Kemp has been on a roll lately, including tomorrow’s lifting of COVID restrictions. But I’d still prefer Jones.
(Obviously, I’d take either one in a heartbeat over Grimace.)
(Obviously, I’d take either one in a heartbeat over Grimace.)
Who would you rather have as GA Governor?
- Thread starter MassachusettsDawg
- Start date
I used to live there, no thanks
I've been very curious about this.....what about Vernon Jones makes him more appealing than Brian Kemp?
Tough choice. Kemp has done a good job as Guv except for the election fiasco. He and our esteemed sos got played by Miss Stacey. Dont know if I can overlook it. If I had to vote today it wood be Jones.
First and foremost, I think he has a better chance to beat Abrams than Kemp does. It will be easier to rile up young voters against Kemp than Abrams. No Trump on the ballot will also help. The fact that Jones has also held public office in DeKalb County is big, as they'll need to shave a few percentage points off their deficit in the metro ATL area to pull it out.
Second, Jones has a much better track record with election integrity. The changes Kemp made recently are good, but he didn't come through when he was needed most. That cost us at least one Senate seat, and likely both. The fact that Jones "stood in Trump's corner" means that the rural GA voters who did not show up for the runoff likely will for the gubernatorial race. It will be interesting to see if there's still some resentment for Kemp - enough to make them abstain from voting in the election again.
Third, even when he was a Democrat, Jones had some pretty reasonable policies. He was basically a centrist who will resonate with moderate and Independent voters from both parties. He has strong fiscal policy, he's a long-time 2A supporter, etc. It's nothing short of a miracle that someone like him came from the rathole that is DeKalb County.
I could go a little deeper on this, but I think the points stand. If Jones does decide to challenge, I'll keep an eye on what he's saying and see if that changes things.
Why? What has she ever done to think she can run the State? Big difference between Cochran Ga vs downtown Atlanta.
do you know how many discrimination lawsuits and other shenanigans he caused in dekalb?
I'm assuming you mean my latter point about costing us one or both Senate seats.
It's no secret that most Trump supporters felt betrayed by Kemp and Raffensberger for their poor response to the voter fraud allegations. Both Loeffler and Perdue didn't show enough support, either.
There were plenty of interviews with Trump voters leading up to the runoff who were open about their hesitance to vote for Perdue and Loeffler in the runoff as a result of the beliefs shared above. Take a look at basically any deep-red county in the state, and you'll see roughly a 10% drop in the vote totals from November to January.
The math adds up, as Perdue received 89.94% of the votes he had garnered in the November election (Ossoff, for reference, retained 95.6% of his). Had Perdue received the exact same rate as Ossoff, he wins by 85,000 votes.
I'm too lazy to run the numbers on Loeffler-Warnock, but even given the extra favorability to Warnock, I'd bet Loeffler wins by an easy 50,000 votes.
The bottom line is, both Senate seats were lost because enough red voters in the state were turned off by what they felt was inaction from Kemp and Raffensberger during the November election.
Your right but I would argue loeffler was one of the worst pics to be appointed I can ever remember ....a blonde millionaire trying to relate to country folk in Georgia
What exactly was the Governor supposed to do? He has very little authority over elections in the state. The votes were counted, several times. The former President lost and could never accept it, so he whined and complained and threw out all kinds of wild accusations with no real evidence to back it up and his most loyal sympathizers in the 9th and 14th took their cue and stayed home, in effect handing over the election in the process. Trump lost in November because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut on Twitter and sufficiently turned off suburban voters enough that they ticket split. He followed that up by blaming Kemp for two months for not doing things he had no power to do and created doubt in the process while he was going through his 5 stages of grief, which killed Loeffler and Perdue.
The former President turned off enough Georgia voters that it helped hand over the White House to a man that never even had to campaign for President and handed over two Senate seats to some of the most lackluster statewide candidates I have ever seen win an election. And somehow people are still deluded enough to think Brian Kemp is the problem?
I get that people are there, but I will never understand it.
That runs both ways. Maybe people in Atlanta are tired of rural interests that don't understand their concerns. She has a law degree from Yale, and has experience in government. She's qualified, and frankly the way the state is divided people are going to be unhappy either way. Frankly I'd rather see the power lie in metro Atlanta. While I don't live there, I think that would be best for the state. I hate rural and small town politics.
There are a number of things the governor could do. Problem is, he was up to his neck in the decision to spend $107 million on the Dominion System, and another $26 million on installation in a tight time frame, after deciding not to hire professionals to do the job. Trying to save money wound up costing another $19 million and the integrity of an election.
Brad Raffensperger hired a member of his staff, Gabriel Sterling, with NO training or experience in systems management or implementation, to manage installation of a complex statewide system with over 30,000 moving parts in a short time frame (to be ready for the 2020 primaries). Sterling had no staff and no organization, but set up a company consisting only of himself to serve as a contractor to the state at a cost of $200K annually. Raffensperger also had to hire a contractor to fulfill Sterling's regular duties during this time.
Because Sterling was unqualified and had zero experience, he contracted Dominion to handle all the work of the system implementation. Kemp and Raffensperger could have hired professionals to handle the implementation and ensure adequate controls were in place in local election offices to manage the new system. They did not. Opportunity lost.
Kemp could have and should have called a special session of the legislature to investigate problems with the election. Unlike the governor, the legislature has plenary power in elections. He refused to do so multiple times.
With the Secretary of State, Kemp could have compelled a full audit of the state's election. Recounts are a waste of time and money, and are generally intended to create the illusion of a thorough review, without actually doing the work. Recounts are very limited in scope, especially when those involved are instructed to disregard irregularities they observe. They are less useful when not properly supervised and observed. Lastly, recounts were done with many of the same people who worked on the election, including Dominion personnel. No one from Dominion should have touched anything after the certification of the machines, prior to the election.
He should have required an investigation of the voting system after it came to light that the SOS allowed Dominion to update voting software after certification of the machines. Nothing at all can be legally changed after certification. The machines must be sealed and left untouched until the election begins. That software update alone could have invalidated the entire election and exposed Raffensperger, Sterling, and possibly others to criminal charges. Kemp knew this and did nothing about it.
The governor should have prevented outside concerns to interfere with county election offices. The Secretary of State should have done the same. This could also have been assigned to a special session of the legislature, which the governor should have convened, but did not.
In short, the governor could have taken numerous meaningful steps to prevent or fix problems with the election and repair faith in the process, but worked to prevent those efforts at every turn, losing the trust of voters.
Awesome post
I'm not going to get into the Raffensberger stuff since there are too many layers to his problems, some of them his own doing, some of them due to the hand he was dealt by trying to run an election during COVID.
On the Governor though, calling the special session to investigate the election would have been pointless. The Secretary of State had the sole power to investigate inconsistencies and potential fraud in the voting process (which did happen and the GBI worked to help in that process). If a campaign (or anyone) has hard evidence of fraud in an election those matters are to be handled in court, which they were. All he could do was work with the legislature to fix some of the process problems for future elections, which they did with SB202.
All kinds of misinformation in here.
The SOS did not fully investigate fraud in the voting process. He avoided as much as he could, settled on recounts (pointless in modern voting) to appease, and cherry picked a small scale audit of "random" samples from a county not really disputed. Heck, after claiming the 2020 election was the most secure in history and denying any problems for months, all of a sudden he called out 3 counties this week for not properly documenting some ballots. That alone proves that a full audit was never done because we would have known about those 3 counties earlier.
Please provide resources showing the results of a full investigation if you believe one was conducted.
Also, people who claimed to have hard evidence haven't been heard in any court in GA. Cases keep getting thrown out, generally due to lack of standing. That's not being handled in court as far as challenging evidence is concerned. They never get to the point of presenting evidence.
Here's the kicker for me personally. The entire election process should undergo a full audit and review after every election as a matter of standard operating procedure. This is especially true now that our elections are handled by a private company using technology to tell us who won. This shouldn't be a matter for court battles in the first place. The goal should be integrity for the sake of integrity.
Elections were never meant to be a black box, but that's what they are now and that should scare everyone who values integrity. If you don't understand why, then you don't understand the power of computing in the modern world.
I don't say this to be condescending or insulting. Also notice that I don't call out anyone by name or suggest who the rightful winners should be. I'm strictly speaking to process. The SOS and Governor both failed the people of GA. They weren't alone.
Like I said, I wasn't touching on the SOS and how good he did or didn't do last cycle. I think he's got a well earned hard road ahead to re-election in 2022 (assuming he even tries to run again).
My focus is more on the Governor and his perceived lack of action. My point in all of this is that, by law, he and the legislature are pretty powerless to do much in terms of a current election. They can change laws and processes for future elections, but they can't override anything in an ongoing election. I do agree that a full audit every two years is a great idea.
Understood, but part of my response was to address the claim that a full audit had occurred already.
As for Kemp, let's not forget that this saga started before the 2020 election. Kemp was SoS when the seeds were planted.
I personally didn't like his voter purge in 2017. Yes, the voter rolls need to be current, but the methods have been suspect under Kemp's watch. Frankly, I don't care if a person chooses to go 40 years without voting, if they are legally eligible and registered, their registration status shouldn't be touched.
If we're to purge voters who have moved out of state or died, it's not difficult to search other government records to build that list. One could argue that in cases of death, the government should have a standard decommissioning process that closes the books on the deceased for any living matter. But that's another story.
I will say that it's strange Kemp would take actions to ruffle feathers to create the modern voter suppression narrative then bring in a new voting platform on his way out the door only for that platform to become the center of controversy all over the world.
It's almost like a game of "Good Cop, Bad Cop" is being played with Kemp and Abrams on the same team.
The problem there is that it wasn't technically "his" voter purge in 2017. Yes, his office facilitated the removal of all of those people, but as a function of Georgia law and, as Secretary of State, part of his duty. I think 6-7 years or whatever it was at the time is too short of a period (I believe that was pushed to 9 or 10 after he took over as Governor), but without some kind of centralized, federal system (which I'm not 100% sure I would be for anyway) I don't know what can be done. We've seen too many instances over the years of dead people voting to just leave the voting rolls completely untended. Could there be a better way to handle this process like you mentioned, sure? One that doesn't involve a partisanly elected state official would be nice. But absent the legislature coming up with something we are where we are.
So basically no matter what position Kemp holds, there's nothing he could do about stuff he did and did not do.
Must be nice to be Kemp!
On the specific topics you mention, yeah. As Governor and Secretary of State a person in those positions have certain leeways and certain areas where they cannot go. I'm not sure any of us would benefit or want a partisan legislature/Governor coming together with the power to investigate/overrule an election result they do not like or a Secretary of State being able to pick and choose what laws he follows on maintaining the voter roll. This kind of stuff is specifically spelled out for a reason.
Some of the ideas you had are good. But that's something to take up with your State Rep and Senator for the next session.
