Stacey Abrams, having lost the governor’s race in Georgia, effectively called the election illegitimate and called for a new election, before kind-of-conceding on Friday evening. The Democratic nominee has a powerful cheering section, with the likes of Sens. Cory Booker and Sherrod Brown accusing the Republicans of stealing the election.
Andrew Gillum has lost the governor’s race in Florida but refuses to concede — that is, after having withdrawn his Election Day concession.
Democrat Bill Nelson, seeking re-election to the U.S. Senate, got a boost in the machine recount when Hillsborough County’s Elections supervisor, a Democrat, refused to submit his recount totals, which would have expanded Nelson’s statewide deficit.
The Democrats will say that they just want every vote counted. That claim is undermined by Nelson’s lawsuit to discard some votes in heavily Republican Bay County, where Hurricane Michael cut voters off from the postal service, and so some voters submitted their mail-in ballots by email.
Some Republicans cry, like Booker and Brown, that Democrats are trying to steal these elections. But that’s off-base.
Stacey Abrams, Andrew Gillum, and Bill Nelson have all lost. They’re toast. The national party that is backing them knows their defeats will not be overturned. This Democratic campaign of delegitimizing elections, breaking the law, and refusing to accept election outcomes, isn’t about stealing the election that just happened. It’s about kicking off the next election campaign.
Democrats have looked at President Trump’s success and decided that breaking all the rules is the path to victory. They have apparently decided that republican norms and democratic niceties are holding them back. At the very least, they believe that in order to fire up their base — and for the 2020 candidates like Booker and Brown, to win their votes in the primary — they need to prove themselves to be fighters above all else. Even when you lose, you keep fighting. Whether the law or the electorate is on your side, you keep fighting.
Only with such a no-holds-barred fighter, they believe, can they beat the Republicans’ own norm-breaker-in-chief, Donald Trump.
The ugly irony is that their very beef with Trump is that he doesn’t respect democratic norms. In their effort to beat him, they are becoming their worst caricature of him.
Democrats may not be terribly interested in our advice, but we feel confident warning them that they won’t beat Trump at his own destructive game. They have made their choice, but they play this way at their own risk.
