It’s a good time to be a voter in Georgia. The state, with a solid-red state government and nine Republicans in its 14-member House delegation but two Democratic senators, flipped from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in 2020 and is a key presidential battleground once again. Voters are responding.
In spite of extensive damage from Hurricane Helene to some parts of the state, early voting is booming. As of Tuesday, with a week to go before Election Day, more than 3 million Georgians have voted already, over 2.8 million of them in person. At least 130,000 mail ballots have been requested, beyond the number already returned. As Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office reported on Monday, when the tally stood at 2.74 million, these have been record-breaking numbers compared with 1.98 million votes at the same point in 2020, 1.64 million in 2022, and 1.2 million in 2018. Just under 5 million people voted in Georgia in 2020 amid record-high turnout in the state; the early vote is already more than 60 percent of that figure. Even CNN described the surge as a “record number of early votes cast in Georgia as election gets underway in battleground state.”
My, how times have changed. In 2021, when Georgia passed a new voting law, Joe Biden described it as “Jim Crow on steroids.” Stacey Abrams (remember her?) wove it into her narrative of massive voter suppression in the state, even though 54.1 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in Georgia when she lost the governor’s race to Brian Kemp in 2018, up from 38.6 percent in the prior midterm election in 2014. Virtue-signaling corporations postured and threatened the state, and Major League Baseball even pulled the All-Star Game.
The constantly shifting justifications for the overheated rhetoric illustrated what became obvious when Georgians went to the polls in 2022 and delivered a thumping mandate for Kemp and Raffensperger: There was never anything to it. It was all a lie. A survey after the 2022 election found that 0 percent of black voters reported a bad experience voting. Democrats couldn’t even muster a court challenge or a press campaign against any of the primary or general-election outcomes in the state — and neither could Donald Trump, whose endorsees against Kemp, Raffensperger, and others were largely routed in the Republican primary. Even baseball announced that it will return the All-Star Game to Atlanta in 2025.
Biden hasn’t changed his rhetorical tune, and we don’t expect an apology anytime soon for the egregious campaign of falsehoods he led in 2021, abetted by his party, the press, and corporate America. But the relative silence about voting laws in Georgia this fall speaks volumes. As for the voters, they are having no trouble being heard.