Runoff in Georgia: Just don’t talk about Trump

Marci McCarthy has been up since the early hours of the morning. These are the final days of a long campaign in Georgia that ended on November 8th. The exhaustion is evident in the DeKalb County Republican leader. She speaks of “election fatigue”. Everyone in the southern state who has had to vote four times in the past two years is tired. The event on the November day is also a stress test for your strategy in the runoff election for the Senate seat this Tuesday.

The 51-year-old events manager is sitting this morning inside a former funeral home-turned-church in the small community of Tucker, northeast of Atlanta. Two older ladies have prepared breakfast: there are scrambled eggs and fried bacon. In addition, filter coffee from paper cups. A few pensioners came. They are very excited to finally see one of their heroes. McCarthy managed to lure John Fredericks to DeKalb County.

The radio talker is a big deal in the Trump universe. He was the former president’s campaign manager in Virginia and founded a conservative radio station that reaches the Trump base from Philadelphia to Atlanta. Radio talk moderators are the true world explainers of the movement. They provide the ideological input for the constituency. They even dismiss Fox News as mainstream.

Everyone just wants to talk about Trump

Sitting next to Fredericks at the microphone, McCarthy tries to get her message across: Choosing Herschel Walker is choosing Georgia. Republican Brian Kemp was clearly confirmed in office as governor in the midterm elections a month ago. But if Walker’s opponent, Democrat Raphael Warnock, wins the runoff, the governor will have no ally in the second chamber of Congress to get money from Washington. McCarthy wants to talk about that. And about the fact that Warnock, who was just ahead on November 8 but did not crack the necessary 50 percent mark, is a water carrier of Joe Biden, i.e. does not fight for the interests of Georgia: 96 percent of his votes are on the left line been administration.

But the people who call the radio show don’t want to talk about Walker and Warnock, they want to talk about Trump. One asks why the party criticized the former president for announcing his re-election for president after the congressional elections. McCarthy takes a deep breath: “It was too soon,” she says. You have to finish the election in Georgia first. The Republican presidential candidate will not be voted on until spring 2024. A lot can still happen before then.

Another caller expressed outrage at criticism of Trump’s headline-grabbing dinner in Mar-a-Lago, which was attended by a right-wing extremist. It’s all just a left-wing media campaign. Fredericks intervenes: Meeting Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes was a huge mistake, he says. It revealed the incompetence of Trump’s employees. They should have prevented that. Trump himself didn’t even know who Fuentes was. It’s just like 2020, Fredericks says. The campaign team at the time was also an absolute disaster.