Republicans Score Massive Last-Minute Election Win in Key Swing State

Republicans have scored another ballot box victory in a crucial swing state.

The Georgia Supreme Court sided with the Republican National Committee and the state’s Republican Party in a decision that overturned efforts to extend the absentee ballot deadline in Cobb County.

Last week, Cobb Elections announced that more than 3,000 absentee ballots had been mailed out after the state required deadline. Three residents filed suit to get their ballot acceptance deadline extended, as there was no other choice.

Cobb Superior Court Senior Judge Robert Flournoy found this to be sensible, extending the deadline for votes to be counted until Friday, November 8, so long as ballots were postmarked by Election Day. But the Georgia Supreme Court overruled him on Thursday, ruling that county election officials can only count ballots received by 7 p.m. on Election Day.

The decision puts nearly 3,000 ballots at risk of going uncounted. Ballots received late will be separated and kept, “until further order of the Court.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center and American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the voters impacted, are urging Cobb residents to vote in person if they can. “Only as a last resort, should voters simply mail their ballots. Unfortunately, there are voters who will not be able to access the remaining options and will not have their voices heard in this election as a result of this ruling,” the SPLC wrote.

Billionaire Elon Musk made his final pitch to voters: Donald Trump’s campaign is going full QAnon. 

The world’s richest man posted a dizzying nostalgic “Trump hype video” Monday night that begins with a threat: “If you do something bad to us, we are going to do things that have never been done before.” The audio, originally ripped from an October 2020 Rush Limbaugh interview about Iran, is probably the most normal part of the supercut. 

As “Jump” by Van Halen plays, vaporwave and ’80s and ’50s revival aesthetics pour over the screen, and Trump declares that “2024 is our final battle.” Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who waved their guns in front of their St. Louis mansion to threaten Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, also make an appearance in the video. 

Then, as Trump declares that “the future does not belong to globalists, the future belongs to patriots,” the O in the word “patriot” transforms into a Q. The rest of the letters quickly fall away, leaving only the Q, for QAnon as the audio trumpets “activation word: Ronald McDonald.” 

Earlier in the day, Musk shared another QAnon favorite: rumors about Pizzagate. He wrote, “The hammer of justice is coming” and shared  a misleading story about the conspiracy theory from last year. 

The Trump hype video appears to have been made by an account called “National Revival” which describes itself as “✞ Immortal Knight of Aryamehr ♛ Imperial State of Iranshahr Minister of Propaganda.” The account posts similar video edits of Iranian politicians, and the pinned video is a tribute to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last monarch of Iran. 

Musk tweeted out the video at the same time that he failed for an hour to host an “X town hall,” eventually giving up and asking people to just watch his episode with Joe Rogan.

Just before Election Day, Donald Trump decided to take a shot at one of his least favorite people: Nancy Pelosi.

At a rally just after midnight EST Tuesday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Donald Trump, his face plastered orange with bronzer, called the representative and former speaker of the House a “crooked person.”

“She’s a bad person. Evil! She’s an evil, sick crazy b— oh no,” Trump said, raising his finger and miming a b sound with his mouth. “It starts with a b, but I won’t say it. I wanna say it!”

Perhaps it’s not the most conventional closing message for a presidential candidate, but for Trump, it’s what one would expect. After all, he has been calling his political opponents the “enemy within” for the home stretch of his campaign, mentioning Pelosi in particular as among the people he would like to use the military against.

Trump has resorted to profanity before, so it’s funny to see him exercise restraint. Perhaps he didn’t want his last sound bite before the election to be an expletive. In the past, Trump hasn’t hesitated to drop some four-letter words, even to a room full of priests at the Al Smith dinner for Catholic charities last month. It’s quite different from another closing message the Trump campaign sent Monday: memorializing a pet squirrel euthanized by New York state wildlife officials over the weekend.

The campaign felt compelled to jump on the conservative cause of the day, the beloved pet Peanut, after Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins tied the squirrel’s death to their baseless conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating their neighbors’ pets. It just goes to show where the campaign’s priorities are on Election Day: taking shots at Trump ’s favorite enemies, and finding some kind of wild conspiracy to stir up the MAGA base.

The king of the manosphere has spoken. Celebrity podcast host Joe Rogan officially endorsed Donald Trump in a lengthy post Monday evening on X. Receipts immediately followed.

“The great and powerful @elonmusk,” Rogan wrote over a video of him interviewing the billionaire Trump fanboy. “If it wasn’t for him we’d be fucked.  He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way. For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump. Enjoy the podcast.”

Fans were quick to point to the many times Rogan has criticized Trump. In regard to January 6, Rogan called the former president “so fucking dangerous … a guy can incite a bunch of morons to do something really fucking stupid.” In another clip from 2022, Rogan outright called Trump a “man baby.”

A more than two-minute long montage of Rogan making very solidly liberal and leftist points also began to circulate. He heaps praise on the Obamas, calling Barack the best president of his lifetime. He says he wants universal health care, says he’s voting for Bernie Sanders, says he wants to spend more on low-income communities, says he’s very “pro-choice, women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, trans rights.” Rogan even says that “not all Trump supporters are racist, but all racists are Trump supporters.”

The podcaster has a laundry list of opinions that Trump and his campaign are diametrically opposed to, and yet he threw in his endorsement the night before Election Day.

In the final hours of the presidential race, the leaders of the far right are “fired up” about one issue that’s sure to resonate with voters across the country: the death of Peanut the squirrel.

Peanut was a social media–famous rodent who was euthanized by New York state wildlife officials over the weekend during a test for rabies after the squirrel bit a person. State law prohibits keeping wild animals as pets, but that didn’t stop conservatives from latching onto the issue.

Peanut reemerged as a topic of concern at a rally in Georgia, where Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins tied the squirrel’s death into an unfounded conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets.

“Trump’s running against a socialistic, big-government, control-everything-about-you, woke regime,” Collins told the crowd. “This thing’s gotten so bad that they’re killing the pets, they’re killing the squirrels, they’re killing the raccoons.”

Greene took the lie a little further, claiming that “Democrats in New York City went in and raided a home to kill a squirrel.” Peanut was actually euthanized in Pine City, according to the report—not the Big Apple. And police did not raid Peanut’s owner’s home.

“They did—to kill a squirrel,” the 50-year-old insisted.

Republican vice presidential pick JD Vance also took the time to memorialize Peanut, claiming Monday in North Carolina that he had spoken to Donald Trump about the dead squirrel, with the Republican presidential nominee allegedly describing the bushy-tailed critter as the “Elon Musk of squirrels.”

Meanwhile, conservatives have spent years ardently advocating for the expansion of the death penalty. At a rally in Aurora, Colorado, last month, Trump escalated his own language on capital punishment, promising to make immigrants—whom he referred to as the “enemy from within” and “animals”—face harsher punishments for potential wrongdoing.

“Think of that!” he said. “We have to live with these animals. But we won’t live with them for long!”

To which someone in the crowd shouted back, “Kill them!”