Thanks to North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis and Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan winning their respective reelection battles last week, Republicans currently hold a 50-48 advantage in the battle for who controls the Senate.
The only races left to be decided are the two Georgia Senate runoff races that will take place on January 5th. Should incumbent Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue win, Republicans would have the upper hand in the Senate 52-48. Both of them losing would mean the tie-breaking vote goes to the vice president. If Joe Biden is certified next month as the winner in the presidential election, the tiebreaker in the Senate would be his vice presidential running mate Kamala Harris.
Obviously, both sides want to win these final two races badly. Unfortunately, some Democrats are so desperate to win that they’re urging supporters to do something that could potentially land them in court.
Last Monday during an appearance on Chris Cuomo’s CNN “Prime Time” program, liberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman encouraged voters to move to the state of Georgia specifically to cast a vote in the two Senate runoffs:
“You can sit back, Chris, and say, ‘Well it’s actually good if you have divided government.’ Everyone has skin in the game, OK? And then maybe they’ll want to cooperate more. But what is McConnell telling us? He’s not – he wants his – your scalp in the game, OK? That’s what he wants. He’s already telling us he’s going to try to do to Biden what he did to Obama.And what that means is, I hope – I hope everybody moves to Georgia, you know, in the next month or two, registers to vote, and votes for these two Democratic senators…”
Watch:
New York Magazine writer Eric Levitz tweeted – and then deleted – a message urging Democrats to move to Georgia temporarily in order to cast votes in the two races:
Failed 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang tweeted a few days after the election that he and his wife were “moving to Georgia” in order to help Democratic Senate nominees Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock win:
Yang clarified later that he was not planning on voting in the runoffs, but instead to help organize GOTV efforts. But his original tweet on moving to the state to “help” the candidates win is still up, which has led to a lot of confusion and which also prompted Georgia election and state officials to forcefully respond to the suggestions that people move to the state to tip the scales in the Senate runoffs.
Here’s what Georgia’s voting system manager Gabriel Sterling had to say during a Thursday presser:
“Let me be clear about this: If you want to move to Georgia and be a part of the No. 1 state in America to do business, we are happy to have you,” said Gabriel Sterling. “It’s great to have you come in. But if you are here for the sole sake of politics…. If you voted for Senate in one state and moved here to another state, I know that’s another thing that could potentially go before the courts because you’ve already cast a vote for a body that could be seated in January. Don’t game our system.”
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr was even more direct in letting people know what could happen if they moved to the state on a temporary basis to vote in the elections:
Georgia Republican Congressman Jody Hice discussed the calls from some Democrats for people move to the state to vote in a recent interview with Newsmax’s Sean Spicer:
The Georgia GOP is asking other state officials to get involved and monitor new voter registrations in Georgia, stating that the “Georgia legislature never intended for non-Georgians to dilute the voices of Georgians in our elections”:
People have until December 7th to register to vote in the runoffs.
Putting aside whether this is legal or illegal to do, the suggestion that people from out of state move to another temporarily just to vote is pretty despicable. It is longtime residents whose daily lives are directly impacted by the outcomes of these races, not the people who move there on a short-term basis. The people who have made a state their home should be the only ones who have a say in their elections, not outsiders who come into it for the sole purpose of manipulating races so their party can take control of the House or Senate.
In addition to Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s declaration that “Now we take Georgia, then we change America!”, AOC’s vow to help Georgia Democrats in any way she can, and Ossoff’s and Warnock’s troubling comments about the police, look for Georgia Republicans to also use the left’s calls for Democrats to move to the state as another powerful motivator to get Republicans to go to the polls.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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