Who would guess that the state of Georgia would become the new epicenter of the 2020 election? A deluge of national political interests have descended upon those sleepy southern hills, as each party fights for the votes that will determine control of the U.S. Senate.
Among those partisans is a group known as The Lincoln Project. This band of former Republican campaign managers and consultants worked to deny Republican Donald Trump a second term of office.
These Lincoln Project “Republicans” will now fight tooth and nail to give Democrats control of the Senate, House, and presidency all at once. If they succeed, this would remove the effective restraint of principled Republican opposition necessary in a two-party system. It will clear the path for the left to remake the country in its own image. The stakes could hardly be higher.
The Lincoln Project, Founded by Big-Money Democrats
The founders of the Lincoln Project are mostly former Republican strategists from Bush and McCain political campaigns long past. Steve Schmidt ran John McCain’s presidential bid; he and Reed Galen were also George W. Bush acolytes.
Rick Wilson was a media consultant for Republicans Rudy Giuliani and Marco Rubio. John Weaver worked for McCain and John Kasich. Mike Madrid directed the Republican Party’s Latino effort in California. George Conway bills himself as a conservative lawyer, though he is better known as the husband of Kelly Conway, who served in the Trump White House.
While the Lincoln Project claims to be a consortium of disenchanted Republicans, the $67 million they raised came from largely Democratic sources. The Lincoln Project also espouses Democratic policy positions and worked relentlessly to elect Democrats up and down the ticket. Early in the fall, the former editor of Weekly Standard magazine, Bill Kristol, threw in his support with the Lincoln Project. His super-PAC, Defending Democracy Together, became their top “dark money” contributor, using funds to target close races in swing states.
Although they raised a boatload of money in their bid to win independent-leaning men and suburban women, the jury is out on how many Republican voters they actually peeled away, especially in House and Senate races. David Sirota, a former senior advisor to Bernie Sanders, considers the Lincoln Project, on a statistical basis, “an epic failure.”
Marching Into Georgia
The group plans to use its war chest amassed from leftist sources to target Georgia voters in a major way. Tim Head, the executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, is a conservative strategist focused on voter education in Georgia. He expects the Lincoln Project will raise an additional $20 million to sway Georgia voters.
Media consultants get 15 percent of the money contributed. That’s a lot of cash to spread between a small number of people for less than two months of work. “These consultants are not the first political operatives to put a financial payday over principles and policies,” Head notes.
Gary Marx is a political consultant based in Atlanta who worked with members of the Lincoln Project on earlier presidential campaigns. Marx admits he can understand these guys lack affection for Trump. But to watch the Lincoln Project attack Republican senator hopefuls in Georgia, as well as their earlier efforts to unseat senators like Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell has been “the most disgusting betrayal of Republican senators and conservative values that I have seen,” Marx says.
Georgia Is Democrats’ Ticket to Unlimited National Control
A massive amount of money will pour into Georgia from the political left because the prize is so great. If Democrats win both of Georgia’s Senate seats, they will control committee chairmanships and judicial appointments. They will have the power to determine what sort of legislative agenda advances. As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer boldly proclaimed hours after several media outlets declared Biden winner of the presidential race, “Now we take Georgia, then we change America.”
Not so fast, say folks on the ground. Native Georgia voters are not enamored of the direction Democrat elites want to take the country. The roots of pro-life, pro-family, and conservative economic policy run deep in Georgia soil.
So what can groups like The Lincoln Project expect to find as they descend on Georgia? Head noted The Lincoln Project staff had established relationships with McCain supporters in Arizona. “But those sorts of relationships don’t exist here in Georgia,” he explains.
Without those built-in relationships, groups like The Lincoln Project must rely on widespread media campaigns. They will struggle to reach actual individual voters.
Big Spending Is No Guarantee of Results
The Georgia outcome will likely be driven by the sheer numbers of people who come out to vote. As long as the evangelical turnout in Georgia stays at roughly the same levels, Head believes these two Republican candidates have better than even chances of winning.
“We almost welcome the over-spending inclinations of left,” Head explains. Money pouring in drives up voter interest. More voters to the polls increases Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler’s chances of winning, even though it will be a fight to the draw.
The Lincoln Project has worked hard to cast themselves as disgruntled “Republicans” who have seen the light. The word betrayal does come to mind. Stalking the Georgia Senate race in hopes of turning all three branches of the government into Democrat strongholds reveals just how parochial and faithless their actual convictions always were. They are not patriots who can make a sanctimonious claim to serving the country’s best interests.
The Georgia races have become a “grassroots turnout war” that will determine the future of the U.S. Senate. It also presents the chance to defeat the Lincoln Project’s unmasked and misbegotten intention to give the left every lever of power in the U.S. government.
