Former Senator Kelly Loeffler pictured in 2021. (Dustin Chambers/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Subscribe to The Nation
Subscribe now for only $2 a month!
Thank you for subscribing to The Nation’s weekly newsletter.
Thanks for signing up. For more information on The Nation, see our latest issue.
Subscribe to The Nation
Subscribe now for only $2 a month!
Support progressive journalism
The Nation is supported by readers: donate at least $10 to help us continue writing on the issues that matter.
Sign up for our wine club today.
Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?
Just last week, we learned that a Republican election commissioner from Wisconsin boasted about the party’s success in dampening black turnout, particularly in Milwaukee, last November. Thanks to the state GOP’s “well thought out, multi-faceted plan,” Commissioner Robert Spindell emailed colleagues, said voters there cast 37,000 fewer votes than in 2018, “with the largest decline occurring in the overwhelmingly black and Hispanic areas.” It could have cost Democrat Mandela Barnes a Senate seat.
Now comes the news that former Georgia GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler is bragging that her party reelected Governor Brian Kemp and scored major victories in the state legislature, at least in part because of the voter suppression of Senate Bill 202, the February 2021 law which severely restricted the state’s postal voting and voting through e-mail programs and limited other voting options. Loeffler doesn’t entirely claim that the bill stifled black votes — although it probably did: After the bill imposed restrictions on mail-in voting, mail-in ballots plummeted 81 percent as of 2020, and black voter turnout fell from the Halftime of 2018 back.
But Loeffler says the law did something just as important: It reassured conservative voters “disenfranchised” by the myth of Democratic voter fraud that their votes would count, thereby increasing white GOP turnout.
This is confirmation of what we knew all along: At best, SB 202 was a solution to problems that never existed and a cynical, dishonest “confirmation” for its base that Donald Trump’s big lie about voter fraud was true.
MORE FROM Joan Walsh
Rather than be mad at Trump for dampening Republican turnout, the Georgia GOP — and that includes widely praised Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who opposed Trump’s efforts to overturn Georgia results — played into his grievances , by giving Republican voters effective validation of Trump’s claims SB 202, who insists voting rules need to be changed to prevent fraud. So the 2020 election, hailed even by some in the Georgia GOP as the fairest and most accessible in the state’s history, instead became Exhibit A in the mythology of Republican voter fraud.
This is another perfect example of how even the comparative GOP “moderates” – Raffensperger was actively thwarting Trump; the less courageous Loeffler, at least, did not vote to block Biden’s presidency on January 6 – they have complicit in disrupting their own party and eroding American democracy. They still encourage Trump-inspired lies. Even those who do not boast of actively repressing non-white voters prefer the unfounded paranoia of their white base. It’s Jim Crow lite of the 21st century.
Remember, after the November 2020 election plunged Loeffler into a runoff with Rev. Raphael Warnock, she took up Trump’s “stolen election” cry. She called for Raffensperger’s resignation, which earned her a violent textlash from his wife Tricia. “I hold you personally responsible,” she said, “for anything that happens to any of my family members, my husband, my children, and my grandchildren.” The family did, in fact, receive death threats thanks to the false and dangerous allegations of voter fraud by Loeffler and other Georgia Republicans.
Current topic
Texts obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution show that Loeffler planned to join efforts by the congressional GOP to stop the Jan. 6 certification of Biden’s electoral college victory. Days before her runoff, she vowed she would “give President Trump and the American people the fair hearing they deserve and oppose the electoral college certification process.” But after they lost their race and witnessed the slaughter in the Capitol that day she reversed course. Still, after months of hype over stolen election lies, she is as to blame as anyone for the deluded voters who refused to vote in the runoff, the ones she says were “disenfranchised.” Of course, they were disenfranchised themselves because they had every opportunity to vote but chose not to.
In 2022, Loeffler poured millions into two groups focused on the 339,000 GOP voters who turned out in November 2020 but sat out the January 2021 runoff. She calls them “disenfranchised conservatives” who believed Trump’s stolen election lies. They cost Loeffler and fellow Republican senator David Perdue the runoff, sending Warnock and Jon Ossoff to Washington, DC instead. Last November, 142,000 of them returned to the ballot box.
“When they feel like their voice doesn’t count, it’s that sense of disenfranchisement,” she told the AJC. “We wanted to make sure people understood the work that the General Assembly did on Senate Bill 202 and that some of the concerns were addressed. And that turned out to be important.”
Indeed it did. Coddling white conservatives with lies and repressing black Democrats with onerous new legislation paid off well for Kemp in his race against Stacey Abrams. Interestingly, Loeffler didn’t address the Walker’s disastrous loss to Warnock in 2022, though she cynically directed “Women for Herschel.” That’s because her group didn’t compete in federal races, she said. Sure Kelly. Loeffler is reportedly considering a challenge for Ossoff in 2026.
For all of its success in voter suppression, the GOP is still hampered by its penchant for chasing scammers and charlatans like Walker and Dr. to nominate Mehmet Oz of Pennsylvania and vote for imposters like George Santos of New York. Let’s hope it’s still self-sabotage. But let’s never forget that even as they don’t brag about handicapping black voters, Republicans are working hard to increase a sense of grievance among the party’s conservative, mostly white base. Both are the only ways they win, so they get very good at it.
