Georgia’s Primary Turnout by Marc A. Thiessen

Georgia’s Primary Turnout Shows Biden’s Falsehoods

by Marc A. thiessen

the Georgia gubernatorial primary was a defeat for former President Donald Trump, who failed in his effort to bring down Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.

But it was an even bigger defeat for President Joe Biden.

In January, Biden traveled to Atlanta, where he delivered a poisonous speech calling Georgia’s 2021 election law “Jim Crow 2.0.” Republicans were engaged in an effort “to suppress your vote, to subvert our elections,” Biden thundered. “That’s the kind of power you see in totalitarian states, not in democracies.” He compared Republicans to racists and traitors, accusing them of standing with George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis. He called them “enemies” of America, saying, “I will defend the right to vote, our democracy against all enemies – foreign and, yes, domestic.” The question before the American people was whether we “choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadows, justice over injustice,” Biden declared, saying this was “not hyperbole; this is a fact.”

Now we know what Biden said was scurrilously untrue. Georgia held its first primary on Tuesday under its new election law – and saw record turnout. Far from suppressing the vote, early voting came in at nearly triple Georgia’s 2018 level. Four years ago, just 299,347 cast early in-person ballots in the midterm primaries. This year, 857,401 Georgians cast in-person or absentee ballots during the state’s three-week early-voting period, according to the secretary of state’s office. That is 212% more than in 2020 – a presidential election year, which usually boosts turnout – when just 326,351 people cast early ballots. The Washington Post reports that the “record-breaking turnout is undercutting predictions that the Georgia Election Integrity Act of 2021 would lead to a falloff in voting.”

Biden claimed that Republicans were targeting Black voters. Well, according to National Review, which cited data from the Georgia secretary of state’s office, at least 102,056 more Black voters cast early ballots this year than in 2018 – a more than threefold increase. One 70-year-old Black retiree, Patsy Reid, told The Post that she was surprised she hadn’t encountered problems when she voted early. “I had heard that they were going to try to deter us in any way possible,” Reid said. “To go in there and vote as easily as I did and to be treated with the respect that I knew I deserved as an American citizen – I was really thrown back.”

She was thrown because of Biden’s falsehoods. The president said in March 2021 that the law “ends voting hours early.” The same week, he also said: “It’s sick. It’s sick.” In fact, the law added a second Saturday of early voting – and 4,081 people voted on that additional Saturday this year. It mandated the use of drop boxes for the first time and expanded the forms of acceptable voter identification to include a utility bill, bank statement, government check or paycheck, or even the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number. The net effect, The Post’s Fact Checker found last year, “was to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them.”

Biden owes Reid and the other people of Georgia an apology. So does Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, who moved the 2021 All-Star Game and MLB draft away from Atlanta in protest over the voting law. “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box,” he declared from a pinnacle of near-perfect ignorance. His decision is estimated to have cost local Atlanta businesses more than $100 million, with minority-owned businesses hit particularly hard. The blow came as many businesses were struggling to recover from pandemic lockdowns. In the wake of Georgia’s record turnout, they now might ask: Where do we go to get our All-Star Game revenue back?

It wasn’t just Biden. Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams called the law “racist” and last year accused Republicans of using “racial animus as a means of targeting the behaviors of certain voters to . . . limit their participation in elections.” After record numbers of non-White voters cast ballots, she is unapologetic, claiming this week that “increased turnout has nothing to do with suppression.” Please. Democrats said the whole point of suppression was to decrease turnout and stop Black people from casting ballots. Now they claim record Black turnout doesn’t matter?

So why did Biden and the Democrats demagogue the Georgia law? Perhaps it’s because Trump won 26% of the non-White vote in 2020 – the second-best showing for a Republican since 1976. After four years of branding the former president a bigot, his critics were shocked to see his support among Blacks and Latinos grow. So, Biden argued that Republicans were pushing “Jim Crow 2.0” in a pathetic attempt to drive these voters away from the GOP. The president who promised to put his “whole soul” into uniting the country instead sought to divide us for political gain – painting his Republican opponents as racist to gin up the African American vote for Democrats.

No wonder his approval rating has hit a record low.