Abraham Lincoln was a \u201clife-long\u201d member of the Whig Political Party.\u00a0\u00a0In 1848, he campaigned for his party\u2019s Presidential candidate, General Zachary Taylor.\u00a0\u00a0The Democrat running against Taylor was General Lewis Cass, and Lincoln derided his candidacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA fellow once advertised that he had made a discovery by which he could make a new man out of an old one, and have enough of the stuff left to make a little yellow dog. Just such a discovery has Gen. Jackson’s popularity been to you [Democrats]. You not only twice made President of him out of it, but you have had enough of the stuff left to make Presidents of several comparatively small men since; and it is your chief reliance now to make still another.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This may not have been the first time Democrats were derided as \u201cyellow dogs\u201d, but it certainly wasn\u2019t the last. The phrase came to mean anyone who voted a straight Democratic ticket, regardless of who was running for office. They became known as \u201cYellow Dog Democrats\u201d. They\u2019d choose a Yellow Dog rather than voting for a Republican.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Whig Party broke apart in 1854 over slavery. Many of the Northern Whigs joined the new anti-slavery party, the Republican Party, including Lincoln.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Raphael Warnock won re-election to the US Senate in the Georgia runoff last week. What looked like a \u201csqueaker\u201d all evening turned out to be a relatively comfortable win, as Warnock defeated his Republican opponent Herschel Walker by almost 100,000 votes, a bit more than Warnock\u2019s margin over Kelly Loefler in 2020. After four state-wide campaigns in two years and almost $400 million, Senator Warnock will finally get to serve a full six-year term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Warnock is the pastor of the famous Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.\u00a0\u00a0As a Senator, he proved instrumental in passing several pieces of legislation, and was surprisingly bi-partisan.\u00a0\u00a0As he tells it, he\u2019s the 18th<\/sup>\u00a0most bipartisan out of the one hundred Senators.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n His Republican opponent Herschel Walker was a tremendous athlete. His exploits on the football field in the early 1980\u2019s for the University of Georgia are legendary. Walker then went onto a professional career, playing first in the USFL, then in the NFL for over a decade. After he retired from football, he took on mixed martial arts, and even earned a place on the US Olympic Bob-Sled team in the 1992.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Walker was an outstanding athlete, but a questionable candidate. He\u2019d left Georgia decades ago to live in Texas, and only returned thirteen months before this election . Walker also has a history of mental illness and domestic violence. When the campaign first began, his staff did an \u201copposition research\u201d of their own candidate. In a week, it was over five hundred pages long. They were NOT allowed to talk to Walker\u2019s former girlfriends. It turned out that he had several illegitimate children, some he acknowledged, and some were \u201cdiscovered\u201d during the course of the campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And Walker had a difficult time articulating his views about the issues of the day. It made it easy for Democrats to ridicule him in ads on television and social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the Georgia election was more about who supported which political party, rather than the individual candidates.\u00a0\u00a0The nation agreed:\u00a0\u00a0more money was spent in Georgia in the past two years than by any nationwide Presidential campaign up through 2012.\u00a0\u00a0There were not enough \u201cYellow Dog\u201d Republicans to pull Walker over the top, even in a state where the Republican Governor won by almost 200,000 votes.\u00a0\u00a0Walker was that bad of a candidate \u2013 which raises the question:\u00a0\u00a0what were the over 1.7 million voters (out of 3.8 million) thinking when they marked \u201cWalker\u201d for their Senator?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ohio is much the same way.\u00a0\u00a0In the 2022 election, the Democrat Tim Ryan was the \u201cmodel\u201d candidate in the nation.\u00a0\u00a0The Republican candidate, JD Vance was nowhere near as \u201cbad\u201d Walker, but was noted as one of the laziest Republican candidates in the country.\u00a0\u00a0Yet Vance still won, by over 150,000 votes (out of almost 4 million).\u00a0\u00a0The \u201cquality\u201d of the candidate didn\u2019t matter here in Ohio, Republicans voted for their \u201cYellow Dog\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s the difference between Georgia and Ohio?\u00a0\u00a0Certainly a lazy Vance was better than Walker talking about werewolves and vampires.\u00a0\u00a0But there is a more important consideration.\u00a0\u00a0The Democrats of Georgia, led by Stacy Abrams, have a voter turnout that is second to none.\u00a0\u00a0The Democratic Party of Georgia still can\u2019t break the Republican grip on state offices, but they are closing the gap, in spite of the Republican legislature\u2019s attempts to suppress Democratic voters.\u00a0\u00a0(Need proof of that \u2013 the Republicans tried to stop Saturday voting on the weekend after Thanksgiving, citing a Georgia law that bans voting the day after a holiday.\u00a0\u00a0The holiday wasn\u2019t Thursday\u2019s Thanksgiving. It was Friday\u2019s Robert E. Lee\u2019s birthday).\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nGeorgia\u2019s Choice<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Party over Candidate<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Ohio\u2019s Failing<\/h3>\n\n\n\n