Voters in Georgia go to the polls one more time today, to vote in two Senate run-off elections. If Democrats win both races, they take control of the Senate and will hold the White House and both Houses of Congress after January 20. If the Republican candidates hold one or both seats, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski become the most powerful people in America.
So, no pressure.
Rather than make a definite prediction about what’s going to happen, I’m going to go the Nate Silver route and break down the percentages. Unlike Nate Silver I’m relying on nothing more than my own intuition. (Or maybe that is how Silver does it. Who knows?)
Republicans hold both seats - 45% probability.
Despite Trump’s best efforts to find another 11,780 votes, Joe Biden won the Presidential election in Georgia. But it is still a Republican-leaning state, and Biden’s vote total undoubtedly included many disgruntled Republicans who’d had it with Trump but aren’t ready to give Democrats the car keys just yet.
A few weeks ago I would have said there was a better than 50% chance that the GOP would hold both seats. But with Trump carpet-bombing Georgia Republicans every day - and even tweeting that the entire run-off election is illegal and unconstitutional - he’s inadvertently made it that much more competitive.
Democrats win both seats - 25% probability.
The GOP and Democrats win one seat apiece - 30% probability.
Absolutely no one is talking about Georgia voters possibly splitting their ballots and electing one candidate from either party. And I think there’s a better chance of that happening than Democrats winning both elections.
Of the two Republican incumbents, I think Kelly Loeffler is more vulnerable, because no one seems to like her very much. She’s too “mainstream” and moderate for the Trump cult, but too far gone for Never-Trumpers. She doesn’t have the name recognition of David Purdue, son of a former state Governor, and a Republican actually elected to his Senate seat.
Leoffler is so disliked that even players on her own WNBA team are supporting her opponent. Throw in the fact that Loeffler beat Trump-train favorite Doug Collins in the “jungle primary,” further enraging the QAnon crowd, and you have a race that’s very winnable for Reverend Warnock.
By the way, all of this is being written before Trump’s pre-election rally on Monday night. Out of pure spite, he could tell people to boycott the election altogether.
Speaking of Georgia, yesterday I wrote that the release of the Trump-Raffensperger phone call recording won’t change anything. And right on cue, here’s David Purdue letting us know that he’s very, very angry that t̶h̶e̶ ̶P̶r̶e̶s̶i̶d̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶b̶l̶a̶t̶a̶n̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶t̶r̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶s̶t̶e̶a̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶e̶l̶e̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ Brad Raffensperger recorded and released the audio from the phone call in which the President is blatantly trying to steal the election:
Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) blasted the “disgusting” release of President Donald Trump’s call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger just days before his runoff election.
“I don’t think its really gonna affect our election,” Perdue said in a Sunday interview with Fox News’ Steve Hilton. “I’m still in shock that a member of the Republican Party would tape a sitting president and then leak that. That’s disgusting in my view.”
During his call with Trump, Raffensperger pushed back on several of the debunked voter fraud conspiracy theories the president has embraced since his defeat in the November election. Perdue took Trump’s side in the call, telling Hilton that Raffensperger had not provided answers about alleged election irregularities. He also re-upped his call for Raffensperger to resign.
And, of course, we all know how this guy would respond:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was in Georgia over the weekend to help Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue campaign to keep their seats in the Senate. While Cruz was out and about in the state, news broke of President Donald Trump attempting to extort the Republican Georgia secretary of state.
When asked about it, Cruz dismissed it as not important and likely a media distraction.
"I get the media wants to report all sorts of things and get everyone distracted by whatever else is going on," Cruz said.
I was going write something suitably nasty about America’s most loathsome Senator, but Allahpundit did it better than I could:
…He was the ultimate tea-party senator, the biggest star of a movement that never tired of lecturing the left about the Constitution and the country’s founding ideals. Now he’s the ringleader of a half-assed plot to wreck American democracy on behalf of a corrupt strongman. He’s the most contemptible fraud in a contemptible bunch, a politician singularly emblematic of his age. And as usual, he’s being too clever by half in the little schemes he hatches to advance his presidential ambitions. In 2016, his scheme was to play nice with Trump in hopes of inheriting Trump’s voters after Trump inevitably imploded. Didn’t work then, not going to work going forward.
[…]
Hawley was the first Republican in the Senate to declare that he’d object to the electoral college results on Wednesday, a move destined to earn him special gratitude from Trump before 2024. Cruz couldn’t stomach that. He’s eaten too much sh*t over the past four years in order to ingratiate himself to Trump voters to let Hawley elbow past him now as the MAGA heir apparent. At some point after the 2016 convention he arrived at a crossroads: Did his presidential ambitions matter so much to him that he was prepared to spend four years abasing himself before a man who’d insulted his wife? Because if so, if he was willing to incinerate his last bit of manhood in order to advance his career, he’d have to stick to that plan come what may. No sense going halfway. If that meant defending Trump on impeachment, fine. If that means supporting Trump’s half-assed coup attempt, fine. If that means defending a presidential order to the military to redo the election, well, he’ll just need to be fine with that too. There’s no point in spending four years doggedly passing every loyalty test thrown at you only to fail the big one in the end. (Right, Mike Pence?)
There’s no getting back his dignity at this point. He might as well ride this tiger until it either eats him or drops him off at the White House.
All I want from him and Hawley is honesty. The reason millions of Republicans have “concerns” about the election is because Trump has spent the past two months propagandizing at them with every bit of Internet conspiracy nuttery to float across his transom. Cruz and Hawley are willing to exploit that propaganda to try to overturn the election on Trump’s behalf, not because they believe it themselves but because they’re soulless careerist politicians who believe doing so will give them a leg up in the post-Trump GOP. They don’t have the stones to admit that so instead they’re hiding behind the defense used by all conspiracy cranks, that they’re “just asking questions.” …
You won’t find any Americans named “Cruz” twenty years from now. They will all have changed their surname to something less embarrassing, like “Dahmer.”
While we’re all distracted by Trump-related madness in the United States, Jack Ma - the founder of Alibaba.com and one of the wealthiest men in the world - has become the Shelly Miscavige of China:
According to an English transcript published by Hong Kong’s Apple Daily newspaper, Ma, who is personally worth $48.2 billion, hedged his speech carefully. He described himself as “a somewhat retired man … sharing the non-professional views of a non-professional” and conceded that his ideas might be “immature, inaccurate or even laughable.” Politely, he threw in a couple of quotes from China’s strongman President Xi Jinping. But as he began inviting the audience—described by Reuters as “the great and the good of China’s financial, regulatory and political establishment”—to consider the need for reform of the country’s financial system, he crossed a line.
He obliquely chided Chinese regulators for stifling innovation, and said that Chinese banks suffered from a “pawnshop mentality” given that banks, like the informal lenders of yore, still relied on a system of “pledges and collateral.” This wasn’t all bad, Ma granted. “In the old days,” he pointed out, “a pawnshop was an advanced idea. Had it not been for innovations such as pledges and collateral, there would be no financial institutions today, and the Chinese economy would not have developed over the past 40 years to such a point now.”
But the listening cadres were infuriated. On Nov. 2, Ma was summoned by Chinese authorities for questioning. The next day, the $37 billion IPO of Alibaba’s fintech arm Ant Financial—touted as a record-breaking offering—was nixed by China’s securities watchdog despite it earlier having received a green light. By late December, regulators had instructed Ant Group to restructure its operations to adhere to new anti-monopoly rules, shaving billions off its valuation.
Then, late last week, Ma was replaced by another Alibaba executive for the televised final episode of a business talent contest he had been helming, with his picture scrubbed from the gallery of judges. Ma has now not been seen in public for at least two months. An Alibaba spokeswoman declined to comment on his whereabouts when contacted by TIME.
In China, as in Russia, your lavish lifestyle - not to mention your life itself - is subject to the whims of the government. By contrast, in the United States, Jeff Bezos hasn’t mysteriously vanished even though his Washington Post keeps breaking embarrassing stories about Trump. (He’s off to the camps when AOC seizes power in 2035, though.)