ATLANTA — Voters in Georgia headed to the polls Tuesday to cast their ballots in two Senate runoff races that have captured the national spotlight, shattered fundraising records, and will decide which party takes control of the U.S. Senate under a newly elected president.
Millions of dollars have been poured into the campaign coffers of incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, as well as their Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff, an investigative journalist, and Raphael Warnock, a prominent black preacher.
Emboldened by Biden’s razor-thin win in November, Democrats are trying to cement Georgia’s status as a swing state. Republicans are digging in and trying to reverse the gains their political rivals made in the 2020 election cycle.
On Monday, President Trump, President-elect Joe Biden, and Vice President Mike Pence all made eleventh-hour pitches to voters in the Peach State.
“Unlike any time in my career, one state, one state, can chart the course, not just for the four years but for the next generation,” Biden said during a drive-in rally in Atlanta.
A few hours later in Dalton, Trump called the runoffs a “biggie,” and he told the crowd that a win for Ossoff and Warnock would give Democrats “the power to ram through every deluded piece of left-wing legislation that they’ve ever wanted, that they’ve ever dreamed of.”
“Your religious liberty will be gone, your Second Amendment will be gone, your borders and great new wall will be gone. Your police departments will be gone as we know them, and your life savings will be gone,” Trump said.
Trump toggled Monday between stumping for his party and airing his own grievances, claiming that “there’s no way we lost Georgia.”
His comments also come on the heels of a taped telephone call that surfaced Sunday between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In the call, Trump repeated a litany of election fraud claims and asked Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the presidential race in his favor, despite three separate vote counts that confirmed his loss.
“The people of Georgia are angry. The people of the country are angry, and there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump said in the call. “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”
Biden won the state by 11,779 votes.
Trump’s obsession with winning has created a rift in the Republican Party, with several lawmakers siding with Trump’s attempts to stay in power versus those who have encouraged him to accept the reality of the election results.
On Monday night, Loeffler announced she would oppose the certification of the Electoral College results on Wednesday.
“On January 6th, I will vote to give President Trump and the American people the fair hearing they deserve and support the objection to the Electoral College certification process,” she tweeted ahead of Trump taking the stage.
Perdue has also said he would urge his colleagues to object to Biden’s win, although given his term has currently ended, he does not have a say.
If Ossoff and Warnock win the runoff races, the U.S. Senate will be split 50-50 with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote. If Perdue and Loeffler win, Republicans would hold a slim 52-48 majority and could block Biden’s legislative agenda.
With so much at stake, a record 3 million Georgians, or about 38.8% of all registered voters in the state, had cast their ballots before Tuesday.
The number easily exceeded the previous early voting record of 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2008 Senate runoff race between Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin.
Tuesday’s dual races are playing out because none of the candidates got more than 50% of the vote in the Nov. 3 general election, as required for winning a statewide race in Georgia.
In the nine weeks between the general election and Tuesday’s runoff, nearly a half-billion dollars has been spent, with another $205 million spent during the first round, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
In their campaign messaging, Perdue and Loeffler have tried to paint Warnock and Ossoff as dangerous radicals who will vote in lockstep with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“If Democrats prevail in the U.S. Senate runoff elections Tuesday they will have the control of Congress they need to impose their radical, socialist agenda on the American people,” Perdue wrote in an opinion piece over the weekend, adding that an Ossoff win would mean “sky-high taxes, illegal immigrants voting, police defunded, our proud military gutted, private health insurance eliminated, small business out of business, and our Supreme Court packed.”
Loeffler has spent the majority of her campaign attacking Warnock’s character. On Saturday, she accused him of being involved in a “domestic abuse” incident and said that he was “hiding out” in order to avoid questions.
Police were called in March after a dispute between Warnock and his ex-wife Ouleye Warnock. She claimed Warnock ran over her foot with his car, and newly released body camera footage shows her telling the police Warnock was a “great actor.”
The comment has been featured heavily in an attack ad blitz during the last days of the runoff. Warnock has denied running over his ex-wife’s foot, and charges were never filed against him. Loeffler also accused Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer of funding Warnock’s campaign. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” she said, referring to David Boies, an attorney who has previously represented the former movie mogul. According to financial records, Boise donated to a PAC supporting Georgia Democrats but not specifically to Warnock’s campaign.
On the flip side, Warnock and his allies have been working overtime to paint Loeffler as a rich, out-of-touch racist. Loeffler, co-owner of the WNBA team Atlanta Dream and one of the wealthiest members of Congress, has been accused of pandering to extremists. She’s spoken against the Black Lives Matter movement even though most of her team is black, and she has also posed for a picture with a neo-Nazi and former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ossoff criticized Loeffler for taking the selfie and told Fox News, “Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a Klansman.” “She is stooping to these vicious personal attacks to distract from the fact that she’s been campaigning with a former member of the Ku Klux Klan,” he said. “We deserve better than that here in Georgia.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper pushed back on Ossoff’s comments and said one picture didn’t prove she was campaigning with the KKK.
Loeffler has often accused Ossoff of being “a pathological liar” and said he lacks credibility.
In spite of all the mud-slinging, some analysts believed Loeffler and Perdue’s biggest challenge would be to get Republicans to come out and vote, something Trump helped with marginally Monday night.
Republicans had braced for what he would say and whether he would call the election “illegal and invalid” as he did Friday. They feared if Trump went rogue Monday night, it might have been a disaster Tuesday.
Another concern Tuesday is safety.
The secretary of state’s office said Monday it had received reports of some counties preparing to bolster security at some polling stations.
Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who oversees Georgia’s African Methodist Episcopal churches and is head of a nonpartisan faith-based voter-turnout organization, told the Wall Street Journal some get-out-the-vote rallies were canceled over the weekend due to threats. He also said several churches that planned to serve as polling stations had received bomb threats.
“Our community is deeply concerned for our congregations safety and the voting rights of every Georgian,” the bishop told the Wall Street Journal.
