OPINION:
In Georgia, as baseball legend Yogi Berra once said, “It’s like deja vu all over again.” Just like two years ago, a Senate seat from Georgia is again heading to a runoff.
In other words, as the eminently quotable Berra also said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” And it won’t be over until (at least) Dec. 6, when the far-left Democratic incumbent, Sen. Raphael Warnock, again squares off against a conservative Republican challenger, another sports legend, Herschel Walker.
Mr. Warnock outpaced Mr. Walker by a bit more than 35,000 votes out of the nearly 3.93 million cast in the midterms, but he failed to reach the 50% threshold required by Georgia law to avoid a runoff. The incumbent’s margin (49.4% to 48.5%) was razor-thin despite outraising his challenger by better than 3 to 1, $123.5 million to $37.7 million.
Despite being vastly outraised and outspent, Mr. Walker likely would have reached the 50% threshold and avoided the runoff had Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver not been a spoiler in the race, garnering more than 81,000 votes or 2.1% of the total.
It’s unlikely that many libertarian-minded voters would have cast their ballots for Mr. Warnock’s Big Government tax-spend-and-regulate agenda. Happily, for Republicans, Mr. Oliver won’t be on the ballot in next month’s runoff, which will be Mr. Warnock’s fourth election race in two years.
That’s where the deja vu, and a lesson for Republicans, come in. In the January 2021 runoff against appointed Republican incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler, Mr. Warnock won with just 51% of the vote.
Republicans cannot afford to make the same mistake that was made in the 2021 runoff that made that loss possible.
It was staggeringly stupid and self-defeating when, in a fit of pique, pro-Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood urged Georgia Republicans to boycott the runoff in the wake of President Biden’s election, which they considered illegitimate and a result of vote fraud.
At a Dec. 2, 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally in Alpharetta, Georgia, Ms. Powell said Republicans should boycott elections until voting systems that she said were rigged were made “secure.”
“I would encourage all Georgians to make it known that you will not vote at all until your vote is secure—and I mean that regardless of party,” Ms. Powell said, as reported by Fox News.
She might have intended the boycott to be genuinely bipartisan, but clearly far more Republicans heeded her ill-considered call.
A statewide analysis of the lower turnout in the January 2021 vote by Georgia Public Broadcasting published on April 22 of that year asked: “Who Stayed Home More in Georgia’s Senate Runoffs?” The answer: “Rural White Republicans.”
“Precinct-level data analyzed by GPB News show the narrow margins of victory for Sen. Jon Ossoff (about 55,000 votes) and Sen. Raphael Warnock (about 94,000 votes) were the result of … a precipitous decline in white rural Republican areas across north Georgia,” reporter Stephen Fowler wrote. (Democrat Mr. Ossoff’s race against GOP then-Sen. David Perdue was also settled by runoff the same day.)
“In 1,387 precincts that former President Trump won in November, turnout dropped by about 310,000 voters, including a 9% drop in white turnout, or about 227,000 white voters. Black turnout in those precincts fell only 6.7%,” the analysis found. “By comparison, the 1,261 precincts President Biden won in Georgia saw a drop-off of just 220,000 voters, white turnout dropped by about 7% and Black turnout fell only 6.4%.
“Of the 25 precincts that saw the largest raw decrease in voters from November to January, all of them went for Trump.”
The percentage of the drop-off in the Republican vote directly attributable to Ms. Powell and Mr. Wood’s peevish calls for a boycott is anyone’s guess. But what happened to Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue can’t be allowed to happen to Mr. Walker.
And it won’t, if Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican, has anything to say about it.
Mr. Kemp — who drew about 203,000 more votes than Mr. Walker did en route to a reelection victory so decisive that even Democratic “election denier” Stacey Abrams couldn’t dispute it — signaled Nov. 11 that he would deploy his formidable get-out-the-vote apparatus on Mr. Walker’s behalf.
Judging by the green wave of blue cash sure to continue to flood into Georgia from Hollywood and Silicon Valley on behalf of Mr. Warnock, Mr. Kemp will need to deploy his campaign donors as well.
Moreover, Mr. Trump must set aside whatever petty grudges and grievances he might still hold against Mr. Kemp from the 2020 contest in what needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort to get Mr. Walker across the finish line next month.
Mr. Warnock is a left-wing radical and a rubber stamp for Mr. Biden’s far-left agenda. He must be defeated.
To that end, there must be no deja vu — “all over again,” or otherwise — on Dec. 6.
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