GOP congressman: How did Trump lose Georgia if other Republicans won?

Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) baselessly claimed this week that there must have been major fraud in the 2020 election, bizarrely citing as evidence the fact that President-elect Joe Biden won Georgia even though some Republicans also won in the state.

“Yes, I believe there was fraud in this election. People say, ‘Give us the evidence.’ Well you have to investigate to get to the evidence,” Loudermilk said in a Monday interview with the right-wing Newsmax TV.

“There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence,” he continued. “If you look at Georgia, Republicans won up-and-down the ballot, except for the presidential and the Senate race. Tell me how that has happened, when Republicans held the House and the Senate. We made great gains in Georgia.”

Biden defeated Donald Trump in the traditionally red state by more than 12,000 votes, according to results certified by Georgia’s Republican governor. A pair of U.S. Senate races will go to January runoffs, as no candidate received an outright majority of votes.

While Loudermilk is correct that Republicans held onto their gerrymandered majorities in the Georgia Legislature, that would seem to indicate that the election was not rigged by Democrats, who had mounted an unsuccessful push to regain seats.

Biden outperformed other Democrats running statewide in Georgia, winning nearly 100,000 more votes than Senate nominee Jon Ossoff and the eight Democratic candidates running in the special election for the other Senate seat.

Bipartisan election officials found no evidence whatsoever of widespread fraud in the 2020 elections.

A similar pattern was visible many in other states, where Biden often got more votes than other statewide Democratic candidates.

In Maine, Biden won with more than 430,000 votes, while Democratic Senate candidate Sara Gideon lost with fewer than 343,000.

In Michigan, Biden got more than 2.8 million votes and won by about 2.8 points; Democratic Sen. Gary Peters won reelection by just a 1.7 point margin with nearly 70,000 fewer votes than Biden.

In Texas, Biden lost but garnered 46.5% and more than 5.2 million votes; Democrat M.J. Hegar got just 43.9% and fewer than 4.9 million votes in her unsuccessful Senate bid.

With the nation increasingly polarized, largely due to Trump’s unpopularity, a number of Republican-leaning voters split their tickets and voted for Biden.

“We do generally side with Republicans on just about everything,” Nebraska Republican Jay Jackson told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “At the same time, the thing that undergirds the freedom that we have to disagree with each other on policy decisions is having political leaders that are public servants and put the country first and subscribe to the rule of law and norms of ethical behavior. And I don’t think that Trump has done that, like at all.”

Jackson said he and his wife voted for Biden for president, but backed Republicans for Senate and House.

Cook Political Report analyst David Wasserman told the Journal that ticket splitting like that gave many “suburban moderates an opportunity to vent their anger at Trump directly at the top of the ticket but continue to vote for the down-ballot Republicans they liked.”

Loudermilk has history of questionable comments.

Last December, he claimed that Trump’s impeachment was worse than the Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. “When Jesus was falsely accused of treason, Pontius Pilate gave Jesus the opportunity to face his accusers. During that sham trial, Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus, than Democrats have afforded this president in this process,” he claimed at the time.

In May 2019, he defended Georgia’s nearly total abortion ban as fair — based on a medically questionable fetal heartbeat standard — because dead people lack a pulse.

“If you are in the hospital, if you’re having issues, they are checking for heartbeat, to see ‘Do you have a heartbeat?’ That’s gonna tell the doctors whether you’re alive or not,” he claimed.

According to medical experts, that reasoning is not based in science.

As Jennifer Kerns, ob-gyn at UC San Francisco, told Wired last year, “At six weeks, the embryo is forming what will eventually develop into mature systems. There’s an immature neurological system, and there’s a very immature cardiovascular system. … [It] is a group of cells with electrical activity. That’s what the heartbeat is at that stage of gestation … We are in no way talking about any kind of cardiovascular system.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.