Donald Trump v. Stacey Abrams
Gracious concessions are the norm except when they're not.
In “Yes, Democrats and Media Are Hypocrites On Stacey Abrams and the Sanctity of Accepting Election Results,” Townhall political editor Guy Benson elaborates on an argument that was something of a throwaway line in a recent post of mine.
In all honesty, I haven’t read Townhall in years and only know of Benson second-hand because he’s very close friends with Mary Katharine Ham, who I mostly know these days through social media. But the piece showed up on the Memeorandum aggregator and, since I had recently had the same thought, it was interesting to see the argument fleshed out.
Additionally, it’s worth noting that Benson concedes in the piece that “a president peddling falsehoods and denying electoral realities is particularly unacceptable and damaging” and that “the 2020 presidential election is over, as far as I’m concerened. Joe Biden has won.”
So, what’s his argument?
Let’s discuss an exchange on CNN (below) over the weekend, in which my friend Mary Katharine Ham made the point that perhaps liberals and their media brethren might be taken more seriously in their indignant exasperation over Trump refusing to accept the apparent election results had they not spent the past two years lionizing Stacey Abrams. Abrams is a failed gubernatorial candidate who to this day has not conceded the race she lost in 2018. Like Trump, she’s bleated about an illegitimate process, offering dubious claims to bolster her alternative history. Conceding, she’s said, would acknowledge the fundamental fairness of the election, which she refuses to do. The facts are not on her side, including this one: The margin of her loss to Republican Brian Kemp in Georgia (54,723) was substantially larger than Joe Biden’s leads over Donald Trump in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin combined (45,043). If those three states had voted slightly differently, with all else equal, the electoral college would be deadlocked at 269.
That’s actually rather powerful. Indeed, because I am actually sympathetic to charges of Republican voter suppression, I had actually remembered the race as having been much closer than that. Is it conceivable that suppression was so effective that it provided that sort of margin?
WaPo’s Glenn Kessler asked precisely that question—“Did racially motivated voter suppression thwart Stacey Abrams?“—last October in response to a line from Pete Buttigieg at one of the Democratic Presidential debates. His fact check gets too far into the weeds in parsing racial motivation from pure partisanship but ultimately gets to these as the bases for the Abrams/Buttigieg claim:
- Kemp oversaw an aggressive effort to purge voters before the election, with nearly 700,000, or 10 percent, removed from the rolls in the year before the election. “For an estimated 107,000 of those people, their removal from the voter rolls was triggered not because they moved or died or went to prison, but rather because they had decided not to vote in prior elections,” according to a report by American Public Media.
- Kemp placed 53,000 voter registrations in electoral limbo in October, with the Associated Press estimating that 70 percent were black voters. The move was the result of an “exact match” policy in which even a single digit or a misplaced hyphen could derail the registration. No one knows how many of those voters turned up to vote.
- More than 200 polling places across the state were closed, primarily in poor and minority neighborhoods. Voters reported long lines, malfunctioning voting machines and other problems that delayed or thwarted voting in those areas. “Research shows that for every tenth of a mile that a polling station is removed from the black community (up to 4 miles), that black voter turnout declines by .5%,” said Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University who has written extensively on voter suppression. “Long lines cause people, whose paychecks are getting nibbled away waiting in the queue, to leave and not vote.” (The Atlanta Journal Constitution found that precinct closures and longer distances likely prevented an estimated 54,000 to 85,000 voters from casting ballots on Election Day.)
- A still-unexplained 4.2 percent undervote in the lieutenant governor’s race, especially prevalent in minority precincts, could indicate serious problems with paperless, touch-screen voting machines in those areas. (The undervote rate in the race was just 1 percent on mail-in or absentee paper ballots.) A federal judge in August ordered the state to have new voting machines in place by the 2020 primary election in March or have plans to provide voters with paper ballots, but advocacy groups have not been able to determine whether the machines properly recorded the governor’s race.
That’s rather damning, right? Way more than the 50,000 votes separating the two candidates could be accounted for by such an aggressive program. Alas, there are some rather strong countervailing points:
- Even if every provisional ballot not counted and every rejected absentee ballot had been awarded to Abrams, it would not have necessitated a runoff, much less overcome Abrams’s vote deficit.
- The 2018 turnout was far greater than any previous midterm, according to FiveThirtyEight, and more African Americans voted in 2018 than in 2016.
- Even if 54,000 to 84,000 had not voted because precinct closings, “Abrams would have had to have won between 82% and 100% of those additional votes to close the gap,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said.
- Georgia purges lots of voters because of death, moving or not voting in recent elections, but it also makes it very easy to register because of automatic voter registration (AVR) when people obtain driver’s licenses. Registration has grown 94 percent in Georgia because of automatic voter registration, according to the Brennan Center.
The fact that the Secretary of State, the chief election official, refused to recuse himself from overseeing an election in which he had such an obvious conflict of interest was shameful. But there’s just no reason to think Abrams would have made up 54,000 votes had he stepped aside.
Still, I think it’s fair to say that she had more basis for complaint about the outcome of her race than Trump did in his. While she’s overselling the degree of Republican malfeasance, there was in fact significant Republican malfeasance. By contrast, there’s simply no evidence of intentional malfeasance or misfeasance on the part of election officials in Joe Biden’s favor in the 2020 race. None.
Regardless, Benson’s next point is the one to which I alluded the other day:
Rather than recoiling in horror at her continued refusal to concede a race she lost, Abrams’ party and media cheering section has handsomely rewarded her behavior. Democrats elevated her stature by selecting her as their official responder to the subsequent State of the Union Address. Donors have showered her organizations and various initiatives with mounds of cash. She’s been given glossy, glowing treatment in an endless string of magazine covers and fawning interviews. She’s been feted by celebrities and turned into a Hollywood film producer. She’s been empowered, enriched and emboldened. Losing an election and refusing to concede it has made her famous and influential. Her shameless undermining of democracy has paid off in spades. Her profile has never been higher, to the point that she vaulted onto many analysts’ VP shortlists, having only held office as a state representative. But mentioning any of this — even as Abrams is being glorified by the news media as heroine for democracy, literally as that same news media is aghast by Trump’s lack of concession — is a bridge too far, apparently.
While Benson’s argument would be stronger without the tired liberal media tropes, he’s not wrong. With the possible exception of Beto O’Rourke, I can’t think of a previously-unknown candidate who raised their national profile so much in a loss. She was not only seriously touted as a Vice Presidential nominee despite never having held an office that would be considered traditionally qualifying, she has been given outsized credit for Biden’s win in Georgia. And has not, to this day, conceded that she lost.
To the extent one wishes to extol the virtues of the losing candidate making a gracious concession in order to heal the community and make it easier for the winner to get about the business of governing as a legitimate figure—and I do—then it is indeed hypocritical to praise Abrams’ steadfast refusal to do so while condemning Trump for the same thing.
The next pieces of Benson’s column are rather unfocused and clearly aimed at convincing a Trumpian base that the other side is even worse than they are. But he uses that to set up a reasonable point:
Hyper-partisanship, deepened by echo chambers and perverse incentives, are fueling a genuine crisis of legitimacy in our politics. The institutions and outcomes aren’t illegitimate. But sizable minorities of each ideological coalition are now conditioned by their leaders in various influential figures to disqualify and reject any political result they dislike. Losses are no longer merely frustrating or disappointing; they’re corrupt and illegitimate. This is poison — and yes, both sides are demonstrably culpable. A striking difference is that because the news media is overwhelmingly aligned with one side over the other, the in-crowd’s egregious behavior and excesses are routinely downplayed, ignored, and memory-holed, a la Stacey Abrams. This breeds resentment and justifications from the rival tribe to emulate dirty play. ‘Round and ’round we go, with few signs of slowing or stopping. Our body politic was unhealthy before this president took office, and will remain so after his departure. And one of the only things that partisans seem to agree on within this context is that the other side is worse.
From there, he argues that, while it’s fine for Trump to continue to pursue legitimate legal inquiries, the election is over, Biden should be allowed to begin the transition, and that Republicans should forthrightly acknowledge the outcome as both real and legitimate.
So Stacey should shut up about actual and significant Republican malfeasance, because, in the end, it is not unlikely she would have lost anyway?
Likewise, sports teams should not complain about corrupt refs if they play against a stronger team?
It doesn’t sound like you know how democracy is supposed to work.
Of course, that’s the rub, the transition is not happening and R’s won’t acknowledge reality and are actively trying to de-legitimatize Biden. The rest is bothsiderism and currying the approval of the reader.
Simple: she was telling the truth, Trump isn’t. It’s really not all that difficult a difference and I think James realizes that because he’s using an awful lot of words to make these things equivalent. And frankly what do readers care when he last read Townhall or dealt with Katherine Whosit?
@drj: Aside from his refusal to recuse himself, the main evidence of voter suppression was the purge from the registration rolls those who had not voted in several straight elections. There’s no really good reason to do that and it disproportionately impacts those who lack transportation or who have to take time off to register. But, as Kessler notes, it’s pretty easy to register in Georgia—indeed, it’s automatic for those who get drivers licenses.
At the end of the day, it simply wasn’t a close race. She lost and should indeed have conceded.
@Sleeping Dog: Again, Benson and I agree with that. But, if the principle is that losers should graciously concede once the outcome is clear, then Abrams should have done so. Still literally still hasn’t done so years after the fact.
It always impresses me how you can come up with “both sides do it” nonsense. Your post and the article you quote are premised on the idea that the post election behavior of Trump and Abrams were equivalent. They weren’t. You implicitly concede it but then dismiss it by claiming that Abrams wouldn’t have won anyway. No harm, no foul? Even assuming Abrams would not have won the governorship in the absence of massive voter suppression by Kemp (and there is absolutely no way of knowing this), you are claiming that Abrams should have conceded because ….reasons. Highlighting the massive voter suppression by not conceding is exactly what she should have done and did. Or are you claiming that as Head of Security Studies there was some risk of harm to national security of this country when Abrams refused to concede and then obstructed a peaceful transfer of power? Asking this question reveals how ridiculous this post is.
Aside the fact that Abrams had facts on her side, there’s a vast difference between a challenger and an incumbent not conceding. The challenger’s refusal to concede does not impede a transition, for example.
I am just piling on here, but Abrams refusing to concede to make a point about demonstrable – albeit perhaps not outcome determinative – voter suppression is not remotely the same as Trump refusing to concede to advance an ever more clearly baseless claim of voter fraud.
Yes, and the whole transition of legitimate government bit is a thing, too.
Big difference, James. Adams refusal to concede is a symbolic objection to systematic racial prejudice and voter suppression in Georgia. Her refusal to concede had no effect on Georgia’s incoming administration’s assuming the duties of governance. Trump’s refusal to concede has a substantial adverse effect on President Elect Biden and his administration’s ability to efficiently assume the burdens and responsibilities of assuming leadership. This is particularly damaging at a time when COVID is rampaging through the nation.
Well, there is that little business that not conceding on the part of the President seems to be a part of an effort to actually overturn the result of that election. I don’t recall anything like that when Ms Abrams made a point of not conceding.
Seems like a significant difference but that’s just me.
Did Abrams deny legally mandated funding and other resources to Kemp. Did she deny him critical briefings? Did she file nuisance law suits all over the state? Come on, James, if all Trump was doing was failing to make a concession, nobody would care.
It’s Murc’s law. All Republican sins are the inevitable and understandable consequences of some Democrat once doing something uncivil.
So Abrams is engaging in a protest – non-normative behavior intended to call attention to an injustices.
This is what Trump claims to be doing. We can, and should look more closely at this election, just as we did the situation in GA. We have been doing so, and not finding much. Nothing equivalent to a capricious purge of the voter rolls, and poor voting machines and long lines in minority neighborhoods.
AND, Abram’s refusal to concede has zero impact on the functioning of the GA government, since she was a challenger. This is kind of a big difference.
@James Joyner:
She should not concede even if it was a complete blowout. She, as well as each and every Georgia voter, has a right to free and fair elections. And neither Stacey nor Georgia voters got it.
Because only if elections are free and fair can we respect the outcome. Kemp didn’t just steal from Stacey. He stole from every single inhabitant of the state. In that sense, it’s simply irrelevant whether Stacey lost 49-51 or 10-90.
As I said earlier, you fail to understand how democracy works. It’s not only about the outcome, it’s also about process.
James, I think you are missing a very important distinction. Stacey Abrams is not be lionized for not conceding in her race. A formal concession from either Abrams or Trump is immaterial. The concession itself has no legal significance. What matters is the obstruction of the transition and the provable lies undermining faith in the foundations of our electoral system. Abrams didn’t deter Kemp from taking office and she has not lied about the corrupted system.
Abrams is being lionized for standing strong regarding the fact of significant Republican malfeasance, then getting busy doing something about it. She built her Fair Fight organization on the back of this significant Republican malfeasance and she deserves some credit for her part in turning Georgia blue for Biden.
From one of Dr. Joyner’s quoted passages:
Is she undermining democracy? Or is she pointing out genuine problems with the vote and working her ass off to remedy those in the future?
While I’ll acknowledge that the purging was capricious (and pretty standard fare for Republican states these days), I’d like to see authoritative numbers regarding how many of those voter registrations which were purged actually resulted in voters who wished to vote being otherwise unable to do so.
In other words, I know how many were purged, but that figure is only tangentially meaningful. I want to know how many of those who were purged subsequently tried to vote but were prevented from doing so.
@Gustopher:
Still you don’t get it. Dr. Joyner has found his way back to the GOP now that the nasty old man is going away. Pointing out genuine problems with the vote and working her ass off to remedy those problems in the future IS undermining democracy, in fact.
I’m sure Mitch, Lindsey, Marco, Ted, and Tom will all agree on that, too.
This is like a bad self-diagnosis. Stacey Abrams totally has the same illness as Donald Trump if you randomly ignore all the symptoms they do not have in common, and don’t count various diagnostic tests. Using this same rigorous approach, turns out I have leprosy.
Ignoring the impropriety, I think there is way too much focus on the word “concede” here.
It’s worth going back to reporting from 11/16/2018 and Abram’s speech:
The issue here, sadly, isn’t whether Trump will concede or not. The issue is his refusal (and those of key Republicans) to acknowledge the facts of this election. It’s further their refusal to accept that the law offers them no real viable “remedy” to that fact (as we continue to see in all of the rulings against these frivolous lawsuits).
Those points alone, from a government continuity standpoint, is the far larger and more problematic issue of the moment. And the reality that most likely this is the accepted strategy of the Republican Party in order to deny Biden a functional first 100 days/Honeymoon period (which is historically the period where Presidents can often get the most work done).
The more friction placed in the transition process, the more they impede Biden.
@mattbernius:
Shorter version: I don’t care anymore if Trump concedes. But it’s critical for him to *acknowledge* that Biden is President-elect and there are no real legal options to change that.
So while it’s in vouge to continue to throw shade on Abrams for whatever reason, the fact remains her early acknowledgement, which had come but this time in the 2018 process, puts miles between her and the villian in the White House.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
There’s something to this. Never Trumpers haven’t quite accepted the fact that they are Democrats now. There is no GOP to return to, there’s only Trump, because Trump is not an aberration, Trump is just a crudely honest Republican – racist, dishonest and cruel. Nothing has changed since Nixon and Reagan – without white resentment and male panic there is no GOP and there never was.
James is engaging in nostalgia, I suspect, forming a rosy mental picture of how it used to be and longing to go home. It won’t work because James is not racist, dishonest or cruel, and should never have been a Republican to begin with because Republicans are assholes, always have been assholes, always will be assholes. The only way back to the GOP is to become an asshole.
Italics in Joyner’s original post.
Also
Some people seem to be ignoring what Joyner actually said in favor of weird straw men like Joyner thinks she should shut up (which he never said) or that he thinks both sides are equivalent or he’s unable to tell the difference between the truth of Abrams accusations vs Trumps. He made a very limited point around the value of a concession to help move on from a contentious election. I think he’s wrong (primarily because of the excellent comments about the difference between an incumbent impeding a transition by refusing to concede compared to a challenger; and because one side has far more truth on its side which he EXPLICITLY acknowledged). However, if we don’t want to turn this site into a closed echo chamber, and want “reasonable conservatives” to debate (a desire frequently mentioned when dismissing some of the stupider trolls who show up), perhaps we should treat them with enough respect to not mis-state their positions or throw pointless accusations about his “real” motivations around?
@mattbernius:
Shorter version: I don’t even care whether Trump “acknowledges” that Biden is President-Elect. I just want him to get out of the way of the transition.
@Joe:
From what we have seen, the issue at hand is that the acknowledgment is apparently necessary for said transition to happen.
Sometimes, the myopia is so stark, I just can’t.
@Kathy:
Absolutely. I’m not suggesting otherwise. I’m just noting that the norm of graciously acknowledging the will of the voters has not been observed in either case.
@Scott F.:
I agree. But Benson makes the argument, to which I’m sympathetic, is that Abrams’ actions “undermin[ed] faith in the foundations of our electoral system.”
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
This repeated charge is growing beyond tiresome. I’ve been calling out Republicans for suppression tactics for more than a decade. I wrote specific posts condemning Kemp in real time. But, it turns out, he rather handily won an incredibly-high-turnout election that had near-historic levels of Black participation. I’m making a narrow case here about acknowledging the outcome of elections.
@Just Another Ex-Republican:
But that’s the point! You DON’T move on from a contentious election when there is clear-cut malfeasance. It undermines the entire point of having the election in the first place!
A concession doesn’t just have the function to let us know who the winner of an election is. More importantly, it reassures the losing side that the election was fair and that their side has an honest chance to come out on top the next time.
It would be a travesty had Abrams conceded.
@mattbernius: It looks to me like it’s another “norm” being violated by delaying the GSA signing, more than a legal requirement. Just a guess, but since the Electoral College vote hasn’t happened yet you could make an argument that there has been no illegal delay in terms of the transition. Even though we all know who will win the Electoral College and the “norm” has been to get the process going as soon as possible, I don’t think we formally have a President-elect until after the Electoral College vote.
@James Joyner:
But justly so!
Or should we simply ignore the fact that our faith in “the foundations of our electoral system” was, indeed, misplaced?
Ignorance is bliss and all that?
@drj: I’m simply objecting to a mis-statement of Joyner’s actual position and the subsequent attacks on him. You were the one who said that his position meant Abrams should just shut up when he said no such thing, and that he obviously doesn’t know how elections work. I think (he can speak for himself 🙂 and I’ve already said I’m on your side drj on this specific issue) that his position would be that she should concede the race on the grounds that there is no way to *prove* in a court of law that the disqualified voters would have swung the election to her, thus legally Kemp won and that the lack of a concession undermines faith in the overall system. He would argue (again, I think) that she can (and should) still speak up loudly and passionately about the vote suppression to try and stop it from happening again.
Again, I disagree with Joyner here. Whether Abrams conceded or not is purely symbolic, whereas Trump’s failure to do so is having a real impact on the transition. In addition, Abrams has significant evidence that there WAS malfeasance, even if it didn’t change the result this time, while Trump has pretty much nothing.
I just think Joyner is, in fact, a reasonable conservative and we should be able to disagree without mis-stating his position, accusing him of malice or not understanding how the system works, or any of the other personal BS. It’s happened in far too many threads recently.
And yet, @mattbernius, it is not. I understand that Trump has made it implicitly necessary, but all of this nonsense around Trump having the right (he clearly does) to pursue his legal claims is being used to cloud the simpler fact that pursuit of those claims should in no way impede starting the transition. If, through some Republican miracle, one or more of those claims turns the election around, you ask Biden for his keys back. It’s not like their is any credible claim that Biden and his people will become security threats.
@James Joyner:
Apparently I repeat drj, but it Abrams had a good faith basis to question those foundations. It’s absolutely her point. Trump and the Republicans have shown no good faith basis – a few weeks of lawsuits drive that point home. Calling the system into question for the basis of improving the system is categorically different than calling the system into question to advance one candidate’s self-interest.
@Joe:
I think we are talking past each other. Theoretically, I agree. Trump’s acknowledgment should not have any bearing on what the non-partisan GSA does. However, we are clearly seeing that what should be a hard rule is in fact a practice based on norms. And, once again, no one seems to be able to cope with what happens when this norm is being violated.
Which, once again, demonstrates the problem of relying on norms.
Also, another difference, Abrams didn’t fire officials who dared to say that the election was free and fair.
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-politics-elections-2481250f4e823dfb2a63d80569495c5c?utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=SocialFlow