Lin Wood has encouraged Georgia Republicans to stay home for the Senate run-offs to punish the GOP establishment for “doing nothing” to aid Trump.
Lin Wood has encouraged Georgia Republicans to stay home for the Senate run-offs to punish the GOP establishment for "doing nothing" to aid Trump.
Top Georgia Republicans are fighting to hold their coalition together in the lead-up to January’s runoff Senate elections after some prominent activists backing President Donald Trump have started raising their voices, publicly calling on voters to boycott the races.
Over the weekend, pro-Trump lawyer L. Lin Wood posted a series of tweets alleging that Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are “doing little or nothing” to support efforts to fix the presidential election that Wood believes is “unlawful.”
If Georgia voters want Loeffler and Perdue “out of their basements to demand that action must be taken,” Wood wrote, they should “threaten to withhold your votes & money.”
Politicians love votes & money (not necessarily in that order).
Want to get @SenLoeffler & @sendavidperdue out of their basements to demand that action must be taken to fix steal of the 11/3 GA election?
Threaten to withhold your votes & money.
Demand that they represent you.
— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) November 21, 2020
To maintain control of the U.S. Senate, Republicans need to win at least one of the two races pitting Loeffler and Perdue against Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, respectively.
Wood, who has established a reputation as a fighter in the right wing’s culture wars, is not alone in his calls for pro-Trump voters to sit out the race.
Ali Alexander, a pro-Trump activist who has organized “Stop the Steal” protests around the country, including in Georgia with InfoWars host Alex Jones, shares Wood’s sentiments.
Alexander has repeatedly threatened to sabotage the Senate runoffs if the Georgia GOP doesn’t call a special legislative session to tighten voting rules ahead of the election — a position Gov. Brian Kemp and the state’s top Republicans have so far rejected.
https://t.co/eWHk0Wbevl patriots take the Georgia Gold Dome! 🇺🇸 #StopTheSteal https://t.co/0UuzcmgqPi
— Ali 🟧 #StopTheSteal (@ali) November 18, 2020
The anxiety hit such a point that even Donald Trump Jr. stepped in Monday to urge unity.
I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote for @KLoeffler and @PerdueSenate.
That is NONSENSE.
IGNORE those people.
We need ALL of our people coming out to vote for Kelly & David.#MAGA #GASEN
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 23, 2020
The threats of boycott are putting the state’s top Republican leaders in a bit of a pickle, as they face a turnout-oriented race that will require the support of Trump’s populist and sometimes conspiratorial base, as well as traditional, moderate Republicans who are skeptical of the more outlandish claims by the president and some of his supporters.
They’re also wary of getting dragged into intra-party mudwrestling matches with folks like Wood, who have large followings among Trump’s most fervent backers.
Attempts to reach Wood on the phone, and via email and Twitter were not successful.
“I understand the concerns of the president’s most passionate supporters and we share them,” David Shafer, the chair of the Georgia GOP, wrote in a text message. “We are fighting to make sure that every lawful vote is counted and every unlawful vote rejected. In the end, the stakes are too high for us not to come together.”
Georgia Republicans who spoke to National Review said there is little room for error in the two races, which are both expected to be close. If even a small percentage of Trump’s followers boycott the races, they could swing blue, handing a one-seat Senate majority to Democrat Chuck Schumer.
“It’s never helpful when any Republican suggests that Republicans might stay home for the most important special election in our state’s history,” said Chip Lake, a local Republican strategist, who backed Loeffler’s opponent, U.S. Representative Doug Collins, in November.
Wood, 68, rose to fame in the mid 1990s representing Richard Jewell, the security guard falsely accused of planting a bomb at the Atlanta Summer Olympics.
A devout Christian, Wood has only recently turned his attention to Republican politics and conservative cultural battles. He represents Kenosha shooting suspect Kyle Rittenhouse, and served as a lawyer for Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School student who was vilified in the mainstream media after video of a confrontation between Native American and March For Life activists went viral in 2019.
Wood is now working with former Trump attorney Sidney Powell to pursue claims that the Georgia presidential election was stolen from Trump. They have also accused Kemp and other Republicans of complicity in the scheme. So far, Powell and Wood have nothing to show for their sweeping claims, but they claim they are filing a new lawsuit Wednesday.
Wood has recently taken to suggesting that their failure in challenging the outcome stems from a lack of support from establishment Republican figures, who should be punished for their cowardice with a loss of their Senate majority.
Alexander, who endorsed Collins over Loeffler in April, is calling for election reform in Georgia because he believes the November election was “rigged.” He said Sunday in a tweet to his more than 200,000 followers that his people aren’t voting for Loeffler or Perdue “unless there’s a press release, from each of them, demanding a Special Session of the Georgia State Legislature.”
“We’re not voting for you. We’re not voting for you. I will have 100,000 Republicans not vote for you on January 5, if I don’t get what we said we want, then we’re not voting for you,” he continued in a subsequent video message. “Because if our votes don’t count, and there’s no oversight anyway, why should we vote?”
Alexander’s claims drew pushback from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the brash Republican congresswoman-elect from Georgia’s 14th district who is widely known for having endorsed the QAnon conspiracy. Greene, who is also represented by Wood, campaigned alongside Loeffler throughout the 2020 election, and tried to strike an appeasing middle ground in a statement provided to National Review.
“Georgia Republicans are fighting like hell for President Trump AND for Kelly and David,” she said. “I’m leading to fight [sic] for election integrity and security by calling on the General Assembly to hold a special session to fix the problems with our elections. Georgia is a deep red state and Republicans will win.”
John Burke, a spokesman for the Perdue campaign, told National Review that the senator “is proud to have the endorsement of President Trump and the entire Republican Party behind him and Senator Loeffler.”
“We are the last line of defense to stop Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi from having total control of Congress,” he said. “Republicans must turn out to vote so we can stop radical socialists from destroying our country as we know it.”
Attempts to reach Loeffler’s campaign were unsuccessful.
In an apparent attempt to appease Alexander and others, both Loeffler and Perdue have called for the resignation of Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s embattled Republican secretary of state, over his handling of the election. “The President, Senator Perdue and Senator Loeffler are completely aligned,” Shafer wrote.
Erick Erickson, a longtime conservative blogger and radio host in Georgia, said that in spite of the media noise surrounding Raffensperger, who has pushed back on the Trump campaign’s claims, the fact that Loeffler and Perdue chose to disavow him will not drag them down in the race.
“I really don’t think it’s a big issue with Raffensperger — he was never anybody’s guy,” Erickson explained, detailing how the wealthy businessman “outspent everybody” en route to his 2018 win.
“Everybody in the state within the Republican Party was really divided between two different people, and neither of those guys won — Raffensperger was a real surprise winning,” he explained. “Even his colleagues in the statehouse were shocked he won. So he doesn’t have a huge base of support, so he’s not somebody who can really turn on or turn off anybody.”
Amy Kremer, chair of Women for America First and a prominent Trump supporter, said she still believes there is “funny business going on here in Georgia” regarding the election results. She wants the legal teams investigating the election, including Wood’s, to continue their work.
“At the same time, we have to elect Perdue and Loeffler and can’t allow the Democrats to take back the U.S. Senate,” she said. “There’s too much at stake.”
Kremer said she thinks a lot of the people calling for a boycott of the election “are simply trying to make a name for themselves.” She thinks Georgia voters should ignore them, adding that she doesn’t know if those suggesting a boycott have enough pull to affect the outcome of the election anyway. But, she said, Trump certainly does.
“I think Trump’s supporters are loyal to the president, and if the president encourages people to go out and vote for Loeffler and Perdue, they will. I think that’s where they’re going to listen,” said Kremer, who’s planning a pro-Trump bus tour from South Florida to Washington, D.C.
Erickson did express surprise that the president had not yet announced any rallies in Georgia, especially considering how closely Perdue and Loeffler have voted with him.
“That he’s not yet coming down to rally the troops is kind of shocking to me, and I know I’m not the only one to think it,” he said. “I realize there are some people out there saying, ‘Well they don’t want him to come down, because they don’t want to inspire Democrats to turnout.’ That’s a bunch of BS. They would love for him to come down.”
A source close to the Perdue campaign echoed the assessment, telling National Review that the campaign would welcome a presidential rally in support of both GOP candidates.
“We still see the president as somebody who is very popular, especially with our voters, and those are the folks we’re going to need to turn out. This isn’t as much a persuasion election, as it was in November, as it is a turnout election,” the source explained.
Overall, Erickson is more bullish on the Senate races, saying that even if Wood and company are able to impact the turnout of Trump’s base, Perdue has strong rural support in the southern part of the state thanks to his past work providing hurricane and suicide relief to impacted communities. He also pointed to the traditionally Republican but Trump-shy north Atlanta suburbs, which helped net Perdue a nearly 100,000 vote lead over Ossoff and likely won’t be affected by Wood’s rabble-rousing.
“Those people turn out in runoffs, and they’ll turn out for Purdue and they’ll turn out for Loeffler, largely because they believe in divided government,” Erickson said.
As for Loeffler, her fortunes are closely tied to those of Kemp, who Erickson thinks is less reliant on Trumpian support than some in the media believe.
“There’s this mythology in 2018 . . . that it was Donald Trump’s endorsement that got Brian Kemp elected,” Erickson argued. “The reality is he won early voting like three to one, beat [Casey] Cagle in early voting, all of which was cast before the President’s endorsement, except for one day.”
“He’s largely trusted, his polling on handling the virus has been very good, and so people are willing to go support Loeffler, because they trust Kemp, and he’s got a machine,” he continued. “Frankly, this gives Kemp a way to train his 2022 campaign team off the ground and get them ready for 2022 against [Stacey] Abrams.”