Everything depended on Georgia. Republicans needed to keep just one of the two Senate seats up for election in order to check a Democrat-controlled House and put an end to the Biden administration’s most radical policies. Now, they will do neither because Democrats appear to have won both races in the Peach State. Sen.-elect Raphael Warnock has beaten Sen. Kelly Loeffler by nearly 100,000 votes, and Jon Ossoff appears to have narrowly defeated Sen. David Perdue.
Both Loeffler and Perdue were horrible candidates, but Loeffler was particularly bad. She could not have sounded more robotic or out of touch if she tried.
It did not help that some thousands of Republican voters across the state undoubtedly were demoralized by President Trump’s insistent claims that Georgia’s Republican officials had stolen the presidential election from him. It did not matter that what Trump was saying was not true — many Republicans believed him and sat out of one of the most consequential elections this year because they did not trust the state’s election process.
And now, President-elect Joe Biden will be free to cancel student loan debt, pass some sort of Green New Deal, repeal the Trump administration’s tax cuts, get rid of the Hyde Amendment, and maybe even add seats to the Supreme Court while he’s at it.
Republicans should take a lesson from their failure in Georgia. Many conservatives, myself included, have been warning the GOP for the past month that Trump’s baseless election fraud conspiracy theories would have a cost. It is one thing to demand an investigation into voting irregularities where the races were close. But once those investigations were completed and the courts ruled definitively and repeatedly against Trump’s campaign, Republicans should have stepped up and told Trump to stop.
Instead, hundreds of congressional Republicans continue to play along with Trump’s farce in an effort to remain in his good graces. Several state Republican parties, including the Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania GOPs, have indulged his worst fantasies. And they have done so knowing full well that the results will not change, that Biden will become president, and that much of what Trump is asking them to do defies constitutional governance.
Well, this is the cost. You cannot try to circumvent the democratic process and overturn the wishes of millions of voters and then expect them not to respond in turn.
This is the GOP’s reckoning. Republicans can wake up to the fact that a political party must stand for more than just one man, or they can follow Trump down the 2024 campaign trail and hope the enthusiasm he generated lasts for four more years. There’s a good chance it will — Trump isn’t going anywhere, and he’ll more than likely be the dominating force in Republican politics for quite some time.
But much of this depends on Republicans’ willingness to put up with him. Politicos such as Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are banking on Trump’s influence in the hopes that they will someday inherit it. But they forget that Trump became a political force not because he inherited his supporters, but because he created his own.
Trump’s one-sided loyalty and childish behavior have become debilitating for his party — Georgia is proof of that. This is why it is vital that Republicans who want a conservatism after Trump start disentangling themselves from the anchor weighing them down before Georgia’s failures become a pattern.
