Republican strategist Karl Rove used his trademark clipboard Tuesday night to call into question former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ assessment of the Georgia U.S. Senate runoff races.
Abrams on Monday contended that 85,000 of 1.2 million mail-in ballot applications received in the state so far have come from mostly Democratic-leaning voters who didn’t vote in November.
After playing the clip of Abrams from “CBS This Morning” along with President-elect Joe Biden praising the former Georgia state senator and saying Georgia was going to “shock the nation,” Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum turned to Rove for his assessment of the race during Tuesday night’s “The Story.”
“Well, I think pretty good,” Rove replied. “But we spent a little time with Stacy’s numbers because she is either misleading or she’s uninformed.”
Chart in hand, Rove went on to explain his rationale:
She just said that there were 1.2 million people who’s requested a ballot, a mail-in ballot for the runoff, and that 1.3 million had done so in November. That’s not correct. In November, 1,740,795 people requested a mail-in ballot. 1,362,369 — actually exercised it, voted by mail, so today, the requests are half a million less, a third less than they were for the November election, and what you also need to remember is 600,000 of the people on the list for mail-in ballots, 600,000 of that 1.7 million are automatically on the list. They are on the list for a long time. They sign up for permanent mail-in ballots, so they are counted as a request, but we don’t know whether or not they are actually going to vote.
The Republican strategist argued that only 52% of those who had at this point voted in the general election have returned their ballots.
“They are less Democrat, they are less black, and 60% plus of them are 66 years or older, meaning more likely to be Republican voters,” he said. “So I don’t know what her deal was there, except to sort of raise expectations that they were already in the lead, but this is a fight to the finish, and the Republicans are doing pretty good right now.”
Later in the interview, Rove contended that only 12,130 of the 85,000 applicants were actually new voters.
