Georgia Result and Capitol Raid Fallout

The story that was poised to be the story of the month was the unlikely double victory by Democrats in the two Georgia Senate runoffs on Tuesday night.  When I previewed this race last week, early indicators were positive for Democrats, but I trusted my instinct as I did in the general election cycle and convinced myself those early indicators were too good to be true for Democrats.  But they weren't.  My predictions of 2-point wins for Republicans Perdue and Loeffler didn't materialize.  Four days removed from the election with numbers now presumably complete, the wins by Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff look all the more impressive compared to the photo finishes that appeared likely in the late evening on Tuesday.  Warnock won by an even 2 points and Ossoff won by 1 point, outside the margin needed for a recount to be automatically triggered.

My prediction of parliamentary voting habits held true to a degree with Warnock and Ossoff winning the exact same 30 counties, which were also the same 30 counties that Biden won in November.  Nonetheless, I was surprised that Warnock ran a full point better than Ossoff, with more than 19,000 Warnock-Perdue voters.  Now 19,000 people splitting their tickets out of nearly 2.5 million voters is hardly a large number, but it was still about 15,000 more than I expected going into election night.  I'm not sure if it was a matter of Warnock having a bit more crossover appeal or if Loeffler was just weaker than Perdue on the Republican ticket.  It might be a combination of both as turnout seemed to suffer most in the state's dark red northeastern corner, home of Republican Congressman Doug Collins who had a hard-fought battle for the GOP nomination with Loeffler in the jungle primary.  And results also indicated that among country club Republicans in places like Roswell and Sandy Springs in the northern Atlanta suburbs, Perdue's campaign posture was less transparently disingenuous than Loeffler's effort to portray herself as "more conservative than Attila the Hun".

And obviously, one cannot dismiss the poisonous interference Donald Trump repeatedly infused into the campaign, making it impossible for Republicans to move on and thus rendering the same Trump-exhausted voters to cast their ballots as yet another referendum against the lame-duck President.  I would not have anticipated this on November 3rd, and nor did just about anybody else.  History has proven that runoff elections in Georgia are typically predictable affairs where Republicans have a tremendous built-in turnout advantage.  Democrats really deserve credit for not only turning their voters out for this runoff, but for growing their advantage compared to just two months earlier, when Biden's Presidential victory was itself quite an upset.  

Does this mean Georgia is the new Virginia, flipping from red to blue because of shifting demographics and essentially never looking back?  It may. Population growth in Atlanta is explosive and the profile of the new residents is decidedly blue-leaning, particularly with the exploding growth of the city's TV and film production industry.  The politics of Atlanta's suburbs are unrecognizable as a consequence, even compared to eight years ago, and there just isn't enough of an inverse demographic trend elsewhere in the state to cancel out the increasing Democratic advantage, a scenario which has been seen in North Carolina over much of the past decade where its been one step forward and one step back for Democrats.

Even before acknowledging that Joe Biden is now poised to have a governing majority on January 20th because of these election results, the Georgia wins were still a huge story.  Yet by noon on Wednesday, events literally rendered those Georgia results yesterday's news.  The ill-conceived effort to deny Biden's Electoral College victory by craven GOP congressmen led to a surreal invasion of the Capitol by a mob of MAGA die-hards who managed to broach astonishingly ineffective Capitol security forces.  

In one sense, it wasn't exactly a surprise that the festering rage of our ferociously polarized political culture ignited like a powder keg, particularly with Trump's endless provocations of his base within shouting distance of the steps of the Capitol on Wednesday.  But it was a wake-up call to see the magnitude of rage boiling over amongst our nation's citizens, and a vindication of those who've been warning about the rise of the "alt-right".  I'll confess to shrugging off the media's breathless warnings about the rise of groups like QAnon and the Proud Boys as being anything more than gadflies, but after the plot to kidnap and murder the Governor of Michigan followed by Wednesday's insurrection in the halls of the U.S. Capitol, they've made a believer out of me.

With that said, an already depressing situation became all the more depressing when the primary takeaway in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol breach, when the bodies weren't even cold yet, was how Trump's ragtag mob of insurrectionists were treated differently than Black Lives Matter protestors would have been.  That may well be true, but the message reinforces how our first instinct as a culture these days is to retreat to our anointed tribes, readying ourselves for the next round of trench warfare with the inevitable consequence of 2021 being just as bitterly and poisonously violent and divisive as 2020 was.

There was no shortage of foolish things said and done in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, but there was a moment of national unity that seems entirely out of reach 20 years later.  That may not entirely be a good thing as politicians can take advantage of moments of national unity, as was done after 9/11 when it was used as a pretext to invade Iraq, but it's hard to look at the tribal infighting of 2021 and not see it as ultimately more dangerous than the aftermath of 9/11.  With Twitter taking the opportunity to ban its most popular and most unpopular user (the President) yesterday, expect to see the fragmentation of society get even worse before it gets better, with conservative Twitter users fleeing to an alternative Trump-approved venue.  It would be one thing if we were talking about a fringe element, but we're talking about 74 million Americans who cast a ballot for Trump's re-election in November.   As divisive as social media culture has proven itself generally, it'll get even worse when the social media institutions cleave off into warring factions.  

It may seem like several years since I forecast identitarian grievance culture as our most pressing national challenge, but it was only last January!  Sadly, that prediction was much more on the nose than anything I predicted about the 2020 elections, even if the Proud Boys or QAnon weren't specifically on my radar 12 months ago.  In the short-term, I think the Capitol raid was such an extreme and visceral display of how bad things have gotten that Biden will begin his Presidency with a stronger mandate and a longer honeymoon than he was otherwise poised to get.  Particularly now that he has narrow Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, he may actually get a few things done, even if none of them are major policy wins.  But I'm not confident that even a limited degree of national unity will survive into the summer.  The willingness of 74 million Americans to vote for Donald Trump in November confirms just how split the country is, and how little patience there will be for Democrats to pursue their governing agenda.  The fact that Democrats' top priority when they reconvened in the House last week was to eliminate gender language and to insist that every House prayer end with "amen and awomen" is a frightening reminder of their tone-deafness and insistence on doubling-down on the culture war touchstones that needlessly drive their opposition absolutely nuts.

As of this writing, I suspect I speak for most Americans when I say I'm pleased that the current dark chapter of national history is days away from ending and that the Democrats are soon to be in a position to mend what's broken.  But again, 74 million Americans voted for Trump....and after last week's ugly display, there will be heightened enthusiasm to use public policy to punish these people for their choice.  I hope the Democrats can resist this urge, because we can't afford to provoke an even deeper cultural schism.