Jay Bookman, Georgia Recorder

Maybe what happened in Tuesday’s election was an anomaly. You could certainly make that case, as many Georgia Republicans have tried to do.

It was, after all, an odd-year election, with relatively low turnout, for two low-profile statewide races. So even if the resulting margins were spectacular – Democrats won two seats on the five-member Public Service Commission, both by 25 percentage points – maybe it was just an anomaly.

Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the red state of Georgia was another such anomaly, so rare and unusual that to this day, Donald Trump refuses to accept that it happened.

Raphael Warnock’s victory in a special election runoff in 2021, making him the first Black Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from the South, was also an anomaly, as was Sen. Jon Ossoff’s runoff win that year. Georgia hadn’t had a Democratic senator in almost 20 years, but suddenly we had two in the same year, so surely that too was just a fluke, the result of a rare confluence of political events at the national level that is unlikely to be repeated here in Georgia.

Of course, Warnock then won re-election in 2022. Was that too just an anomaly, a one-time event explained away by the GOP’s mistake in running Herschel Walker, a man who made his name on the football field, as its candidate? It’s not as if Georgia Republicans would ever repeat that unforced error, right? They would never again try to nominate someone else whose only qualification was football fame, someone like Derek Dooley?

No, they would never.

But anomalies are funny things. Considered in isolation, they might not mean much. But when you get a string of them, one anomaly after another, they cease to be anomalies at all. They become a trend.

We also have other anomalies to consider. For example, today we have a former Republican lieutenant governor who has switched parties and is now running for governor as a Democrat. That’s pretty rare, right? When was the last time a party-switcher actually ran for governor and won?

Well, Sonny Perdue did it in 2002. That was an anomaly, until Nathan Deal did it again in 2010. The anomalies became a trend.

We also have MAGA queen Marjorie Taylor Greene, representing Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, who is suddenly and loudly condemning her own party’s leadership. She is slamming it for its failure to reopen the government and for its failure to address a looming crisis in health insurance affordability. In a startling appearance this week on The View, where Greene was greeted warmly by the liberal hosts, she called the GOP’s performance “embarrassing.”

My mother, who lives out of state, is a big fan of The View.

“What the heck happened to that woman?” Mom asked me this week. “Did she get struck by lightning or something?”

“No, Mom. I think it was space lasers. Or maybe chemtrails.”

The easy, short-term conclusion from all this is that Democrats have momentum going into the 2026 midterms, both here in Georgia and nationwide. While I think that’s true, something deeper and more profound is also going on.

A generation is finally ceding power that it has clung to for too long, necessary because we face new problems that our elders do not comprehend. The political establishments of both parties are crumbling, and frustration with government has become so profound that Americans of all ideologies find themselves open to solutions that previous generations had rejected. In a recent YouGov poll, for example, just 13% of Americans said they approved of how Congress is performing, and that’s just not sustainable. Change is coming, and fast.

What we see happening in Georgia, then, is just a small part of what’s happening nationally, globally. Coalitions are breaking apart, and new ones will be forming. Old ways of understanding are being tossed aside. As structures and systems are torn down, new ones must rise to replace them.

Trump and MAGA offer one such alternative, one they apparently intend to impose by force if necessary. Tuesday’s results offer us hope that other alternatives will emerge and prove more viable, but in a world where everything seems an anomaly, who the hell knows.

She blew it.

Fani Willis blew it.

Give her credit for this much: The Fulton County district attorney did have the guts, the courage and the ambition to attempt to bring Donald Trump to justice for his role in trying to overthrow the 2020 election here in Georgia. For all we know, Willis might also have had the evidence needed to convict him and his co-defendants, both in the eyes of a jury and in the eyes of the nation.

But she never got the chance to present her case.

Why?

Because she blew it. Yes, she made a series of questionable calls, but she blew it by starting up a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor she hired to help her prosecute the case against Trump, and compounded it by stubbornly mishandling the subsequent scandal. In December, the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Willis as prosecutor in the case, ruling that the appearance of impropriety made it impossible for her to continue. Earlier this month, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected her appeal, ending Willis’ involvement and all but ending the case as well.

In fairness, those rulings come off less like reasoned legal opinions and more like attempts to make a controversial, politically awkward case go away. If so, it’s not an unreasonable tack to take.

But again, Willis has only herself to blame for being in that position in the first place. A local district attorney who is attempting to prosecute a former (and future) president on politically charged crimes had better do everything by the book, showing good judgment throughout, to have a decent chance at success. Even defenders of Willis have a hard time making the case that she met that standard.

When she filed the case against Trump and 18 other alleged co-conspirators, Willis did so under the state RICO, or racketeering conspiracy case. That decision guaranteed that what followed would be a complicated, far-flung case in which a lot could go wrong, especially against top-flight defense counsel attracted by a rich defendant and a crime-of-the-century case.

Indeed, in an unrelated RICO case involving the Atlanta rapper Young Thug and 27 co-defendants, Willis and her office did nothing to build confidence that they were capable of succeeding under such conditions. The Young Thug trial devolved into a carnival, the longest running trial in state history, and in the end most defendants went free after getting credit for time served.

Last November, Willis won re-election, in part because the Trump and Young Thug cases fell apart too late in the political calendar for major challengers to put a campaign together. She now has three-plus years to try to redeem her reputation and to hope that memories fade.

It’s also important to note that Willis launched her grand-jury investigation into Trump’s attempt to steal the election in February 2021, at a time when federal authorities were showing little stomach for doing so. It should not have been left to a local prosecutor to handle a case of such magnitude and consequence.

If she blew it, then Attorney General Merrick Garland and the federal Department of Justice blew it even worse.

Last fall, James McWhorter was summoned to appear before the DeKalb County Board of Elections to save his precious right to vote.

It wasn’t the first time he had been forced to do so.

“Years ago, I had obtained a traffic felony, I was stripped of my right to vote,” he explained to the board during a hearing. “So I did everything I needed to do to regain that right to vote. After 15 years, I gained a pardon for my felony.”

This time, under a mass voter-registration challenge orchestrated by conservative “voter integrity” activists, McWhorter had become one of thousands of Georgians who are being forced to show up at hearings around the state, often based on spurious grounds, to avoid having their voter registrations revoked.

McWhorter had originally registered to vote in 2008, after regaining his rights. As McWhorter later explained to Capital B News, he had come back home a few years earlier from serving in the Army in Operation Desert Storm. He suffered from post-traumatic stress, and had racked up three DUI convictions.

After serving his time, he also had no permanent address.

“I was displaced. I was homeless,” he told the board, but he still wanted to vote. So he used his place of employment, where he sometimes slept, as his mailing address. That’s how he had ended up in the crosshairs of activists looking to strip people of their voting rights, because that business, a barber shop, wasn’t zoned for residential use.

As McWhorter told a reporter, he had taken the time to show up for his hearing because his late grandmother had stressed the importance of the right to vote, given the struggle that black Americans had faced to win that right.

“They endured water hoses. They endured dogs. They endured heinous things,” McWhorter said. “They endured stories that I heard of dragging her grandfather out and putting him on a tree just for the right to say, ‘I would like this individual to represent me in my local, my state or my national elections.’”

That day, McWhorter was able to salvage his right to vote by re-registering at his now-permanent residential address. But in the weeks ahead, hundreds of thousands of other Georgia voters will probably face similar mass challenges to their eligibility, thanks to state laws adopted after the 2020 election giving activists the right to file an unlimited number of challenges to voter registrations. Election boards fear chaos in trying to handle that upsurge.

Unfortunately, those changes in state law are just part of the changed landscape since 2020, when Donald Trump and his supporters tried and failed to overturn the election results here in Georgia and in other swing states.

Consider what’s been done to the state Board of Elections. After the 2020 debacle, Georgia Republicans passed a law that removed Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as chair of the board and stripping him of his vote on the board. Later, it passed another law that removed him from the board altogether.

That was odd for a couple of reasons:

First, the state constitution gives Raffensperger, as secretary of state, primary responsibility for running elections. Cutting him off from the elections board makes it difficult to carry out that important duty. Second, the move reeks of punishment for Raffensperger having dared to run clean, fair elections and for standing by the results, refusing to “find” the 11,800 votes that Trump had demanded in that notorious phone call.

In addition to removing Raffensperger, Republicans in the Legislature have removed three other members of the five-member election board, all of whom had previously expressed confidence in the outcome of the 2020 election. They’ve been replaced with new appointees who have each expressed doubt that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, meaning that a new majority of the state board is unwilling to acknowledge Biden’s legitimacy.

Others who had played important roles in protecting the outcome of the 2020 election have also left the scene.

In 2020, then-Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan had refused to participate in the conspiracy to overturn Georgia’s election results. He has been replaced by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who was an active participant in that conspiracy.

In the House, then-Speaker David Ralston had also refused demands from Trump and others to push for a special legislative session to overturn the election. Ralston has since died, replaced by state Rep. Jon Burns. Burns has a moderate reputation but may lack the influence Ralston was able to wield to fend off demands the election be overturned.

Republicans have also worked to place election-doubters in local boards of election. A newly appointed GOP member of the Fulton County election board, for example, recently refused to certify the results of the 2024 primary, claiming she had vague concerns about process.

There are two ways to look at all these changes. One is that they are the minimum necessary to placate a Republican base still somehow convinced that the 2020 election was stolen. The second is that they have weakened the system that successfully stood up to pressure four years ago.

If we had actual evidence of vote fraud, such changes might be justified. We do not have that evidence. To the contrary, the biggest demonstrated threat to election integrity in Georgia is the willingness of some to overturn an election whose outcome they do not like, based on no evidence whatsoever.

And instead of bolstering the system’s ability to withstand a similar threat in 2024, state leaders have compromised those safeguards.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

A few days earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had firmly rejected a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas seeking the overthrow of election results in Georgia and several other states. That seemed to have been Donald Trump’s last, best hope of staying in office, and with that decision reality was setting in.

Over drinks, Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis apologized for the failure to Dan Scavino, Donald Trump’s social-media alter ego. But as Ellis later recounted the conversation to Fulton County prosecutors, an excited Scavino told her not to fret:

SCAVINO: “Well, we don’t care, and we’re not going to leave.”
ELLIS: “What do you mean?”
SCAVINO: “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.”
ELLIS: “It doesn’t quite work that way, you realize?”
SCAVINO: “We don’t care.”

Think about that: “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.”

The question is, how? How did they think they were going to pull that off?

By that time all the votes had been cast, counted and certified. Dozens of judges in dozens of courtrooms across the country had rejected legal challenges. Local, state and federal investigators, including firms hired by the Trump campaign, had all concluded there was no fraud to be found. After all that, how was it still possible to think that “The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances?”

Because a coup attempt was already underway.

The timing of the Ellis/Scavino conversation tells us a lot. Just the day before, on Dec. 18, 2020, Trump had sent out a tweet demanding that Gov. Brian Kemp call a special session of the General Assembly to overrule Georgia voters and hand Trump the state’s 16 electoral votes.

“So easy to do!” Trump had tweeted. “It will give us the state! MUST ACT NOW!”

But Kemp, with the agreement of House Speaker David Ralston and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, would not bow to that demand, would not “give (Trump) the state.”

Later that same day, a frustrated Trump and his co-conspirators met in a highly emotional, hours-long strategy session at the White House, a meeting that Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson later described as “unhinged.” Rudy Giuliani was there; Mike Flynn was there; Sidney Powell was there. With all those clowns you should expect a circus, and that’s what they got.

There had been screaming. Shouting. Insults. Accusations that those not willing to overturn the election on Trump’s behalf were guilty of treason. Accusations that those who did want to overturn the election were traitors.

It was “nuts,” as another participant described it under oath.

The meeting went on late into the night, with not much apparently decided. But in the early morning hours of the next day, at 1:42 a.m., Trump sent out a fateful tweet: “Big protest on Jan. 6,” it read. “Be there. Will be wild.”

With that the fuse had been lighted, and it still burns today.

Without the investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, we would not know of the Scavino conversation. Without the House Jan. 6 committee and special counsel Jack Smith, we would not have heard the damning first-hand accounts or read the incriminating email and message threads that have uncovered so many aspects of the coup attempt. I have no doubt that those sources still have much to teach us.

But we already know what matters. We already know that Trump has no respect for our democracy, no respect for the Constitution, that he would trash it at his next opportunity, and that next opportunity may come a year from now, in November 2024.

It is not an accusation to say that Trump would trash the Constitution. It is not a matter of opinion to be debated. It is plain fact, unassailable on any grounds. We know it to be true because Trump has told us it was true. A full two years after the election, after enough time had passed for passions to cool and with no evidence of fraud in hand, Trump was still demanding that he be reinstated as president, immediately.

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump tweeted in December 2022.

“… even those found in the Constitution.”

If put back into office by voters, Trump is promising retribution against all who have dared to oppose him, whom he degrades as “vermin.” He has said he will weaponize the Department of Justice and the Defense Department, filling them with appointees whose only loyalty is to Trump himself, not to the Constitution. Those convicted in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will be pardoned and get official apologies. Those in his first administration who attempted with mixed success to keep Trump’s worst instincts at bay, who might tell him “You can’t” or “You shouldn’t,” will be purged and replaced with those who will do his bidding without question.

I understand that there’s a lot of anger and distrust out there, directed both at our elected leaders and our fellow citizens. But I have to ask:

Is your anger at your fellow Americans so profound, so blinding, that you are willing to be an accomplice in the overthrow of our 250-year-old republic? “Freedom is always one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan once warned us, and once forfeited it is extremely difficult to regain.

Are we to be that generation, the generation that in a fit of pique tosses away the work and sacrifices of who came before us, and on behalf of a man like Trump?

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.