Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe has made former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election trutherism a chief focus of his campaign.
Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, McAuliffe argues, is unfit for office because he is insufficiently outraged by the former president’s election fraud allegations.
It would be a stronger argument if it came from basically anyone else.
McAuliffe himself has been peddling election trutherism for the past 21 years, maintaining the repeatedly debunked fantasy that former President George W. Bush stole the White House from former Vice President Al Gore.
McAuliffe’s focus on Youngkin’s supposed kid-glove handling of Trump’s election conspiracy theories is doubly awkward considering the fact the Democratic candidate has called on failed Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate and noted election truther Stacey Abrams for support.
“You see, I’m here to tell you that just because you win doesn’t mean [you’ve] won,” Abrams told a crowd of supporters as McAuliffe looked on, nodding his head.
She added, “I come from a state where I was not entitled to become the governor, but as an American citizen and as a citizen of Georgia, I’m going to fight for every person who has the right to vote to be able to cast that vote. And here in Virginia, you need to cast that vote for Terry McAuliffe!”
First, “entitled” to win? What does this even mean?
Secondly, because it apparently bears repeating, Abrams lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race honestly, her baseless accusations to the contrary notwithstanding.
Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp won the election with 50.2% of the vote, compared to Abrams’s 48.8%. Kemp defeated Abrams by an estimated 55,000 votes — that’s close, but it’s not quite a squeaker.
Abrams didn’t go quietly. She ended her candidacy only when it became clear she had exhausted every possible option to overturn the results of the election. And even when she ended her campaign, she refused to concede defeat. Indeed, she maintains to this day that Kemp won only because he suppressed the vote, based on multiple debunked conspiracy theories about what happened on Election Day.
Abrams and her allies in the Democratic Party and the press agree. They claim, without evidence, that Kemp was responsible for Democratic county governments choosing to consolidate polling places. (In many cases, Kemp, then Georgia’s secretary of state, was actually on the record opposing their consolidation.) Abrams and her allies falsely blame Kemp for creating longer lines and other likely unforeseen delays for voters. They also claim falsely that Kemp was personally responsible for Election Day mishaps, including a shortage of extension cords for voting machines at a polling station in Gwinnett County. (The extension cords were quickly found, and Kemp had not hidden them. Neither had the Easter Bunny.)
As for the vote being suppressed in Georgia, approximately 3.9 million were cast in the 2018 midterm cycle. This is the same number of votes cast in the entire state during the 2012 presidential election and not too far short of the 4.1 million votes cast in the 2016 election. That was astounding turnout, way up from the 2.5 million votes cast in Georgia during the 2014 midterm elections. All in all, the 2018 election saw voter turnout in Georgia increase by an estimated 1.6 million from the previous midterm election cycle.
Put another way, whoever was in charge of “suppressing” the vote did a terrible job.
Following her non-concession speech, wherein she ended her candidacy but refused to admit she lost, Abrams promised she could prove the Republican Party stole the election. She has yet to deliver on this promise.
Oh, by the way, Abrams’s personal website bills her as “governor.” If you think this is embarrassing, just think of how embarrassing it is that Democratic operatives and luminaries continue to promote her falsehoods.
At an event Tuesday evening in Washington, D.C., for example, failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told an audience she feels “strongly” Abrams “actually won” the 2018 race. Maybe that one isn’t such a huge surprise — Clinton never admitted that she lost the 2016 race fairly, either.
Democrats universally support Abrams’s evidence-free election fraud conspiracy theories, even as they concern-troll the public with Trump’s equally baseless election claims.
Youngkin is the real threat, say the same people who insist that Stacey Abrams really won an election that she clearly lost. Youngkin’s alleged failure to obsess over the former president’s claims of election fraud make the Republican gubernatorial candidate an existential real threat to our beautiful, sweet republic, according to Democrats.
Election trutherism is apparently bad … except for when it isn’t.
