Fresh off her stunning second place victory in Georgia's US Senate election, Kelly Loeffler has come up with A PLAN to fix Georgia elections. And it is ... a PAC, of course.
Call it "Unfair Fight" Action Committee. Not because that's what Loeffler calls it — she'd prefer the name "Greater Georgia" — but because it is so transparently modeled on Stacey Abrams's Fair Fight group that registered hundreds of thousands of new voters for the 2020 election. And it's off to a rip-roaring start.
"Empty timeline?" Three whole likes? Yes, that is weird! And entirely predictable for someone who ran such an incompetent campaign after being gifted a Senate seat.
"It's the culmination of what I learned and what I saw firsthand in Georgia's biggest election in its history," Loeffler told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in her first interview since getting booted out of office on January 5. "You often learn more when you're not successful than when you are, and that's our starting point."
Which appears to have been the case with Abrams, who lost her 2018 race against Georgia's Governor Brian Kemp, and then flipped the whole damn state blue. But you can color us highly skeptical that Loeffler, a dilettante who never won an election in her life and was appointed to office because she was presumed to have the money to maintain it and the sense not to embarrass herself (nope and nope), can replicate the success of a career politician with a strong connection to the base of her party.
Loeffler's theory is that there are two million Georgians who would turn into reliable Republican voters if only someone would reach out and ask them. This seems wildly optimistic, since the state's entire population is only 11 million, and almost five million people turned out to vote last year. It's not clear where she plans to find another two million voters, all of them Republicans, in a state where a third of the population is Black and approximately 20 percent of the residents are under 18.
Loeffler's second big idea is to keep the party apparatus active even in years where there's no election.
"We always talk about wanting to have a big tent. We can't grow the tent if we take the tent down every two years," she told the AJC, while adding that her "tent" was meant to complement, not supplant, the state party. "Greater Georgia is designed to make sure that every campaign has access to a united resource that will help conservatives."
"Right now there is no answer on the Republican side to a comprehensive platform that provides the resources, the scale, the network, the message, the communications platform that we need for statewide success in 2022 and beyond," Loeffler said, without explaining exactly why she is the one to run such a platform. There's also the minor detail that outside conservative groups plowed $106 million into her race, compared to outside liberal spending of just $55 million on her opponent — so perhaps "resources" weren't the issue here. But no doubt the Georgia GOP appreciates Loeffler taking a break from palling around with Marjorie Taylor Greene and shouting "MARXIST" at random Black people to MBA-splain what they've been doing wrong and how it cost her the election.
The third "tenet" of Loeffler's PAC is to promote "transparency and uniformity" in elections, i.e. make it harder for Georgians to vote in hopes that fewer Black, brown, and poor people show up and vote for Democrats.
"We had unprecedented changes to our election laws in 2020 because of the pandemic. And we need to take a really hard look at the impact of those changes, and why it drove trust in our elections so far down," she told the AJC, refusing to acknowledge that "trust" might possibly have been eroded by her own party's shameless promotion of the Big Lie that non-existent electoral fraud deprived Trump of a win.
Georgia's Republican legislators are trying frantically to impose draconian voter ID requirements and cancel early voting after getting pummeled at the polls. Having blamed the state party for her loss in January, Loeffler will presumably take credit if Republicans manage to eke out a win in 2022 by dint of voter suppression. In the meantime, Loeffler will keep plugging away, pretending to be an IRL politician and threatening to run against Warnock in 2022.
"Frankly, I think what we have to do is the work that I'm doing right now. I don't know if any Republican can win if we don't shore up what we're doing around voter registration, engagement and election integrity," Loeffler said, keeping up her habit of saying the quiet part out loud. "We have to make sure that Georgia's voters feel like their voice is being heard. We have to grow the party. And we have to make sure that we have the infrastructure for Republicans so they compete on the ground."
To which Lauren Groh-Wargo, chief executive of Fair Fight Action, responds, "If Kelly Loeffler wants to spend even more of her money on losing causes, she is free to do so. And she is free to appropriately name her group 'Unfair Fight.'"
Politics ain't beanbag. And Kelly Loeffler ain't a real politician. But other than that, you're doing great, sweetie!
[ AJC ]
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That Mary Ann top ain't foolin' nobody, Kelly.
Actually, after Romney's defeat, the Republicans did a study that recommended that they try to "appeal to more people". They shitcanned it in favor on doubling down on racism and misogyny.