Vice-President Kamala Harris campaign to Vote Georgia Blue injects optimism with Democrats

ATLANTA, Georgia echo report by Greg Bluestein published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

When Vice President Kamala Harris makes her first visit to Atlanta since she became a presidential candidate, she’ll encounter a political landscape that’s been transformed by President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, just over a week ago.

Key Democrats are no longer despondent about their chances in November against former President Donald Trump. Republicans are promising renewed energy of their own.

And Harris’ visit signals Georgia will be even more hotly contested than expected.

Among those expected to welcome the vice president is Stacey Abrams, who was twice unable to channel enthusiasm and energy around her campaigns for governor into a winning coalition.

And Harris will get a glimpse of the party’s potential reach. Former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, one of the most prominent Republicans to endorse Harris, has become a de facto spokesman for disaffected conservatives. He’s scheduled to be on hand during the Harris event.

The visit comes at a pivotal moment in her nascent presidential bid. Social media is exploding with sunny pro-Harris memes, and her campaign coffers are bursting with fresh donations. Aides report thousands of volunteers staffed dozens of Georgia events for Harris this weekend.

But she is also facing escalating attacks from Trump and his allies, along with mounting pressure to pick a running mate before an August 7th deadline.

In Georgia, Harris and her allies must fight to reassemble the fractious coalition of Black voters, independents, suburbanites and frustrated Republicans who propelled Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia in 2020.

And she must balance the tricky task of running for president on her shared record with Biden even while pushing to create her own policy platform that separates from the president’s agenda without conflicting with it.

Democrats are competing for Georgia with a vast campaign apparatus, boasting more than 170 staffers scattered throughout 24 offices. Harris spokesman Michael Tyler calls it the “largest in-state operation of any Democratic presidential campaign cycle ever.”

It’s fueled a guarded optimism that wasn’t there before. Gov. Roy Barnes, the last Democrat to hold Georgia’s highest office, acknowledged what few party leaders would say publicly a few weeks ago: The race in Georgia was tilting decisively toward Trump.

Former Democratic Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, who was doubtful about Democrats' chances of winning Georgia when President Joe Biden was still running for reelection, now says Vice President Kamala Harris has a "fighting chance" of winning the race for the White House. (Hyosub Shin/hshin@ajc.com)

“Initially, because of all the angst, if I were betting that I’d have to say that Trump was going to win,” he said Monday on “Politically Georgia.” Then came Biden’s withdrawal and Republican struggles to blunt what they call the “Harris honeymoon.”

Now, Barnes said he’s confident that Harris has more than a “fighting chance” to keep Georgia in the blue column.

His advice to her strategists: focus on younger Georgians, “quit worrying about angry old white men” and contrast her background as a prosecutor with Trump’s legal troubles.

“Because who’s on the other side? Someone convicted of 34 felonies and still has felony cases pending here in Georgia.”

A presidential ‘pathway’ - #VoteGeorgiaBlue

IMO, Project 2025 is a Republican guide to fascism

Senior Republicans also say Georgia is suddenly more competitive, but for different reasons.

Georgia GOP Chair Josh McKoon has crisscrossed the state for months warning conservatives not to get complacent, and he headlined a weekend event that drew more than 200 volunteers who trained to be poll watchers.

He said Harris’ ascension to the top of the ticket has “narrowed the electoral map considerably” by shifting the focus from the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to other battlegrounds.

Brad Hughes, from left, Jason Thompson and Josh McKoon, the chair of the Georgia Republican Party, pick up the state's delegate marker during the final day of 2024, Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Republicans came out of the convention feeling good about their chances of regaining the presidency, but McKoon has warned them not to get complacent. (Hyosub Shin / AJC)

More: “While President Biden had a plausible path to victory without Georgia, it seems virtually impossible for a Harris win without our state,” McKoon said. “So I would expect her to campaign in Georgia to try to establish a pathway.”

Polls throughout the past year have largely showed Trump with a lead over Biden, though the few that have been published since Harris became the presumptive nominee indicate the race has tightened.

Brian Robinson, a veteran GOP strategist who was one of then-Gov. Nathan Deal’s chief advisers, said Harris’ success might hinge on a factor that emerged in many of the polls: lagging Democratic support among Black men.

“I’m open-minded until I see data on that, but it’s my hunch this doesn’t move the needle with those voters,” he said. “I think it’s status quo.”

The 30-30 formula: At the center of Harris’ campaign argument in Georgia is support for expanded abortion rights, which she hopes will both galvanize party loyalists and middle-of-the-road voters two years after Trump’s appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court helped reverse Roe v. Wade.

Sonja Adcock, an Oconee County Democratic organizer, said she’s confident Harris will put forward a plan to reinstate abortion protections “so we don’t have to live in fear of basic human rights being taken away every transfer of power from one president to the next.”

She speaks of Harris as many stalwart supporters do — in lofty terms, as a ray of hope who can “turn the tide” against Trump. But veteran Democrats still warn the vice president faces an uphill battle.

Rick Dent was a top adviser to then-Gov. Zell Miller and other party officials, carving out a reputation as an unvarnished truth-teller. He said Democrats would be foolish to grow overconfident by metrics that indicate soaring Black turnout in Georgia.

“The math never changes. It’s the 30-30 rule — the only way a Democrat can win in the state of Georgia,” Dent said.

That rule posits that Democrats must win 30% of the white vote and Black voters must make up at least 30% of the overall turnout for the party to have a solid chance of prevailing.

“You have to energize the African American vote,” Dent said. “But if you don’t hit those thresholds of white voters, you’re not going to win Georgia.”

Harris’ campaign said it’s battling for voters on several fronts and has opened offices in often-overlooked parts of the state, including rural Jenkins and Washington counties.

Tyler, her spokesman, noted that her journey will mark 15 times that Harris has traveled to Georgia since becoming vice president. There will be more visits to come in the next few weeks, he added.

“We know the days ahead will be a marathon at a sprint’s pace,” he said.

Voting rights - "If the act of electing is not sacred, I don't know what is".

Echo report published in Religion News Service by Adelle M. Banks.

Stacey Abrams has become synonymous with voting accessibility and turnout.

In a sermon, Stacey Abrams supports Texas Democrats ‘in exile,’ preaches on voting rights:  ‘If the act of electing those to speak for us is not a sacred duty, I do not know what is,’ Abrams told a Washington DC church.

(RNS) — Former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams used a virtual Washington, D.C., pulpit to preach a message supporting efforts to push back on voting rights restrictions.

“If we want to ensure and endure, and enjoy the blessings of liberty, we cannot be part of denying those blessings to others,” the daughter of two retired United Methodist ministers said in a sermon Sunday (Aug. 8) at Foundry United Methodist Church. “We are all apostles, we are all called by the Lord’s grace to do his good. And if we do that good, justice will be won.”

“What Texas Democrats did is say that if you’re going to try to steal the voices of our people, we will not help you do this,” she said. “We have the responsibility sometimes to deny and defy convention. Because sometimes convention’s just wrong. Sometimes convention is simply in place because no one has had the temerity to say no.”

Abrams lost her 2018, bid for governor by 50,000 votes to Brian Kemp, then the state’s top elections official, and announced in her concession speech her founding of Fair Fight, a voter access organization.

Her sermon Sunday was based on the Apostle Paul, quoted in the New Testament Book of 1 Corinthians as saying “Am I not an apostle?” when he sought equal treatment. She compared his question to anti-slavery feminist Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech and her mother’s struggles against congregations that opposed clergywomen.

Abrams, a member of a United Methodist congregation in Georgia, noted she was speaking to a church in Washington, where there have long been calls for statehood due to D.C.’s lack of representation in Congress.

Abrams said she supports the Texas Democratic delegation “in exile,” who have left their state in an attempt to prevent limitations on voting from being passed by that state’s legislators. 

Moreover, Abrams compared them to her preacher mother, whom she recalled walking out of a church she was visiting that refused to allow the elder Abrams to be seated with other clergy because the host pastor did not recognize her call to ministry.

“You see, we have this opportunity, in this moment, if we fight for the right to vote, if we fight for fair districts, if we fight for states’ rights for the District of Columbia and the territories that have been held by this nation for far too long without full representation,” she said. “We have the opportunity to answer Paul’s nonrhetorical question.”

Though Abrams admitted she has far less experience preaching than her parents, she said she learned more than she might have planned about theology serving as her parents’ “official typist” when they wrote papers while attending Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.

“I know more about (Karl) Barth (1886-1968) and (Paul) Tillich (1886-1965); I actually know what an exegesis* should be, and I know what I am not,” she said, emphasizing her role as a guest speaker.

Abrams said her mother, the Rev. Carolyn Abrams, helped her to appreciate the sacredness of voting by pointing out that the remaining apostles, though handpicked by Jesus, voted for who should succeed Judas, who died after betraying him.

“If the act of replacing an apostle is not a sacred duty, if the act of electing those to speak for us is not a sacred duty, I do not know what is,” Abrams said Sunday. “For me it is a sacred responsibility because it is how we live out the call of our Lord for justice and for mercy.”

*Critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of scripture- "the task of biblical exegesis".

Republicans are now the Grim Old Reaper party!

Echo opinion written by Paul Krugman published in Arkansasonline.com, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette: 

Obviously, the Republican party has lost its way. Republicans have fallen and they cannot get up. 

Now the Grim Old Reaper party have become #Trumpzis

Krugman- Here's what we know about American politics: The Republican Party is stuck, probably irreversibly, in a doom loop of bizarro. If the Trump-incited Capitol insurrection didn't snap the party back to sanity--and it didn't--nothing will.

What isn't clear yet is who will end up facing doom. Will it be the GOP as a significant political force? Or will it be America as we know it? We don't know the answer. It depends a lot on how successful Republicans will be in suppressing votes.

About the bizarro: Even I had some lingering hope that the Republican establishment might try to end Trumpism. But such hopes died this week.

On Tuesday Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who has said that Donald Trump's role in fomenting the insurrection was impeachable, voted for a measure that would have declared a Trump trial unconstitutional because he's no longer in office. (Most constitutional scholars disagree.)

The GOP's national leadership, after briefly flirting with sense, has surrendered to the fantasies of the fringe. Cowardice rules.

And the fringe is consolidating its hold at the state level. 

Incredibly, the Arizona state GOP party censured the Republican governor for the sin of belatedly trying to contain the coronavirus.

 The Texas GOP has adopted the slogan "We are the storm," which is associated with QAnon, although the party denies it intended any link. Oregon Republicans have endorsed the completely baseless claim, contradicted by the rioters themselves, that the attack on the U.S. Capitol was a left-wing false flag operation.

How did this happen to what was once the party of Dwight Eisenhower? Political scientists argue that traditional forces of moderation have been weakened by factors like the nationalization of politics and the rise of partisan media, notably Fox News.
This opens the door to a process of self-reinforcing extremism (something that I've seen happen in a minor fashion within some academic subfields). As hard-liners gain power within a group, they drive out moderates. 

What remains of the group is even more extreme, which drives out even more moderates, and so on. A party starts out complaining that taxes are too high; after a while it begins claiming that climate change is a giant hoax; it ends up believing that all Democrats are Satanist pedophiles.

This process of radicalization began long before Donald Trump; it goes back at least to Newt Gingrich's takeover of Congress in 1994. But Trump's reign of corruption and lies, followed by his refusal to concede and his attempt to overturn the election results, brought it to a head.

And the cowardice of the Republican establishment has sealed the deal. One of America's two major political parties has parted ways with facts, logic and democracy, and it's not coming back.
What happens next? You might think that a party that goes off the deep end morally and intellectually would also find itself going off the deep end politically. And that has in fact happened in some states. Those fantasist Oregon Republicans, who have been shut out of power since 2013, seem to be going the way of their counterparts in California, a once-mighty party reduced to impotence in the face of a Democratic super-majority.

But it's not at all clear that this will happen at a national level. True, as Republicans have become more extreme, they have lost broad support; the GOP has won the popular vote for president only once since 1988, and 2004 was an outlier influenced by the lingering rally-around-the-flag effects of 9/11.

Given the unrepresentative nature of our electoral system, however, Republicans can achieve power even while losing the popular vote. A majority of voters rejected Trump in 2016, but he became president anyway, and came fairly close to pulling it out in 2020 despite a deficit of 7 million votes. The Senate is evenly divided, even though Democratic members represent 41 million more people than Republicans.

And the Republican response to electoral defeat isn't to change policies to win over voters; it is to try to rig the next election. Georgia has long been known for systematic suppression of Black voters; it took a remarkable organizing effort by Democrats, led by Stacey Abrams, to overcome that suppression and win the state's electoral votes and Senate seats.

So the Republicans who control the state are doubling down on disenfranchisement, with proposed new voter ID requirements and other measures to limit voting.

The bottom line is that we don't know whether we've earned more than a temporary reprieve. A president who tried to retain power despite losing an election has been foiled. But a party that buys into bizarre conspiracy theories and denies the legitimacy of its opposition isn't getting saner, and still has a good chance of taking complete power in four years.
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Paul Krugman, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics, writes for the New York Times.

UGH! On Thursday Kevin McCarthy (i.e., the dummy Charlie McCarthy's evil twin!) the House minority leader--who still hasn't conceded that Joe Biden legitimately won the presidency, but did declare that Trump "bears responsibility" for the attack on Congress--visited Mar-a-Lago, presumably to make amends.