Newt Gingrich Says Trump Won Georgia, But Stacey Abrams Stole It ... Somehow!

Sure thing.

Newt Gingrich is in a rather awkward position right now.

On one hand, he absolutely wants to encourage people who think the election was stolen from Donald Trump. He wants them to believe this with their whole shriveled little hearts and souls, because he knows encouraging that kind of loyalty and a willingness to buy unbelievably stupid conspiracy theories is key to Republican success. On the other hand, odds are strong he knows the election wasn't actually stolen and realizes telling Republican voters that elections are hopelessly corrupt is likely to kill turnout. Indeed, MAGAlebrities like Lin Wood and Sidney Powell have been telling Republican voters they should just stay home and "boycott" the upcoming Georgia Senate runoffs.

So now, he and other Republicans who probably don't sincerely believe any of this nonsense have to figure out how to get Republicans to turn out on January 5 while simultaneously agreeing with them that Democrats were able to handily steal Trump's landslide.

On "Fox & Friends" this morning, after praising Kelly Loeffler's robotic debate performance last night, Gingrich went with the "Well, I believe Trump won Georgia because the Democrats were clever enough to steal it from him, but people have to turn out for this next election, which will also be rigged in favor of Democrats, but the key here is for there to be more votes for Republicans than Stacey Abrams can steal for Democrats" tack.

 He said:  

This election is going to come down to turnout. The objective fact is I believe Trump probably did actually carry Georgia. I believe that the election process is a mess. I really wish the governor would call a special session to clean it up. And Republicans simply have to turn out more votes than Stacey Abrams can steal. It's a very straightforward thing.

Not so much, really!

Even Fox's Steve Doocy was confused about how Stacey Abrams, a person who does not have the power to steal an election, stole the election. And when Gingrich tried to explain, he didn't really appear to understand it either. He just started talking about how there were far more absentee ballots accepted this time than in the last election, which was held when there was not a pandemic. He then claimed that there was no signature matching on absentee ballots in Georgia. There was, of course, and in fact 2,000 absentee ballots were voided because the signatures on the ballots didn't match the signatures on their registration forms.

Also, in a hypothetical scenario where Stacey Abrams did have the ability to steal votes, why would there be a limit on how many votes she could steal? And how would anyone know what that limit would be? Biden won Georgia by about 12,000 votes — a fact that two recounts did not change — so is 12,000 the limit?

One of the reasons Gingrich cited for his belief that the election was stolen for Biden in Georgia was that many of the ballots were only votes for president and not for any down-ballot races, which he claims just makes it easier to do "old-fashioned ballot stuffing." Though it does seem odd that Democrats would go through all that trouble to rig a presidential election and not bother to ensure control of the Senate. That's pretty important! It seems more likely a whole lot of people didn't actually care about anything electorally outside of getting Trump out of office.

Gingrich is trying his heart out, but maybe even he can't keep up with the overall wackiness of the Republican party. (He's obviously up to the challenge, so we'll see.) He's more than happy to use and exploit the True Believers, but at heart, he's just an old school Republican who wants to force women to have babies, tell people what kind of sex they're allowed to have and fuck over the poor — and at some point, they're gonna notice.

[ Media Matters ]

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