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TOWNSHIP, Georgia – In the second round of elections for two seats in the U.S. Senate, which will decide which party controls the chamber under President-elect Joe Biden, outgoing Republican Representatives David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are looking to attract the big names in the GOP. by their side, while Democrats choose to keep things local.
Loeffler and Perdue were joined by Vice President Mike Pence in Canton, Ga on Friday in front of a noisy outdoor crowd of more than 1,000 supporters. As Pence stopped before conceding the general election, which was called by The Associated Press and other media outlets for Biden, Pence tacitly acknowledged that if Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were victorious, the tie of the 50 resulting seats would be broken by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
“We need the great state of Georgia to stand up for the majority,” Pence said. “And the road to the Republican majority in the Senate goes straight through the state of Georgia.”
On Thursday, Loeffler and Perdue held a joint indoor rally in front of a smaller crowd of around 150 at the Georgia National Fairgrounds in Perry, Ga., Alongside Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who made a similar admission.
“Sometimes the Lord works in mysterious ways,” Cotton said. “It gives the Georgian people the chance not only to vote for your senators … it gives you the opportunity and the honor to stand in the line and ensure that Republicans remain in charge in the US Senate.”
Cotton, a rising Republican star who many believe will run for president in 2024, has a penchant for stoking strong culture wars, as most recently evidenced by his opinion piece published in The New York Times which led to the resignation of the newspaper. editor of editorial pages.
Last week Loeffler and Perdue were joined by two GOP Florida senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott.
President Trump’s refusal to concede defeat to President-elect Biden, as well as his insistence that his loss in Georgia could only be explained by electoral fraud, weighs heavily on the race.
“Republicans have the advantage in a vacuum – the problem is this second round is playing out in the eye of a political hurricane on the president’s own initiative,” Republican strategist Liam Donovan told Yahoo News. “The longer this pipe-dreaming attempt to overturn the results and deny the reality of a Biden victory, the harder it is to pretend that you need a GOP majority as a check.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who called himself an “end-to-end Republican” in an interview with Yahoo News earlier this week, blamed Trump for Biden’s victory in the state.
“Twenty-four thousand people did not vote in the fall; or they didn’t vote away because the president told them ‘don’t vote away, it’s not sure’, ”Raffensperger said in an interview with WSB-TV, an ABC affiliate in the region of ‘Atlanta. “But then they didn’t come to vote in person. He would have won by 10,000 votes. He actually depressed, suppressed his own voting base. “
On Thursday and Friday, Loeffler and Perdue both reaffirmed that the Georgians will be responsible for what will happen not just for the next 4 years, but for generations.
“Georgia is on everyone’s mind,” Loeffler said at Thursday’s rally. “We are the firewall. It’s not just the control of the US Senate. It is the future of our country. We will hold the line against socialism right here in Georgia.
“Today we are the last line of defense against this country by making a change to the left that we will not be able to reverse for maybe two, three, four, five generations,” Perdue said on Friday.
Republican senators spent little time attacking their Democratic opponents. Instead, Perdue and Loeffler took hits against Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calling them “radical” Democratic Party leaders who want to push the country toward socialism.
In an about-face, they also pushed the absentees and the early voting, which begins on December 14 for the second round of the elections.
Donovan believes the two Georgian senators learned from Trump’s mistakes.
“This is an important problem that Republicans seek to resolve by telling their people to vote however they can, including those absent,” Donovan said. “If they don’t address this inequality, you could very well see another election night lead for Republicans eroding as the mail-in votes arrive.”
Still, state Republicans fear their party will not do enough to rally voters for the second round.
“We have to do a better job of getting the vote out,” Denise Dehnel, a 64-year-old Republican resident of Perry, Ga., Told Yahoo News. “Democrats are good at it. They have great ground play. We have to decide how important this is to us. If we lose the Senate, I worry about what this country will look like.
Wrightsville, Ga. Republican Glynn Martin, 66, told Yahoo News he was concerned Stacey Abrams was responsible for generating “bogus votes” for Democrats, and could do it again. “If a Democrat comes in, we’re in trouble,” Martin said.
There is no evidence that Abrams or anyone in the Democratic Party engaged in fraud. On the contrary, Abrams, who narrowly lost to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in a controversial 2018 race, devoted his efforts to mobilizing Georgian voters through his national voting rights organization Fair Fight, which was largely recognized as a huge force behind Biden. victory.
Republicans in the state fear Democrats now have an advantage in organizational structure and that many reliable GOP voters are letting cynicism over allegations of voter fraud keep them from voting. Georgia Republican Assembly Speaker Alexander Johnson is concerned that an ill-informed public will affect turnout in the run-off election.
“The idea of whether the election is safe or not will certainly have an effect in January,” Johnson told Yahoo News. “I think it’s very important that for people to have confidence in the system, they have to understand the system and know that the legal votes will be counted.”
“I think one of the major problems right now is that there is so much talk about what people think about the election, instead of the facts about how voting works, about what happens to. your ballot, how signatures are verified, and how the process works. , “he added.” I think the uncertainty could definitely hurt the turnout rate throughout the election. “
Below are the key dates for Georgians ahead of the second round of the State Senate elections on January 5, 2021:
Cover thumbnail illustration: Yahoo News; Pictures: Jessica McGowan via Getty (2)
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