives that we choose to believe, and those narratives are just as influenced by rhetoric as there are by events.
There are so many slogans that have been popularized these days like, “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” or, “You’re entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts” — and all of that is such garbage. People’s views of the world are not empirical. For that to even be possible, we would have to humor the absurd notion that any one person could actually take in, and retain, every bit of information the world has to offer and see it from every single perspective and do all of that concurrently. That is simply not within the capacity of even the most genius of human minds (and most human minds are pretty far from genius). The facts may not care about our feelings, but our brains certainly do — and it is ultimately our brain’s job to make sense of the facts and decide how we choose to perceive them.
POLTIFACT: The only really honest answer is that no one knows for sure how much voting was depressed by the alleged acts of “voter suppression” by former Secretary of State [Brian] Kemp… It’s not necessarily inaccurate to make this claim, but it is speculative.
I’m going to do with this story what I did with the story of the 2004 election in Ohio: I’ll start by telling you the narrative part, and then afterward — for those of you who like the boring policy debates — I’ll break down in detail the four primary complaints related to “voter suppression” I heard Democrats make about this election. These complaints were (1) the purging of the voter rolls, (2) the debates over the exact-match law, (3) the closing of polling places, and (4) the suspicions of rigged and/or faulty voting machines — and you’ll note that the latter complaint ended up being one that was co-opted by the Republicans during the 2020 election (and in Georgia especially).
I think it is important to highlight that Democrats explicitly and consistently claimed that all of these alleged actions by Republicans were driven by racism. In 2019, Pete Buttigieg (who is someone I admire) stated bluntly, “Racially motivated patterns of voter suppression are responsible for Stacey Abrams not being governor of Georgia right now.” That same year, Joe Biden told the African American Leadership Summit that “voter suppression is the reason Stacey Abrams isn’t governor.” Kamala Harris also told the NAACP, “Let's say this loud and clear: without voter suppression, Stacey Abrams would be the governor of Georgia.” (Just for the record, I have not discovered any instance of Barack Obama making these kinds of statements about this particular election.)
Stacey Abrams stated her case very clearly in the speech she gave after the election ended, “Democracy failed Georgians of every political party, every race, every region… So, to be clear, this is not a speech of concession.” Abrams also did a lot of see-sawing in her speech. She would say the thing that was expected and required of her on the one hand, but then slip in the accusatory rhetoric calling the results into doubt on the other. For example, she stated, “I will pray for the success of Brian Kemp, that he will indeed be a leader for all Georgians,” but then followed it up with, “Make no mistake, the former Secretary of State was deliberate and intentional in his actions.”
In the aftermath of the 2020 election (prior to January 6th), mainstream media outlets were indeed willing to state plainly that Stacey Abrams had refused to concede in 2018. According to NPR, “Abrams lost by nearly 55,000 votes and never did concede.” That same story also noted that, “In a statement issued after this story was first published, Seth Bringman, Abrams’ spokesman, said her situation in 2018 and Trump’s today are nothing alike. ‘We had a coherent and well-documented case about why the system failed voters, in truthful and complete sentences. Now, Donald Trump has no evidence and no argument.’”
I do feel that Brigman’s last comment about Donald Trump having “no evidence and no argument” is fair, but I would tend to argue that Abrams’ case was not well-documented. Yes, it was coherent. Yes, it was in complete sentences. But it was far more theoretical than it was “truthful,” and they did not deliver any better than Trump did when it came to producing evidence.1 Abrams simply assumed that Kemp had undermined the election in an intentionally racist manner, and so that was the story that she stuck to. Many of the charges were even taken to the courts, but they could never be proven. Regardless, Stacey Abrams continued to say the results of that election were illegitimate and has never reversed her position to this day.
What really makes this all so noteworthy to me — particularly after the dust had settled on the 2020 election — was the fact that Brian Kemp displayed a genuine commitment to election integrity when he stood up to Donald Trump in the wake of his 2020 fraud claims. Trump had put immense pressure on Georgia's officials to reverse the vote in that state in his favor. And although it was Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who got the most press for not kowtowing to Trump, Governor Brian Kemp was right there holding the line with him. And I must confess that I would never have guessed that Brian Kemp of all people would have been the Republican to stand up and do what was right during the 2020 election. Back then, I was just as convinced as Stacey Abrams that he was just another Trump sycophant who would lie, cheat, or steal to keep the Democrats out of power — but I was wrong about that (and so was she).
In that infamous phone call that was leaked in January of 2021 (the one where Trump asked the Georgia Republicans to “find” him the 11,000 votes he needed to win), Trump claims that it was his support in 2018 that was the sole reason that Brian Kemp got elected governor in the first place. “What a schmuck I was,” Trump said. And then in a speech prior to the Senate run-off elections in Georgia on January 5, 2021, Trump told a crowd, “I’m going to be here in a year and a half, and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state.”
By all accounts, Brian Kemp appeared to have committed career suicide by standing up to Trump in 2020. One piece on CNN stated that “with the possible exception of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis [who Trump would also turn against two years later], there isn't a single governor in the country who has been more openly praiseworthy of and loyal to Donald Trump than Brian Kemp. Not one. And Kemp didn't betray Trump. Or attack him or his policies publicly. Or, well, anything. He just did his job. And for that, he has become a Trump enemy.”
And look, I still disagree with Brian Kemp on almost all of his policy positions. I do think it was inappropriate for him not to recuse himself as secretary of state (a position which oversees the elections in Georgia) while he was running for governor in 2018. Kemp is someone who still engages in many of the corny talking points that you hear over and over again from lesser Republicans (like proclaiming that he’s “going after Antifa”). He can also engage in the same conspiracy mongering Republicans are fond of as well (such as when he stoked suspicions that the Democrats had hacked Georgia’s voter registration system just two days before the election). And sadly, even after admitting that he did not vote for Trump in this year’s Republican primary, Kemp still chose to bend the knee and endorse Trump for president — even appearing with him at an event just weeks after Trump had ranted against Kemp and his wife at one of his rallies. So I’m not going to sit here and claim that Brian Kemp deserves a Profile In Courage Award or anything like that. Still, it is a reminder that our politics (and our politicians) are not always as simplistic as we want them to be. Brian Kemp was no villain and Stacey Abrams was no hero — they were just people. (And yes, politicians are sometimes people too.)
Still, even when you’re someone like myself who has no strong attachment to either side, it can be truly difficult to know exactly who is acting in good faith and who isn’t. So you can only imagine how difficult it must be for people who are firmly entrenched on the right or the left (or on any other ideological spectrum) to make that distinction. Take our Lieutenant Governor here in Texas, Dan Patrick, as an example. My negative views of him were essentially the same as my negative views of Brian Kemp in 2020, but Dan Patrick was not someone who stood tall during the 2020 “stolen” election claims. He even offered $25,000 rewards (paid out of his campaign fund) to anyone who provided information leading to a conviction for voter fraud.
Ironically, the first (and I believe only) payout was to a Democratic poll watcher who turned in a Pennsylvania Republican that tried to vote twice by using his son’s name. Which is a seriously funny anecdote, but it also reminds us that we do actually need to have people keeping an eye out for this kind of behavior — regardless of which party is engaging in it. Too often Democrats act as if the fact that voter fraud is incredibly rare is a justification for just putting every American voter on the “honor system” rather than having real safeguards in place. I mean, if nothing else, Democrats should be supporting those safeguards so that Republicans don’t start pushing the envelope more on committing voter fraud in the future. (As I constantly say, it’s the people who believe in conspiracies that are the most likely to engage in conspiracies [see Richard Nixon].)
I admit, I am inclined to think that Dan Patrick is not a good-faith actor; but after being so surprised by someone like Brian Kemp, I realized that I cannot just assume that any of us knows for sure what lies in men’s hearts based solely on how we feel about their politics. That’s not to say that I find any of Dan Patrick’s legislative behavior justifiable, but I do think it’s quite possible he genuinely believes all of his assertions about voter fraud — no matter how delusional they may sound to me. Some of those assertions can be heard in the embedded clip below from an interview on an October 2020 episode of The Circus. The interviewer is Mark McKinnon, George W. Bush’s former campaign strategist, and I found Dan Patrick’s conversation with McKinnon to be a very interesting insight into the paranoid mind of Republicans during that unique 2020 election environment.2 But I also came to realize that if The Circus had interviewed Brian Kemp just before the election, instead of Dan Patrick, Kemp’s comments would have probably sounded identical.
And I’ll be blunt, I have had the exact same type of conversation as this with people from the left who made the same kinds of “that just doesn’t make sense to me” arguments about how they are certain massive voter suppression exists, regardless of the absence of evidence. I guess my point is that it can be hard for anyone to know who you can trust and who you cannot when it comes to this stuff. I mean, I feel absolutely confident in asserting that Donald Trump is as awful a human being as I have consistently said he was since 2015 (and prior), but I cannot pretend that I don’t understand how a modern-day Republican can delude themselves into thinking that this is just a narrative propagated by the “liberal media.” I do actually get it. I’m not proud to say that I get it, but I grew up around that mentality — and somehow it makes perfect sense to me (even if it never actually appealed to me). After all, I also see my friends on the left delude themselves all the time. And I certainly deluded myself about the Iraq War for a number of years, and I did so just because I desperately wanted my version of that war’s narrative to be the correct one. That is what people the world over do. It’s what we all do.3
Before the election, Donald Trump was not only constantly discrediting the electoral process in order to whip the masses into a frenzy, but he actively attempted to suppress the vote nationwide by directly intervening in the duties of the Post Office at a time when mail-in ballots were crucial because of the COVID pandemic (since he was convinced, rightly or wrongly, that the mail-in votes would favor Democrats). Trump and his people attempted to use the power of the Executive Branch, and later attempted to use the courts, to do whatever they could to interfere with the election both before and after it was over.4
Which had me thinking: If Trump had managed to win the 2020 election, most Democrats would most certainly have felt the election was “stolen.” Even I myself would have even been inclined to feel that way after witnessing all the nefarious actions Trump engaged in prior to election day. And unlike the people who supported Trump’s stolen election claims, or those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, we would have at least had significant circumstantial evidence on our side. Evidence that would not have been conclusive, but would have certainly been believable.
Yet, we have since learned from people like Chris Krebs, Brian Kemp, Bill Barr, et al. that the 2020 election went a million times more smoothly than anyone had expected (even on the mail-in ballot front). By all accounts, 2020 turned out to be one of the least flawed election cycles we’d had on record. And yet, many of us who voted for Joe Biden would have believed the opposite had Trump managed to pull off a victory… and we would have all been wrong.
Click here to read part two of this post which details the specific complaints by Democrats in 2018, and also includes some concluding thoughts on this series.
As I have stated previously, one of the difficult parts of convincing Democrats that their election denialism is on par with that of Republicans is that you can’t prove a negative. We can interrogate and disprove most accusations of “voter fraud,” but you can very rarely prove or disprove accusations of “voter suppression” — because it requires you knowing for certain what the motives of every single person who did not vote were. In other words, you can look into the record of a registered vote, but there are no records on non-votes. And you would have to show conclusively that all of those non-votes were “suppressed,” rather than it simply being a case of the person choosing to stay home (for whatever reason or reasons).
If you listen to the new episode of Joe Rogan with Donald Trump, you’ll find that this paranoid mentality hasn’t changed much in the past four years. Although, I also took note of how Rogan & Trump focused on the ridiculousness of Democrats opposing voter ID Laws, even while Democratic voters themselves approve of such laws. The two of them stated that there is no logical reason to oppose such laws unless you want to commit voter fraud. I have talked about this line of thought in previous pieces; and even though I don’t buy the notion that Democrats actually want to commit fraud, I certainly recognize why their continued (and illogical) opposition to voter ID laws only help to validate such conspiracies.
This is generally where you’ll hear someone bemoan the “false equivalency” of my making such assertions as “the left deludes itself too.” Which I agree, I don’t think the (modern-day) delusions of the left are generally as destructive as the delusions of the right (although I am completely open to debating that point), but that’s actually where I think the “false equivalency” arguments miss the point: It’s not about an “equivalency” of outcomes, it’s about an “equivalency” in the behavior/mentality. In other words, if you’re just a honest, decent person who got suckered into supporting a demagogue like Hitler or Trump, you could certainly argue there is an “equivalency” in the behavior/mentality of going along with any movement like that. After all, I read plenty of testimonials from Germans in the ‘30s that showed their support for Hitler had nothing to do with Jews and which sounded remarkably similar to what you hear from ordinary American voters today. But there was still no equivalency whatsoever in terms of the outcomes of following Hitler vs Trump. Because despite what some people say, Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler could not be more different, and their visions for what they want to manifest with their army of loyal followers is not the same. So the equivalency I’m making is more about reminding us that this kind of behavior (as disturbing as it can be) is actually normal in the history of human nature, and most of the time it does not actually lead to a World War or a Holocaust (but it can lead to other bad things nonetheless).
On a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Michael Moynihan noted that before the 2020 election had even been held, Steve Bannon openly told him that Donald Trump would never concede defeat regardless of the results. Which reminded me of the audio leaked of Bannon in a meeting on October 31, 2020, where he said, “What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”