Georgia’s election integrity law, which the General Assembly passed in 2021 and strengthened in 2023, has been in the Democrats’ crosshairs for years. The Democrats have gone after Georgia even longer than that.
Let’s back up to before the 2021 law. In 2018, when now-Gov. Brian Kemp (R-Ga.) barely defeated Stacey “President of Earth” Abrams (D-I’m not a governor, but I play an elected leader on TV), the left went ballistic. Abrams refused to concede the race, and Democrats acted as if Kemp was an illegitimate governor. It was the Dems’ same old election-denial tune in a different key.
During the 2020 election, Democrats set up snack tables and handed out candidate-branded bottles of water to people waiting in long voting lines. The embarrassingly long lines combined with other shenanigans helped tint the Peach State blue in that election. Gun-shy Republican voters, affected in part by billboards from left-wing PACs suggesting that Democrats were out to steal the election, stayed home from the Jan. 2021 Senate runoff, further adding to the narrative that Georgia was a purple state ripe for Democrats to seize.
What happened in 2020 and early 2021 prompted the General Assembly to enact legislation to make it “easier to vote and harder to cheat,” in Kemp’s words. And on cue, the Democrats screamed to the rafters because the Peach State enacted a law that didn’t hand elections to the Dems on a silver platter.
Sore loser Abrams penned an op-ed in USA Today that led to Major League Baseball moving the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta. Of course, the Atlanta Braves got the best revenge by winning the World Series, and USA Today stealth-edited Abrams’ op-ed to remove the suggestion that MLB should punish Georgia and the businesses around Atlanta, many of which are minority-owned.
Related: Georgia Election Preview: The Lay of the Land in the Reddest 'Purple' State
The narrative was that securing Georgia’s elections somehow equated to racism. Predictably, politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris decried the legislation as “Jim Crow 2.0,” and corporations denounced the state. One progressive Christian organization even claimed that outlawing Democrats handing out partisan water bottles denies Christians the ability to “be a light unto the world.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren snidely called Kemp the “Republican who is sitting in Stacey Abrams’ chair” and said that he signed the law “to take Georgia back to Jim Crow.” (Hey, Fauxcahontas: [middle finger emoji redacted]!) By the way, Warren's new tribal name is Can Kiss My A**.
It didn’t take long for the Peach State to prove the Democrats wrong. Atlanta’s 2021 mayoral election saw increased turnout, and the 2022 midterm elections saw record minority turnout even as the GOP swept all but one statewide race. Last week’s election saw a record-shattering turnout — and Donald Trump won, proving that Georgia is redder than many people want to admit.
The left kept trying to lie and cheat in Georgia in 2024. Democrats circulated false propaganda about the state’s tax-related ballot questions, and campaign ads lied about the state’s protection of unborn babies to advance a radical pro-abortion agenda. A judge even shot down one metro Atlanta county’s eleventh-hour effort to illegally bring in more last-minute registered voters. Through it all, Trump still won, and the ballot questions passed, helping Georgians potentially save on their taxes.
The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby wrote on Tuesday:
In a speech from the White House Rose Garden last week, Biden called on the country to “bring down the temperature” after the intense and bitter presidential campaign. Biden has frequently called for an end to divisive rhetoric from Republicans and Donald Trump backers; rarely if ever has he called out those on his side of the aisle whose political language has been equally outrageous. Biden’s own words have been pretty incendiary at times. He said at one point that Trump was using “language you heard in Nazi Germany” and in an intemperate comment a week before the election, he described Trump supporters as “the only garbage I see floating out there.”
It may be too much to expect the president to retract anything he has said about Trump specifically. But if he sincerely wishes to cool the overheated atmosphere of the past few years, he might start by publicly taking back his slanders about Georgia’s election law. Nearly four years of data have now proven conclusively that there was no attempt to prevent Georgians from voting. The “Jim Crow” line of attack was sheer racial demagoguery with no basis in fact.
So why aren’t the Democrats apologizing for slandering the Peach State? Why aren’t we hearing mea culpas from the left? We know why: the left will try to use the same rhetoric in 2026, 2028, and on into eternity.
While conservative Georgians would love to hear apologies from the Democrats for their lies and rhetoric, we’re not holding our breath.
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