When failed Senate candidate Robert “Beto” O’Rourke first jumped into the Democratic presidential race back in mid-March, the sky was the limit.
His fundraising haul in the first 24 hours was massive, major Obama fundraisers and former aides were lining up behind him, and he was receiving glowing press coverage.
But a funny thing happened not long after he announced. Interest from the press and liberal political analysts shifted to shiny new candidate and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is gay, and the four female candidates. Speculation about whether or not Joe Biden would enter the presidential race was at a fever pitch.
As all of this was happening, enthusiasm from Democratic voters for O’Rourke was also waning. After polling at 12% just a few days after he declared his candidacy, his numbers dropped to the single digits, and they haven’t recovered.
Beto’s response to losing the spotlight to minority candidates like Buttigieg and the ladies is to do what comes naturally to Democratic hopefuls in the primary season: Shamelessly pander to Democratic minority voters.
There are three main ways he’s tried to do this. One is to accuse President Trump of being a borderline Nazi who is “responsible” for the deaths of illegal immigrants at the border and the horrific mass shooting that took place in O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso, TX.
The second is to embrace an anti-America platform by way of asserting that our country was “founded on white supremacy.”
The third way is one he invokes often: the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was stolen from Democrat Stacey Abrams.
While Beto is not the only Democratic candidate for president who has kissed the Abrams ring by indulging in the fantasy that she would be governor had Brian Kemp not allegedly committed election fraud, he has perhaps embraced the myth more than the rest.
Two weeks after he said in early May he’d put Abrams in charge of combating voter suppression in an O’Rourke administration, he absurdly told “View” co-hosts that Abrams, who has steadfastly refused to concede the governor’s race and who tells anyone with a microphone that in reality she won it, had handled the “unfair, unlevel playing field” of the November 2018 election “with grace.”
He said this barely a month and a half after she complained to MSNBC that O’Rourke’s whiteness was a major factor in why he got so much favorable publicity in the aftermath of losing to Sen. Ted Cruz in November. This even though Abrams herself had also become a media/Democrat darling well before the November elections (she has remained so ever since).
Most recently, O’Rourke told a Massachusetts crowd during a campaign stop that Abrams would be governor if Brian Kemp hadn’t cheated to win:
“You know Brian Kemp was … did some very shady sh-t, basically and, you know, a lot of minorities, me included, who sent in an absentee ballot, my vote was not counted at the last midterm elections so what can you do about that?” [a rally attendee] asked.”Because of what you just described we have functionally disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans but for what you just described Stacey Abrams would be the governor of the state of Georgia right now,” O’Rourke said.”So we see this in every part of United States,” he continued. “Texas, until this last midterm election, ranked fiftieth in voter turnout. Not because we love our democracy less than you do here in Massachusetts, but because we were drawn that way. Not by accident, but by design. Based on your race and your ethnicity.”
Watch:
Fellow 2020 presidential candidate and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (MN) also got in on the act:
This falsehood has been debunked over and over by conservatives. But the liberal mainstream media won’t do their jobs by reminding Democrats that 1) they have no evidence to support their claims and 2) by their own standards they are undermining democracy by refusing to accept the results of an election.
Abrams herself has also said in the past that nominees who refuse to concede an election are dangerous:
As Mike LaChance noted back in June, affirming Abrams’ delusions has become a rite of passage of sorts for 2020 Democrats like Beto. But because the national press won’t call Beto and other Democrats out on the lie (instead, they do their own coddling of Abrams), this tactic is unlikely to be dropped anytime soon – if ever.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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