Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* Remember in Georgia’s gubernatorial race, when Brian Kemp (R), just a few days before Election Day, accused the Democratic Party of Georgia of trying to hack into the voter database in a failed attempt to steal the election? An Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation has concluded Kemp, now the governor-elect, was lying.
* In North Carolina, Republican officials are making no secret of their plans to dump Mark Harris (R) if there’s a do-over election in the state’s 9th congressional district.
* Ahead of Mississippi’s U.S. Senate runoff election a few weeks ago, several companies asked Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) to return their campaign contributions, unwilling to be associated with her suspected racism. At this point, most of those companies still haven’t gotten their money back.
* In case there were any doubts, the Associated Press has finally called the race in New York’s 27th district for Rep. Chris Collins (R). The Republican incumbent briefly ended his re-election bid after getting indicted on felony corruption charges, but most local voters apparently didn’t mind. * In Maine’s 2nd congressional district, Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R) has given up on overturning the election by way of a recount, but he’s still weighing an appeal of last week’s federal court ruling. That ruling, from a federal judge, threw out the Republican congressman’s challenge to Maine’s system of ranked-choice balloting. * And now that George Papadopoulos, a former adviser to Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, has finished his brief stint in prison, he’s apparently gearing up to run for Congress. Though Papadopoulos apparently resides in Los Angeles, he told the Daily Telegraph, “I just have to find a little Republican enclave somewhere in this part of the country and run there.” Who could take issue with such an iron-clad plan?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past." Recommended
