DEMOCRATS HOPE FOR GEORGIA SWEEP
Those needs, she said, extend beyond what was included in the stimulus package approved last month and signed into law by President Donald Trump.
Nevada’s issues, including housing insecurity, food security and unemployment levels, much of which can be linked to the state’s reliance on and the economic damage to the hospitality industry, give the Silver State a harder path to recovery than others, Cortez Masto said. Because of that, she has been pushing for additional relief for the hospitality industry, both here and nationwide.
“There is so much work that needs to be done in Nevada, and by really flipping the Senate we have the opportunity to do so,” she said.
If either of the Republican incumbents musters a win today in Georgia, the GOP will maintain control of the Senate and Mcconnell will continue to set the legislative agenda for the chamber, not Democrats or the Biden administration. That, Cortez Masto said, will lead to “gridlock and dysfunction” in the Senate for at least the next two years, when midterm elections are scheduled.
Nevada’s junior Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen said in a statement that “a Democratic Senate would work with President-elect Biden to make sure families, workers and small businesses get the support they need to survive this pandemic and build back better.”
Ken Miller, an assistant professor of political science at UNLV, said a Democratic Senate majority would give Nevada’s senators the ability to exert more of a say in how legislation is drawn up at the committee level.
“I think where it could help out, especially in the case of Nevada, is you have two senators representing our state who are relatively young senators, in their first term, and they’re in the minority party,” he said. “If Senate control flips, now all of a sudden they’re sitting on committees where they have majority control of those committees.”
Cortez Masto said the DSCC was working with both the Georgia Democratic Party and the campaigns of Warnock and Ossoff after none of the Senate candidates in Georgia received a majority of the vote in the November elections, forcing today’s runoffs.
“Right after the (November) election our focus then was, OK, let’s focus on the ground game. We spent $5 million on behalf of the DSCC going into Georgia to make it competitive because we saw that opportunity there. Now with the support of the DSCC, the Democrats have built a multimillion-dollar coordinated campaign in Georgia,” Cortez Masto said.
Getting the Democratic vote out is the key in Georgia.
“It is all of the canvassing, where we can do it safely; it is the phone banking; it’s everything that we need to do not only to focus on key voters there, but also we have an opportunity to register new voters, and we did,” she said.
The effort appears to be working.
As of Monday morning, according to figures from the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. more than 2 million Georgians had cast early ballots in in-person voting and another 967,000 had submitted absentee ballots by mail. The combined 3 million votes cast represents about 40 percent of the state’s electorate ahead of Election Day — numbers that were bolstering Cortez Masto’s and Democratic hopes.