Georgia Voting and the Jim Crow Lie

LEFT: Vice President Joe Biden delivers remarks in the Pentagon Auditorium, March 14, 2013. (DoD Photo By Glenn Fawcett) (Released)
RIGHT: Former Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams (Photo courtesy of the Georgia State House of Representatives)

Here’s the question: Was Georgia Suppressing the Vote?

Last January, President Biden had plenty to say about Georgia’s election rules:

Georgia’s election rules would “suppress your vote, to subvert our elections.” The state’s “Jim Crow 2.0” law was “insidious,” he said, urging his followers to “hate evil.” The solution, which congressional Democrats were then proposing, was a federal takeover of elections, which he said would be a victory of “democracy over autocracy, light overshadow, justice over injustice.”

It was one of the president’s more “reckless” speeches, writes Kimberley Strassel in the WSJ. That’s a high bar, she adds, for a speech that had hysterical overreaction to Georgia’s minor voting changes.

• Major League Baseball stripped Georgia of the All-Star Game
• the CEOs of Atlanta-headquartered Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola stumbled in with moral condemnations
• the Justice Department filed a lawsuit
• the media lost its wig

Georgia Republicans patiently explained that their reforms were designed to increase both ballot access and security. They were right, and lucky for Georgia voters, they stood firm.

Not Just Georgia

As Ms. Strassel points out, the numbers everywhere are humiliating. How could the press run a loop of stories extolling Georgia’s early numbers while it failed entirely to explain how these fit with the media’s prior insistence that Georgians were living in a new era of voter lockdown?

… outfits like the liberal Brennan Center, which spent the past two years wailing about states that passed laws “that will make it harder for Americans to vote.” That claim was already undercut by 2021 elections and 2022 primaries that featured high turnout.

The numbers more broadly highlight a growing political reality, continues Ms. Strassel:

Democrats erred last year in choosing to craft their midterm message around claims of GOP extremism. The end of abortion rights. Insurrection. Racism. Voter suppression. Mr. Biden in his January speech nuttily suggested the choice was between his party and Republicans who were the equivalent of “Bull Connor” or “Jefferson Davis.”

It isn’t only that polls show these issues are completely disconnected from American voters’ priorities. It’s that these wild claims were always obviously false. Americans are realizing that abortion rights aren’t going away. They understand that neither party has a monopoly on crazies. And they know access to the ballot is alive and well—since they are exercising it.

Democrats, writes Ms. Strassel, don’t have any answers to some real problems: “soaring inflation and energy prices, unsettling levels of crime and an unchecked border.”

And if the early-voting numbers suggest anything, a lot of voters may be coming out to register their disapproval.