GA Run-offs: A Rebuke of the Southern Strategy

SIMPLE & QUICK: Georgia senatorial run-off advances public rebuke of the GOP Southern Strategy, forever changing American politics

In case you missed it, Georgia Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Jon Ossoff, really embarrassed the Peach State’s sitting Senator, David Perdue. So much so the prospective politician left the seasoned establishmentarian speechless at the second 2020 gubernatorial debate. In fact, Senator Perdue’s tissue paper snowflake feelings were so hurt that Perdue refused to participate in the planned third debate, and is again refusing now to participate in any run-off special debates. SAD!

Life for Kemp-appointed Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler is a whirl of questions. Why did you “apply” to be a U.S. Senator? Do you and Bloomberg believe that your immense personal wealth earns you easy political power? Why do you own a women’s basketball franchise if you are anti-women? And probably most salient, why did Kelly Loeffler’s Senate coronavirus briefing correlate with her “well-played” high-dollar stock trade just before the largest economic downturn in American history?

Beyond the will of both of these resourceful Republican financiers is the arch of time. Ruby red Georgia is long gone. For the first time since 1992, the Peach state went blue in 2020. In 1992, Georgians voted for their Southern cousin, Bubba Clinton, from Hope, Arkansas. Before that, they voted once for their native peanut, Jimmy Carter. Biden is neither. Biden is a yankee from Delaware, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was raised and Confirmed Catholic and spent eight years as President Barack Hussein Obama’s Number 2.

At first it appears that the same map is used for both election cycles. Nope, these are the correct results by county for each respective election outcome. Actually, if you look at the Democratic cluster in the north east region of the state, you will see that Donald Trump reclaimed Burke County from the blue team. However, the difference for whom received GA’s 16 EVs is a collective increase in blue county turn out. Although Donald Trump did increase his turn out in most red Georgia counties, The Donald lost votes in almost all of its blue counties. Joe Biden out-performed Hillary Clinton by +3% in both blue and red counties.

The increase in turn out is partly due to changing state demographics, but it is largely the culmination of a near-decade of grassroots work. Originally, The New Georgia Project, has evolved into the mammoth registration and GOTV machine fueled by Stacy Abram’s Fair Fight Action. Fair Fight is a voter protection and registration campaign that targets new voters in historically abandoned precincts. Founder Stacy Abrams has proven her strategy and has forever changed the Georgia game. New Atlanta transplants and Abrams’s enthusiastic and steadfast devotion to reaching and activating disenfranchised Georgia voters has come to fruition— and just in time for national Democrats.

The run-off election on January 5th will provide a much more revealing look at what exactly is happening in Georgia politics. The Southern Strategy was implemented by Republicans during the Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater era. Its purpose is weaponizing the racist, antisemitic, and anti-liberal sentiment of post-Jim Crow and the segregation grievances of rural white voters in combination with the funding of wealthy white voters, whose wealth accumulated through racist institutions such as slavery and continues amassing today through Republican anti-union and anti-worker legislation.

Its “effectiveness” resounds through the RNC and the Southern Strategy has remained core to the Republican political playbook. Mirroring The Donald’s Twitter-feed, during his own 2020 general Senatorial election campaign, Georgia Senator David Perdue used antisemitic and racist fear-mongering in his marketing. This tactic was aggressively and widely used by Republican strategists in 2020.

Regardless, Jon Ossoff and Raphaeal Warnock have centered their campaigns on a full rebuke of the Southern Strategy. Reverend Warnock has flipped the GOP script and is using his flock and Christian faith to amass a voter base. The Reverend is establishing a black political power base that connects voters at predominantly black and AME churches— not unlike a Southern Strategy tactic used to much success by Republicans on white evangelicals and their church networks.

Warnock has proven his base by trouncing Republican candidates Rep. Doug Collins and Kemp-appointed Senator Kelly Loeffler in the general 2020 election. Boy howdy has Ms. Loeffler taken notice. She has released a string of absurd white supremacist-laced campaign ads referring to Warnock as a “Marxist,” who is “the most radical and dangerous candidate in America.” The unashamed sinner Senator is even attacking the longtime Christian reverend’s sermons.

If Warnock can seal the deal, he will not only solidify Georgia’s purple status, but he will he have successfully rebuked the racist institution of run-off elections by being the black and Democratic candidate who beat all of the white Republican challengers in the general election and again beat the Republican challenger in the run-off— busting through Jim Crow’s political shackles and forever changing the Empire State of the South.

Jon Ossoff minced no words during the campaign trail and especially at the second Georgia gubernatorial debate. Mr. Ossoff looked directly at Senator David Perdue and called him out for “not only being a crook,” who made money off of the pandemic and essential workers, but for also “attacking the health of Georgians” in voting five times to end the Affordable Care Act. The young Democrat also called out Mr. Perdue’s racist and antisemitic campaign marketing. Instead of letting the Southern Strategy bulldoze over another Jewish candidate, Ossoff has put a spotlight on the Republican Senator and his party’s ploy of unsubstantiated hatred of the other.

America will learn in January if the Republican’s tried and true Southern Strategy survives to influence another election cycle. But if indeed it is the Georgia run-off elections in 2021 that rebuke this mainstay pathway to Republican power, then it will signify a permanent change in American politics: white churches are not the only places of worship where voters can be activated and using fear of the other has lost its dogma. The 2020 proof in reality of Georgia’s changing demographics reflects beyond the South and promises a new strategy imperative for the Republican party— evolve with America, or die with Jim Crow’s generation.