Martha McSally "conceded gracefully" but Stacey Abrams didn't? Shut up. McSally did not have a vote-suppressing Secretary of State Brian Kemp running against her, but that did not stop Rich Lowry from making the comparison.
November 19, 2018

[Above: Stacey Abrams concedes the election, but not the fight for voting rights, earlier this month.]

Seriously, right-wing media can just put a sock in it about Stacey Abrams not being conciliatory enough in her concession speech.

That somehow Arizona's Martha McSally was graceful and Stacey Abrams was not?

Gee, Rich Lowry, maybe if a Democratic Secretary of State in Arizona had deleted voter registrations, filtered ballots through a Republican sieve, and "supervised" the vote count until it was too late, maybe Martha wouldn't be so graceful.

Joan Walsh says it better than I can, and with fewer swears:

Martha McSally didn’t have to run against a candidate who was making the rules governing their election and who bent every one of them in his favor. She didn’t see her opponent purge more than a million voters—most of them clearly members of her base—in the year before their election. She didn’t see him close 214 polling places in six years—mainly in areas where her base voters resided. She didn’t see him put 53,000 voter registrations into limbo because of tiny inconsistencies—a missing hyphen in a name, or a missing middle initial—70 percent of whom, again, would have almost certainly been McSally voters.

She didn’t find that on Election Day, in the heart of her geographic base—in Abrams’s case, Atlanta—700 voting machines were mysteriously wrapped up and unused, while lines to use the inadequate number of machines stretched for blocks, making her voters wait four hours or more. She didn’t see her opponent lie about doing those things—and, in fact, accuse McSally of being the actual cheater—in the days before her election. And McSally wasn’t forced to get the backing of four federal judges to make sure all the votes were counted in her election, because her opponent, who made and enforced the voting rules, opposed efforts to do just that.

Oh, and one more thing: Republican Martha McSally may well be appointed to Arizona’s other vacant Senate seat by the Republican governor when Jon Kyl steps out of his caretaker role early next year. Democrat Stacey Abrams won’t be appointed street sweeper by Georgia’s new Governor-elect Brian Kemp, who rigged the rules to help himself and still only won by just over one point.

Bite my butt, Rich Lowry. And stick your dog-whistle "Martha McSally test" where the sun don't shine.

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