“Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock shattered fundraising records by hauling in more than $100 million each in the past two months, significantly outraising GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the final stretch of the two Georgia Senate races that will decide control of the chamber next month,” Politico reports.
“The massive fundraising for the two Democrats was driven largely by small-dollar donations, continuing the pattern this year of the party’s Senate candidates tapping into online donors across the country to fund their challenger campaigns, although Democrats underperformed expectations in November despite the fundraising edge.”
Stacey Abrams tweets that 57,429 Georgians who already cast a ballot in the January 5th Senate runoffs did not vote at all in the presidential election. And “half or more” are people of color.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) told Fox & Friends he was unconcerned about the potential political fallout from President Trump’s attacks on him for refusing to help overturn the results of the presidential election.
Said Kemp: “As far as me getting primaried, I could care less about that right now. The biggest thing we all need to do, regardless of what you think about what’s going on in Georgia, we’ve got to support David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.”
Matthew Continetti: “Republican officials who have indulged or assisted in President Trump’s effort to nullify the 2020 election have many motivations: partisanship, conviction, delusion, cynicism, ambition, paranoia, fear. But all these reasons for participation in an antidemocratic power grab point to a single truth: For many, Mr. Trump is all that binds the Republican Party together.”
NBC News: “With Trump’s days in office dwindling, QAnon influencers have become increasingly restless and militant, urging him to #crosstherubicon, a reference to Julius Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon river after the Roman Senate explicitly told him not to, effectively kick-starting the Roman civil war and Caesar’s dictatorship.”
New York Times: “As Georgia prepares to hold special elections that will determine which party will control the U.S. Senate, the state has become the focus of a misinformation campaign that is aimed at discrediting the results of the November elections and convincing voters that Democrats are trying to steal the upcoming vote.”
“A small group of ‘superspreaders’ is responsible for the vast majority of that misinformation, according to new research by Avaaz, a global human rights group. Not only are those accounts responsible for most of the misinformation swirling around the vote, they are drowning out accurate reporting by mainstream media outlets on Facebook and Instagram.”
Related from Axios: “In 2020, nearly one-fifth (17%) of engagement among the top 100 news sources on social media came from sources that NewsGuard deems generally unreliable.”
“Several incoming House freshmen have inquired about carrying guns into the Capitol, leading a board overseeing congressional security to rethink a regulation banning members from packing heat under the dome,” Axios reports.
“Some Democratic members say expanded gun carrying on Capitol Hill would be a ‘provocation’ in light of the current political climate. Some Republicans consider it an expression of a citizen’s Second Amendment rights.”
“After an intense hunt by President Trump’s allies to surface voting irregularities in this year’s election, law enforcement agencies in six key swing states targeted by the president have found just a modest number of complaints that have merited investigation,” the Washington Post reports.
“So far, only a handful of cases have resulted in actual criminal charges alleging wrongdoing — some of them against Republican voters aiming to help Trump.”
“The Trump campaign shell company that helped hide $617 million in 2020 presidential campaign spending was almost exclusively a Trump family production, run in part by a top deputy to Eric Trump,” Business Insider reports.
“That Eric Trump deputy, attorney Alex Cannon, worked closely to run American Made Media Consultants with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump, and former campaign manager Brad Parscale. Together, they built a campaign shell company so powerful and opaque that key Trump campaign aides feared what they might uncover if they learned too much about its operations”
“In one instance, the Trump campaign paid an extra 2 percent fee on all ads aired from a firm tied to its chief strategist, Jason Miller, Trump advisors told Insider. “
“Dominion Voting Systems has sent letters to Fox News, as well as the right-wing media outlets Newsmax and One America News warning it may sue over the baseless conspiracy theory that the election technology company manipulated the results of the 2020 presidential election,” Business Insider reports.
“Dominion has also sent letters to individual hosts and right-wing media figures, including Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Maria Bartiromo, as well as Rush Limbaugh.”
A defamation law firm representing Dominion Voting Systems has sent letters to White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Rudy Giuliani instructing them to preserve all records related to the company at the center of Trump’s conspiracy theories and warning Giuliani that legal action is “imminent,” CNN reports.
“President Trump has instructed his top political advisers to begin monitoring potential 2022 GOP primary targets, as he lashes out at fellow Republicans whom he deems disloyal,” Politico reports.
“With less than a month until Trump leaves office, his team has begun mapping out what his post-White House political infrastructure will look like. Until now, the planning has centered on deploying resources to defeat Democrats in midterm races. But advisers are now also keeping tabs on Republican incumbents.”
“Trump in recent weeks has used his Twitter feed to attack Republicans for failing to get behind his unfounded claims the election was stolen with him. But his team is now taking more formal steps — such as tracking their public comments — with an eye toward possibly marshaling the president’s political operation to replace them with more Trump-friendly figures.”
Andrew Yang has filed paperwork to run for mayor of New York City, NBC New York reports.
“Yang’s filing has the potential to immediately upend a race that was shaping up as a contest between long-entrenched city politicians. It comes just days after a new poll giving him a slight lead among his fellow Democrats running for mayor.”
A new USA Today/Suffolk University Poll finds 50% of Americans now predict history will judge Donald Trump as a “failed” president.
The remaining are divided: 16% predict he will be seen as a great president, 13% as a good president and 16% as a fair president.
Nonetheless, most Republicans are ready to vote for Trump again. If he is the party’s nominee in 2024, 71% of Republicans say they would support him, and another 16% say they would consider it. Just 10% say they wouldn’t.
Max Boot: “The good news is that roughly two-thirds of the country inhabits the land of facts, where information comes from mainstream media. The bad news is that at least one-third live in a la-la-land of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news,’ where the most trusted sources of information are Fox News and Facebook — or, heaven help us, Newsmax and OAN. There is plenty of irrationality on the left, to be sure, but it now appears much more prevalent on the political right, where so many deny both climate change and the coming change of administrations.”
“There is a vast, unbridgeable chasm that separates the brilliant scientists who came up with the coronavirus vaccines and the ignoramuses who believe that the coronavirus was engineered by Bill Gates to profit from vaccinations, or that it was created as a bioweapon by China, or that it is spread by 5G cell towers, or that it doesn’t actually exist, or that its dangers are vastly exaggerated, or that masks are either useless or harmful in stopping its spread. This pandemic of misinformation helps explain why the United States is among the countries with the highest covid death rates in the world despite having the most sophisticated medical sector.”
“Now these two nations are on another collision course because of the resistance to taking the coronavirus vaccine.”
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