On CNN Monday, POLITICO chief political correspondent Tim Alberta laid out why so many Republicans have refused to acknowledge Joe Biden as president-elect: they are terrified of anger and reprisal from President Donald Trump's supporters.
"We've only got a handful, a small handful of prominent Republican officials and leaders who have actually come out and acknowledged the election result, and have even used the phrase 'President-elect Joe Biden,' and that speaks volumes in and of itself," said Alberta. "What's interesting is that the Republican Party, for the past decade, has been the party of hard truths, and has been sort of propped up on this mantle of saying that they are the ones willing to have the hard conversations with the American people about the debt and the deficit and the spending and all these things, and yet this is a pretty good example of how fundamentally afraid Republican elected officials are of their own supporters back home."
"You can see that with their unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of this situation, which is that the president has lost, that Joe Biden has won ... and Kamala Harris is the vice president-elect," said Alberta. "That is a simple observation that could be made by anyone who has spent ten minutes in electoral politics, much less if you are a United States senator, United States congressman, and yet they are unwilling to observe it, and I don't think it's because they're afraid of Trump. I think it's because they're afraid of his supporters."
"If you've watched over the last couple of days, even conservative radio hosts, who have come out and acknowledged that the president is not likely to surmount these numbers, they're losing listeners. They're getting killed on social media," noted Alberta. "So it's just a risk that most of these Republicans feel like they can't take with their own supporters back home."
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