So much for the news media’s supposed golden era of truth-telling. It was nice while it supposedly lasted.
On Wednesday, during a Democratic primary debate in Atlanta, three U.S. senators promoted the lie that failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was robbed in the 2018 midterm elections.
Not a single debate moderator — not conspiracy enthusiast Rachel Maddow, not NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell, not NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker, and not Washington Post White House reporter Ashley Parker (she of “do you feel that your gaffes have overshadowed your foreign trip?!” fame) — pushed back on this persistent falsehood.
Democracy dies in darkness indeed.
“[If] we did something about gerrymandering, and we stopped the voting purges, and we did something significant about making sure we don’t have money in politics from the outside — Stacey Abrams would be governor of this state right now, and that’s what should have happened,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey said next in response to a question about whether there is room in the modern Democratic Party for pro-lifers, “This is a voting issue. This is a voter suppression issue. Right here in this great state of Georgia, it was the voter suppression, particularly of African-American communities, that prevented us from having a Governor Stacey Abrams right now.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said later in reference to the issue of voting rights that, “the American people understand that the political system we have today is corrupt.”
He added, “And it is not just voter suppression, which cost the Democratic Party a governorship here in this state, not just denying black people and people of color the right to vote, but we also have a system through Citizens United which allows billionaires to buy elections.”
The debate moderators did not so much as flinch in response to the spectacle of three Democratic candidates for president alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to deny Stacey Abrams the governor’s mansion.
Since we care about facts, let’s go through this one more time.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp won the 2018 gubernatorial election with 50.2% of the vote. He ran at the time as the Georgia secretary of state. Abrams won 48.8% of the vote, losing by approximately 54,723 votes. Notthat close of a loss. As I have written previously (because this stupid Abrams-was-robbed lie will not die): “Was turnout down because of voter suppression? No. Were there irregular or unusual purges of legitimate voters? No. These are urban legends, carefully planted before the election in order to delegitimize its result in advance.”
Also, as I have been saying since 2018:
[…]
Meanwhile, we have repeatedly debunked the associated conspiracy theories about vote suppression tactics. These conspiracy theories included then-Secretary of State Kemp’s supposed involvement in closing polling places (Democratic local officials made those calls to save money); supposedly excessive purges of former and deceased residents from voter rolls (a large number of purges came all at once because a long-running lawsuit over regular, smaller purges had just ended); and power cords that went missing at one busy polling place on election day (they were quickly found, and no one has ever credibly claimed they were stolen or hidden on purpose).
Yet, despite all of these data points, Democratic lawmakers and luminaries, including former 2020 candidate Beto O’Rourke, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, keep claiming, without evidence, that Abrams should have won the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. This is now an article of faith for Democrats and it seems no amount of evidence to the contrary will convince them otherwise (but maybe that is because they want to believe in it, as opposed to genuinely believing in it). They simply willed this false narrative into existence, facts be damned. Worse, the supposed gatekeepers of truth have done nothing to combat the lie. In fact, many reporters and commentators support it!
Hell, three U.S. senators repeated the Abrams lie Wednesday in front of four journalists and no one said “boo” about it.
