The Tribune

With Charlie Harper

These days, it often seems like the United States actually has four major political parties, not just the two-party duopoly which has prevailed for much of the past 100 years. While there have been exceptions like Ross Perot in 1992 and Ralph Nader in 2000, third-party candidates have rarely influenced national election results in recent decades.

Nader’s quixotic Reform Party won three million votes in 2000 and many Democrats still blame him for siphoning off enough liberal votes to ensure Republican George W Bush’s victory that year over Al Gore. Perot had set the third-party standard eight years earlier, helping Democrat Bill Clinton to prevail by winning 20 million generally conservative votes in the general election and 19 percent of the overall vote.

Now, though, we have the spectacle of both the Republicans and the Democrats trying to cope with intra-party fractures that result from dissatisfaction with the relatively “centrist” course espoused by mainstream party leadership. The party that prevails in 2024 and perhaps even next year will most likely have best mollified its radical wing.

The Democrats are wrestling with their “progressive” wing, which has grown increasingly critical of the Biden administration for not pushing hard enough on societal reforms designed to strengthen the so-called “safety net” under the working poor and indigent in the US.

The Republicans, who may have thought they were due a respite after the Tea Party insurgency over a decade ago, now face an even more formidable one in the committed support enjoyed by Donald Trump. GOP leaders clearly want Trump to go away. But he won’t.

This is nowhere as apparent as it has recently become in Georgia, where just 11 months ago the Democrats snatched two Senate seats from Republican incumbents in a stunning result that delivered majority control of the US Senate to Joe Biden’s party. Now, the Peach State is looking like the bellwether in next year’s pivotal US elections.

It all started three years ago. Stacey Abrams, a dynamic black woman who held trailblazing positions in the Georgia legislature, ran for governor of the state in 2018. Her Republican opponent was the then-Secretary of State, Brian Kemp. As Secretary of state, one of Kemp’s responsibilities was to oversee an election in which he was a candidate.

Kemp did not recuse himself, as many advised him to do in the face of a transparent conflict of interest, but he did win a very close election. The fact that Abrams came within a whisker of victory both stunned the nation and cemented her place in the Pantheon of current Democratic political leaders. There was much speculation about her. Would the 2020 presidential nominee, Joe Biden, choose her as his running mate? Would she contest one of the two Georgia seats in the US Senate that was open last year?

In the end, Abrams did neither, explaining she wanted executive positions with real responsibilities. It has now become clear she still wants to be governor of Georgia. She announced last week she would run again for the state’s highest office, still seeking to be the first black female state governor in US history.

After losing the 2018 election to Kemp, Abrams turned her considerable energy to increasing minority voter registration all over the country, but especially in her home state. Her organisation’s efforts brought nearly 800,000 new voters onto Georgia rolls. Such success was clearly one of the significant factors in Georgia’s two Senate elections early this year. Democratic underdogs won both seats, and the Dems won a slim but almost totally unexpected control of the Senate.

Now we have Abrams as the almost certain Democratic gubernatorial candidate. Incumbent Kemp is running for re-election. But guess what? He is opposed, by none other than one of the two GOP senators who lost their re-election bids in January of this year: David Perdue, a retired millionaire businessman.

How would the Republicans allow such a potentially destructive primary election competition? The answer is the former US President. Trump lost Georgia last year to Biden, who was also a clear beneficiary of Abrams’ voter registration prowess. Trump tried in several ways to get that result overturned, at one point urging Kemp to somehow find for him the nearly 12,000 votes necessary to change the result.

Kemp refused, declaring there was no legal way to do so. Trump, who had supported Kemp against Abrams in 2018, felt betrayed and vowed retribution. It has now appeared in the form of Perdue, whom Trump has been publicly urging to enter the race for months.

So now, six months before the Republican primary election, a bitter internecine GOP fight is shaping up. It looks like the state Republican party is going to stick with Kemp, while Trump will continue to urge his “Make America Great Again base” to support Perdue. The MAGA base is strong in Georgia.

Exit polls in January revealed Trump’s steady criticism of Georgia state GOP leaders for not skewing the election his way persuaded at least some of his supporters to not vote in the crucial Senate races. Should Kemp prevail and again become the Republican nominee, many wonder if the Trump base won’t stay home again.

Abrams is expected to run unopposed in the Democratic primary. If the Republicans cannot unite behind a candidate, she will win.

Meanwhile, long-time Trump ally and former football star Hershel Walker is favoured for the Republican Senate nomination against long-time civil rights activist and incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock, who was elected in January to complete an unexpired term and now faces re-election just two years later. While the state party may not run a candidate against Walker, his lack of experience may work against his election bid. And given the looming fight over the governor nomination, some Republican voters may sour on this Trump favourite.

Trump is also in the Georgia news for other reasons. In Atlanta, the Fulton County District Attorney is still investigating, among other things, Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2. On that call, later released by multiple news organizations, Trump tried to bully Raffensperger to cook the election books in his favour. Raffensperger has now written a book in which he says Trump was threatening him in an effort to coerce him to break the law. The DA has pledged to file criminal charges if they are warranted.

It seems quite likely Trump will dominate Georgia news for the next year. The question many are asking is whether this will be good or not for the Republican Party in the 2022 elections. If he splits the party, Trump could easily cost the GOP several elections they would otherwise almost certainly win.

Family affairs

CNN fired its exceedingly popular 9pm talk show host Chris Cuomo over the weekend, finally agreeing with mounting public opinion that Cuomo had crossed ethical lines too often in his efforts to help his older brother, beleaguered and now-former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo. The brothers are sons of former long-term New York governor Mario Cuomo, and represented perhaps America’s most prominent contemporary political family dynasty.

With the near-total disappearance from the national American political scene of such family dynasties as the Rockefellers, Kennedys, Tafts, Clintons, Bushes and now the Cuomos, it’s getting harder to identify family political enterprises. Indeed, the most well-known one still standing is probably the Cheneys, where former Vice President Dick Cheney’s congresswoman daughter Liz has pushed her political chips all-in on a strategy of denouncing Trump and trying to lead the Republican Party away from him.

Are Americans tiring of political royalty? Maybe it’s a temporary casualty of all the populist doggerel so prominent in the Trump administration. Perhaps the latest generation of America’s royal political families didn’t measure up to their predecessors in public life.

But whatever the reasons for this apparent dynastic demise, it’s worth noting that former Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, daughter of a former Arkansas governor, is in a very strong position running for her father’s old position. She has garnered Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement. And she has already driven two better-qualified, more experienced Republican opponents from the race. Both are now running for positions which would be subordinate to hers if she becomes governor, as is now widely expected.