We've been hammering away on this issue for a reason. The Stacey Abrams/Joe Biden crowd made outrageous claims about Georgia's new election law -- calling it worse than Jim Crow segregation, and racist voter suppression. Their demagoguery was demonstrably untrue at the time, and even though many corporate entities performatively echoed the dishonest hysteria, most Georgians ultimately supported the measure. Tuesday's primary election offered the first real-world test of the law's impact. Would it vindicate the "Jim Crow 2.0" chanters, or expose them? The answer has been powerful and clear. Here's a statistic shared by a spokesman for the Georgia Secretary of State (who won re-nomination, without a runoff) prior to the polls closing on Tuesday, for context:
We are on a solid path to surpass the record for midterm primary turnout. The previous record was 2018 with approximately 1,162,000.
— Gabriel Sterling (@GabrielSterling) May 24, 2022
Slightly more than 1.1 million Georgia voters participated in the 2018 midterm election primaries. You'll recall that during that cycle, Donald Trump was president, enthusiasm was high on the Democratic side, and there were robustly contested primaries among Republicans and Democrats ahead of the state's gubernatorial election (in which Kemp defeated Abrams, though she never conceded, opting instead for conspiratorial trutherism, victimhood, and grifting). In that primary, slightly over 607,000 Republican voters participated, while roughly 555,000 Democrats did the same on the other side of the aisle. For what it's worth, that gap ended up closely mirroring the margin of the general election, just on a larger scale. Fast forward four years. With a supposedly 'racist' law intended to "suppress" the vote in place, following all the high-decibel histrionics, what happened? As we've previously pointed out, early and absentee voting vastly increased, close to tripling (also tripling among black voters). Now that election day ballots have also been tabulated, here are the approximate totals:
Update: Turnout exceeded 1.9 million in Georgia’s 2022 primaries. https://t.co/nytkZLIYMN
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) May 25, 2022
Nearly 1.2 million Republicans alone turned out in this cycle's primary, eclipsing the entire bipartisan total from four years ago. And more than 720,000 Democrats voted on their side this go-around, a massive increase over 2018, when their base was more fired up and there was a real primary fight underway. This cycle, Abrams ran unopposed, and Sen. Raphael Warnock faced only token opposition. In all, turnout went up by more than three-quarters-of-a-million people, utterly demolishing the prior record -- and dramatically outpacing Georgia's population growth. Turnout spiked. Voter participation flourished in a record-setting manner. This is the textbook opposite of "suppression." Shame on everyone who spread or amplified that lie. If you missed it, here's Abrams -- realizing she has a reality problem -- spinning ridiculously, rather than admitting she was a spreader of fear and misinformation monger. And how could she admit that? "Voter suppression" claims are her whole brand:
Democrat Stacey Abrams on Georgia's skyrocketing turnout: "We know that increased turnout has nothing to do with suppression" pic.twitter.com/MzTnwNY7KK
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 24, 2022
As we said yesterday, and others have also pointed out, she's playing an unfalsifiable game. If turnout goes down, it's suppression. If turnout goes up, that's not not suppression. And, in fact, higher turnout (even much higher) should be attributed to the righteous backlash to suppression. In other words: Always suppression, no matter what happens. It's an unserious, desperate argument that cannot be refuted, by design. That bogeyman must be kept alive for future fundraising, grievance, and excuse-making, if any when Abrams loses again. And the professional prognosticators seem to think that's more likely than not at this stage:
Crystal Ball: GA-GOV moves from Toss-up to Leans R following Kemp's big win; Raffensperger and the crossover vote; other reactions to last night's primaries: https://t.co/r8jn9XElvS
— Kyle Kondik (@kkondik) May 25, 2022
I'll leave you with this. which has more of a national flavor to it:
Disapproval of Biden keeps making new highs according to the 538 tracker https://t.co/ogEbgFOKCE pic.twitter.com/cbbzix36gV
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) May 25, 2022
A new Reuters poll this week shows Biden at (36/59). If his numbers are anywhere near than in the fall, some Democrats will have no chance of surviving a wave that size.
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