The Oxford Reference notes that "single most" is a "venial redundancy" and my biblical Fowler's Modern English Usage similarly, though rather reluctantly, observes that it's "tautologous." I have used it anyway in the post's title, as emphasis, for this critical takeway from the Warnock-Walker contest is momentous and thus deserving of rhetorical overkill.
It is also overlooked — entirely overlooked would be another emphatic veniality, but I've already expended my daily quota — in both The Washington Post and NY Times' "key takeway" analyses. Which, though puzzling, invites my observation.
The Times' Blake Hounshell came up with five takeways: 1) Herschel Walker stank; 2) Trump lost in another race he encouraged; 3) Georgia will again be in presidential play; 4) Democrats have built a "formidable turnout operation in Georgia"; and 5) the state's recently passed voting restrictions "might have backfired," see: #4.
The Post's Aaron Blake assembled four takeaways, the latter two being distinguishable from Hounshell's: 1) Democrats did a superb job of turning out voters; 2) Trump lost bad — "Walker was the [only] statewide GOP candidate who didn’t win on Election Day"; 3) the Democrats have a "more literal majority" in the Senate; and 4) unusual for midterm elections, "this [one] was more or less" supportive of the "status-quo."
Each of the above, discrete deductions is true enough, and each — except for Hounshell's first and, perhaps, Blake's fourth — says a lot about the next two years. Either unnoticed or disregarded, however, is this combined takeaway: The loser Walker discountenanced claiming voter fraud, and not even Trump alleged it. Both phenomena could spell enormous political relief through 2024.
Reports the Post: "Acknowledging that it had been 'a tough journey,' Walker thanked his team [in a concession speech] and said he would not make excuses for his loss because 'we put out one heck of a fight.'"
On Truth Social, at 10:41 p.m., Trump had only this to say:
As a Trumpian, democracy-destroying tool, the banshee bellowing of Voter fraud! after any Republican loss may have finally exhausted itself. From the vista of Walker's concession speech, it looks as though the crackpot cri de couer is either dying or dead.
Arizona's Republican guberbatorial loser, Kari Lake, remains on a harpie roll, shrieking "sham election" and "sabotage" and "we will not stop fighting, because the people of Arizona were disenfranchised." But, aside from a few other minor, virtually anonymous GOP losers in 2022, Lake is alone in this, confined to Steve Bannon's War Room. Arizonans are satisfied. Notes CNN: "Monday’s certification of the state’s voting results was uneventful. Boring, even. And most voters on both sides seem content with that."
For the past two years, discomfittingly portenous was the ghastly threat that Trump's invention of voter fraud would wreck the electorate's confidence in American democracy. No election result could be trusted; future Democratic officeholders — especially Democratic presidents — would reign in perpetual, perceptual illegitimacy. The U.S. government would slip to banana-republic status in which little generalissimos squabble and struggle for undemocratic power.
Such was the Trumpian hereafter, as necesarily conceived. The Republican Party has no governing platform, its "character" is offensive to a multicultural electorate, and it refuses to change, So it had to do something. The party settled on voter fraud. For a while, there seemed some hope for its strategy; a sour, distrustful electoral zeitgeist on both sides haunted democracy's legitimacy. It appears, though, that the Trumpian ghost is dead.