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FLASHBACK: Media (Wrongly!) Claimed GA Law Would ‘Restrict’ Voting
Preliminary numbers show a record 5.29 million Georgia voters cast their ballots in the 2024 presidential election on Tuesday, an increase of at least 290,000 from the 4.99 million who voted four years ago. Just three years ago, the liberal media trumpeted how a new Georgia law was an effort to “make it harder to vote,” to “restrict voting rights” or amounted to “voter suppression.”
There’s no way to reconcile a significant increase in voter turnout with media claims that Georgia Republicans had rigged the system to “suppress” voter turnout. That doesn’t mean you’ll hear a lot of apologies from journalists who got it wrong in 2021, even though the record shows their coverage consisted of credulously repeating Democratic talking points that turned out to have no basis in reality.
“The Georgia Senate on Tuesday pushed through the first batch of what could be a raft of restrictive voting measures,” warned the Associated Press in a February 23, 2021 story.
“Rolling back voter rights,” CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell proclaimed on the March 1 Evening News, blaming “the Republican push in more than 40 states to limit voting access.”
“Why do you [Republicans] bring back the most odious laws suppressing the black vote, almost by design, since Jim Crow?” CNN’s Chris Cuomo sneered on his Cuomo Prime Time on March 15. “This is becoming some kind of perverse holy war for you guys.”
“What we’re seeing the Republican Party do now is actually go back to the norm of voting behavior, the norm of American voter suppression,” MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson alleged three days later on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House. “We have to stop these people at every single turn because they will take America back to the 1930s, ’40s, and ’20s, and make sure that nobody who’s not a straight white male Christian is actually able to vote and exercise their right in this country.”
The final bill was passed by the Georgia House of Representatives on March 25, 2021 and signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp. “This is the most serious thing that we’ve seen since the January 6 siege,” MSNBC host Joy Reid fretted that night. “It’s Jim Crow America!”
“Make no mistake about it. This bill is about nothing less than taking away the right to vote. That is all it is, plain and simple. A right that generations of Americans fought and died for,” Don Lemon insisted on CNN Tonight. “The bill the governor signed tonight is a slap in the face to John Lewis, who gave his life, who risked his life for the right to vote....And tonight Governor Kemp is taking away that right from the people he was elected to serve.”
The next morning on NBC’s Today, White House correspondent Kristen Welker matter-of-factly referred to “Republicans...attempting to limit voting rights,” as if that was a neutral description of the bill, rather than an outrageous Democratic accusation.
CBS This Morning brought aboard their in-house “election law expert” Dave Becker, who challenged the premise of the Georgia law: “It’s important to note first that all of these efforts in the states like Georgia are based on the Big Lie, based on the lie that the election lacked integrity, when in fact this was the most secure and transparent election we’ve had....President Biden was absolutely right yesterday when he called the effort ‘anti-American.’”
On CNN, daytime anchor Brianna Keilar insisted: “We are watching the Big Lie turn into voter suppression before our very eyes.”
On MSNBC’s The ReidOut, frequent guest Michael Eric Dyson raged: “This is Jim Crow, this is Jane Crow, this is their kids, this is the nesting of white supremacy....The real religion, the real politics in America is whiteness and whiteness unhinged.” He faced no challenge from host Joy Reid, who chose to nod along: “That is sad but true. Sad but true.”
That Sunday (March 28) on ABC’s Good Morning America, co-host Dan Harris asked reporter Jon Karl about “the situation we’re seeing in Georgia with these voting restrictions,” as if anyone’s vote was being restricted. Karl charged that “Republicans... are looking at ways across the country... to make it essentially harder to vote, to bring down voter turnout.”
The next day on Nightly News, anchor Lester Holt casually described it as “Georgia’s new law restricting voting rights.” The next morning, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski branded it “Georgia’s crackdown at the ballot box.” In the Washington Post, columnist Greg Sargent claimed that Georgia’s law and others were part of “a huge wave of voter suppression efforts.” On MSNBC, Joy Reid called it “Georgia’s Jim Crow voter suppression law.”
“This is what the Republican party is now. It’s not a party of ideas or reasonable debate. It exists to play up fears and push ideas of right-wing victimhood,” growled fill-in host Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC’s All In on March 30. “Take for instance that new Georgia voting law which will hit black people disproportionately hard....”
All across the dial, the media mantra was the same: voting rights were being slashed. “As Republicans in dozens of states seek new limits on how people can vote...” CBS’s Gayle King misinformed viewers on CBS This Morning on March 31. That same day on CNN, anchor Ana Cabrera referred to how Georgia’s “Governor Kemp was signing sweeping voting restrictions into law...”
“Jim Crow is making a comeback,” CNN reporter Joe Johns intoned in a taped piece for CNN Tonight that evening. “As hundreds of new proposals to scale back voter participation in elections make their way through state legislatures, the parallels with the past are inescapable....And some of those proposals have already become law, like the one in Georgia.”
“Governor Brian Kemp says there’s nothing Jim Crow about this law,” MSNBC’s Ali Velshi asked the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson on The 11th Hour on April 7. “What’s your take on whether it is, or isn’t?”
“Well, I say it is, and, I mean, I did grow up under Jim Crow laws,” Robinson argued. “If this is not a complete and total verbatim repeat of that, it is certainly a very close rhyme.”
The idea that the law made voting more difficult for blacks in Georgia is refuted by the data. In 2020, exit polls showed 29% of Georgia’s voters identified themselves as black; this week, that number actually, rose to 30% of those who cast ballots. That suggests that while overall turnout as a whole increased, black turnout increased even more.
And the notion that the Republican law had damaged the Democratic turnout machine is also not true. Vice President Kamala Harris actually received nearly 70,000 more votes this year (2,544,281, as of 9am on Sunday, November 10) than President Biden received in 2020 (2,474,507) when he won the state.
But while Democratic turnout increased, Republican turnout increased even more, as Donald Trump improved from 2.46 million votes four years ago to 2.66 million this year, an increase of roughly 200,000.
Three years ago, the media claimed Georgia’s votes would “restricted” or “suppressed” by Republicans in a racist fashion. None of that happened. In 2024, Democrats just got out-voted in Georgia, plain and simple — and a lot of other states as well.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
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