EDITOR, The Tribune.

The much anticipated run-off in the Georgia Senate race has been completed, and the Democratic Party incumbent Raphael Warnock has won, giving his party a 51-vote majority in the Senate.

The Republican Party standard bearer Herschel Walker, a former NFL running back, received over 1.7 million or 48.6 percent of the votes, despite being backed by Donald Trump. Warnock got over 1.8 million or 51.4 percent of the votes.

Warnock fared well in Fulton, Dekalb, Gwinnett, Cherokee, Chatham and Cobb Counties, to list a few. Warnock is the first African American senator from Georgia, a supposedly redneck state.

Ironically, Georgia was one of 11 states that declared its secession from the Union in 1861 -- two years before the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

Warnock’s win gives President Joe Biden the unfettered freedom to continue pushing his far-left policies through Capitol Hill without much legislative resistance from Republican lawmakers.

This is bad news for the Progressive Liberal Party. If the GOP cannot win in Georgia -- a state in the Deep South - then what are the prospects for the GOP in the scheduled 2024 Presidential Election?

The Bahamas will head to the polls in 2026. Based on the results of the 2022 Midterm Elections, particularly in Georgia, it is now looking like the American people will either re-elect President Joe Biden, assuming he runs again; or they will vote for whomever the Democratic Party fields.

I spoke about the GOP’s lack of appeal to African Americans and other ethnic groups in a previous submission.

According to Rolling Stone, only 18 percent of black male voters and six percent of black female voters supported Donald Trump in 2020.

In the recent gubernatorial election in Georgia, Democratic standard bearer Stacey Abrams got 94 percent of Black female voters and 86 percent of black male voters.

To underscore the deep rift between the African American demographic and the GOP, former NAACP leader Ben Jealous publicly accused Trump of not being truthful about his concerns for the African American community.

The rift seems to have widened, especially since the death of George Floyd and the recent surge of Wokism.

In a Reformed Facebook forum, I encountered much opposition from White evangelical Christians when I highlighted the accomplishments of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ironically, individuals who opposed King saw no issue with championing the late Presbyterian theologian Robert L Dabney, whose “Systematic Theology” is widely read within Reformed circles in North America.

His “A Defence of Virginia” was written to support the system of slavery in the Deep South by misusing the Bible to justify it. Dabney conveniently ignored the fact that the slavery practised in the US and the British Empire was mainly based on racism.

None of this is to suggest that this writer condones the aberrant theology of King. I don’t. I had written in the past in this space about King’s rejection of several cardinal tenets of historic Christianity, which has led this writer to the conclusion that King was not a true born-again Christian, notwithstanding his affiliation with famed evangelist Billy Graham.

Having said that, I suspect that the opposition to King’s theology in that Facebook forum was a subtle repudiation of the Civil Rights Movement.

This racist attitude is a poor reflection on the GOP and is the reason why African Americans do not trust the party. Biden has two years remaining in his current term, which will overlap with the PLP’s current term into late 2024.

If the inflation crisis drags into the presidential election period, that has the potential to turn off many disgruntled Bahamians from the PLP.

The issue I have with the Democratic Party is that it is pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ and pro-Marxist. Indeed, Biden’s Marxist policies have compounded the oil and inflation crises. In one particular food store in Freeport, a cauliflower is going for over $14. Consumers are now having to decide which utility bill to defer in order to buy adequate groceries. One of the devastating results of the current inflation crisis is that it has diminished the purchasing power of tens of thousands of low-income Bahamian families.

Whatever Marxist Utopian world the Democratic Party is attempting to create, the overwhelming majority of Bahamians cannot afford to survive in it.

The current standoff between the Davis administration and grocery retailers underscores the financial quandary Democratic leftists have placed the vulnerable in.

No matter how robust the economy is, if Bahamians cannot afford to buy food and gasoline and to pay their utilities, mortgage and rent, they will blame the Bahamian government.

The Biden administration will not suffer the consequences of its ill-advised policies at the Bahamian polls in 2026. It will be, unfairly, of course, the PLP government. Warnock’s win in Georgia has massive implications for the PLP in 2026.

KEVIN EVANS

Freeport, Grand Bahama,

December 8, 2022.