“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough ripped into Republicans on Thursday after some GOP members attributed the party’s midterm losses to the inability to inspire more mail-in and early votes.
“Republicans used to own early voting. Absentee ballots, we owned it,” Scarborough said. “If I didn’t get 85% of absentee ballots, I was pissed off on election night, and I would do everything to work those people. I would call people overseas that were in the military. I would say, ‘We’re sending you an absentee ballot.’ We worked it. The election was over by the time the polls closed in Florida because I would be pulling down a huge number of absentee ballots.”
He went on to argue that the GOP is acting like mail-in voting is something new.
“They’re like little babies who play peekaboo. They cover their eyes and they think that if they cover their eyes because they can’t see anybody, nobody can see them,” he added. “We can see them. They’re acting really stupid and they’re pretending that the realities of modern politics still don’t apply to them.”
In addition to the GOP’s failure to win over mail-in and early voters, some Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney placed blame on former President Donald Trump, a long-time critic of the mail-in voting process.
“President Trump lost again, and I know a lot of people in our party love the president, but he’s, if you will, the kiss of death for someone who wants to win a general election,” Romney said.
Others like Sen. Lindsey Graham tried to shift blame away from Trump.
“[Democrats] won because their financing system is so much better than ours,” he said.
The midterms wrapped up following the Senate runoff election in Georgia, which saw Sen. Raphael Warnock beat Herschel Walker with 51.4% of the total votes cast. Over 1.8 million votes were cast in favor of Warnock, while more than 1.7 million were cast in favor of Walker.
