Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff on Monday challenged Republican rival Sen. David Perdue to three televised debates ahead of their multimillion-dollar January matchup that will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
The Ossoff-Perdue race is one-half of twin runoff elections in the Peach State taking place on Jan. 5.
The other is between Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Raphael Warnock to fill the final two years of the term won by Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson, who retired at the end of 2019 due to Parkinson’s disease.
In a letter to Perdue, Ossoff said Georgia voters should hear their candidates address “great challenges” such as public health, economic crises, unequal justice under the law, deep political divisions, and widespread corruption in the political system.
“Georgians deserve to hear their candidates for U.S. Senate debate these issues publicly,” he said. “I am asking you to join me in committing to three live, in-person debates sponsored by media organizations throughout our great state. Georgians deserve nothing less.”
Ossoff’s debate challenge is part of an aggressive first step by the Democratic candidate during the opening days of the nine-week period to the runoff.
Ossoff and Perdue squared off in two televised debates during the general election cycle, but Perdue pulled out of a third one so he could attend a President Trump rally. Democrats mocked the decision, calling Perdue a coward.
Perdue has tried to paint Ossoff as a “radical” and a “socialist.”
In the second debate, Ossoff, a former investigative journalist, slammed Perdue’s record on healthcare and COVID-19. He accused the incumbent senator from Savannah of downplaying the threat posed by the virus and attacking the health of Georgians.
“You did say COVID-19 was no deadlier than the flu. You did say there would be no uptick in cases. All the while, you were looking after your own assets and your own portfolio. And you did vote four times to end protections for preexisting conditions,” Ossoff said.
In less than 24 hours, a clip of the remarks had been viewed more than 2.7 million times on social media. A tweet of the footage had been liked and shared more than 20,000 times.
Georgia has been a breakthrough for Democrats this year.
Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden is ahead in the vote count and on the verge of adding it to his winning electoral margin. The evolution of Democratic voters in the once-reliably ruby-red state has some Republicans worried about the Senate runoff races. However, it’s an uphill climb for Democrats who have not elected a senator in the state for more than 20 years.
Nationally, the Senate-elect currently stands at 48-48. Incumbent Republicans lead uncalled races in North Carolina and Alaska. If the GOP holds on to those two seats, the balance of power would be 50-48. However, if Warnock and Ossoff win their races, it would be a 50-50 split in the Senate with presumptive Vice President-elect Kamala Harris acting as a tiebreaker.
With such high stakes on the line, Republican and Democratic operatives have been racing to the Southern state to convince voters that their candidate is worth the vote.
The nine-week year-end runoff sprint could cost up to $500 million, according to the Associated Press. The staggering sum expected to be funneled into Georgia’s races is money well spent, according to the two parties.
“The Senate is the last line of defense,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee tweeted.
Steven Law, the president of Senate Leadership Fund, the outside group affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, echoed the importance of a win.
“It’s all on the line in Georgia,” he said. On the other side of the political coin, Stacey Abrams, who lost the Georgia governor’s race in 2018 by 55,000 votes but has largely been credited with helping turn Georgia blue, told her 1.3 million Twitter followers that there was more work to be done.
“We have raised $6 million (!) so far to help jumpstart the Jan. 5 Senate runoff elections,” she tweeted Monday, encouraging her followers to donate via ActBlue, a PAC that acts like PayPal for politics by directing donors’ money where they want to go and not to a centralized pot. In this case, to Warnock and Ossoff.
Longtime Democratic financier Bernard Schwartz told CNBC that he’s ready to raise money for Warnock and Ossoff.
The Lincoln Project, a group of longtime conservative Republicans who broke with the party to defeat Trump, tweeted, “We’ve got important work to do in Georgia… We need you fully energized.”
During a private caucus call, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reminded her colleagues about what’s at stake. “How we conduct it in the next two months will affect how we do in Georgia,” Pelosi told House Democrats. She also reminded them to be “respectful,” The Associated Press reported.
