My overwhelming initial reaction to the Georgia January 5th senate run off was relief that campaign ads are gone. $800 million bought a lot of mud slinging. I was not enamored with any of the four candidates. I believe the Republican candidates ran to continue lining their own pockets. Ossoff has his sights on much higher offices, and will probably sell out to whoever he thinks will help him achieve that. I'm not sure about Warnock so I will reserve my opinion for now. I am super skeptical of political ad content, but Warnock's were clearly better than the other three.
Several factors led to Georgia turning blue. While demographics were important, I believe Trump's behavior was the catalyst that tipped the scale between November and January particularly in the Perdue/Ossoff race. I also believe that if Trump had been even semi-diplomatic during his presidency, he would have easily won re-election. His comments/tweets during the riot on January 6th were as always all about his ego.
As a log time skeptic of both the democratic and republican parties, I hoped republicans would win at least one of the Georgia races just to maintain some degree of checks and balances. The fact that Ossoff has generated a huge campaign war chest over the past few years despite his background leads me to think he has a lot of people/organizations in his pockets--and many of them have little interest in serving Georgians or other citizens.
The January 6th Capitol Hill chaos could lead to a civil war that many predict might occur. I wasn't around for the the first one in 1861, but like then our country seems very divided and angry right now. Upon reflection, January 6th was not the start. The protests over the past few years over a variety of issues have often led to violence. Now some folks are creating unrest over a presidential election. That hasn't happened since Abraham Lincoln was elected. I guess history can repeat itself. Hopefully the last shot of this uprising has been fired, but things remain uncertain.
I consider local and state elections more important than presidential elections. Nevertheless, I have voted in 14 presidential elections since becoming eligible. I've only voted democratic or republican on two rare occasions a candidate terrified me (Nixon, 1968 and Dukakis, 1988). The other 12 were for third party candidates based on my opinion that first, America should have more than 2 candidate choices and second, whoever is president does not make that much difference in the long term. The second reason began to change in 2016 with Trump and Hilary as candidates. At the start of campaigning there were a lot of candidates, even a few I felt inclined to consider. In the end it was the same old thing, so I voted for Gary Johnson.
When Trump won, I was willing to give him a chance since he was a true political outsider and I thought he would shake things up in Washington. He sure did, but over 4 years, not the way I thought it should be handled. As mentioned above Trump's personality and character flaws ultimately cost him what could have been a second term, and his post-election actions have "trumped" any chance he will pull off a Grover Cleveland in 2024. He virtually erased his legacy paraphrased by Kimberly Strassel (Wall St Journal columnist) as a one-term disrupter-- elected to let Washington know many Americans were fed up with "business as usual."
Perhaps the divisions, particularly within the republican party, will eventually create a viable third major party so we have more presidential choices on actual election day. I am not adverse to infighting among democrats either. However, it needs to be handled much more diplomatically than has been done previously. I do hope Washington--along with politicians and citizens--get the message that it is now time for positive change.
