Former President George W. Bush told People magazine that he wrote in former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for president in the 2020 election.

“A new analysis of demographic data from Georgia’s November and January elections confirms a larger decline in white rural turnout led to Democrats flipping both U.S. Senate seats, one of the biggest challenges the GOP must tackle ahead of 2022,” Georgia Public Broadcasting reports.

“The data illustrate Republicans will have to work to motivate their rural base to trust the election system and return to the fold — and there are signs Georgia’s new 98-page election law could do the trick.”

Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske (R) told the state Republican Party on Wednesday that an investigation had found no “evidentiary support” for its allegations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, CNN reports.

Pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood told Newsweek that he “sometimes works up to 20 hours a day as part of his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

Politico: “In Cobb County, the archetype of the GOP’s suburban erosion, Republican activists over the weekend were still re-litigating former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud while drafting resolutions to rebuke the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and other Republican officials for their unwillingness to overturn Trump’s loss. The Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has been all but excommunicated.”

“The once dominant Georgia GOP might be in meltdown in the suburbs, but the rank and file remains obsessed with Trump and the perceived wrongs of the last election.”

Republicans will have a tough time winning back the suburbs if they can’t move past the 2020 election.

New York Times: “The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race… That finding extended even to the state’s reddest districts.”

“The phenomenon appeared to hold nationally. Mr. Biden performed 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent better last year in conservative state legislative districts where Democrats put forward challengers than in districts where Republicans ran unopposed.”

Howard Dean is smiling somewhere.

The Cook Political Report introduced the post-2020 edition of the Partisan Voter Index for all 50 states and 435 congressional districts.

Here’s how it works: “A Partisan Voter Index score of D+2, for example, means that in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, that district performed an average of two points more Democratic than the nation did as a whole, while an R+4 means the district performed four points more Republican.”

Last year saw a slight increase in the number of swing districts as former Republican suburban seats moved left and midwestern Democratic seats moved right.

Despite former Speaker John Boehner’s scorching criticisms of Donald Trump in his new book, Boehner told Time that he voted for Trump in last year’s presidential election.

Said Boehner: “I voted for Donald Trump. I thought that his policies, by and large, mirrored the policies that I believed in. I thought the choices for the Supreme Court were top notch. At the end of the day, who gets nominated to the federal courts is really the most important thing a President does.”

Boehner’s coddling of the Tea Party laid the groundwork for Trump, so this should be no surprise.

Eric Levitz: “Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters were apparent in preelection polling (even if the magnitude of those gains was not). In October, the New York Times entertained the theory that Hispanic men were driving this trend, as Trump appealed to their ‘machismo culture.’ And on one level, the election results are consistent with that hypothesis: In absolute terms, Trump performed better with Latinos than Latinas.”

“But Equis’s polling suggests that between 2016 and 2020, Trump gained far more ground with Hispanic women.”

Of course, this is also more evidence that making it harder for infrequent voters to vote can hurt Republicans.

David Hopkins: “The idea of Joe Biden as a depolarizing figure, someone who aimed to transcend rather than exacerbate the nation’s political divisions, was both a dominant rhetorical theme of his campaign and a major strategic premise behind his nomination. In particular, Biden was supposed to be uniquely appealing to the type of white, older, modestly-educated, socially traditionalist voter who had wandered away from the Democratic Party sometime between Barack Obama’s first victory and Hillary Clinton’s last defeat.”

“In the end, that didn’t happen.”

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds about half of Republicans believe the January 6 Capitol siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Donald Trump look bad.”

Also, 60% of Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024.

New York Times: “Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election. Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.”

“As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a ‘money bomb,’ that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.”

“The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.”

“A new analysis of U.S. voters suggests — counterintuitively — that the coronavirus pandemic may have helped drive former President Donald Trump’s surprising increase in support from Latinos last November,” Axios reports.

“By shifting Trump’s rhetoric from immigration to fears around the economic impact of shutdowns, the virus gave conservative and low-information Latino voters a permission structure to back Trump even if they shunned him in 2016.”