BIDEN, TRUMP WARN OF HIGH STAKES IN TODAY’S GEORGIA SENATE RUNOFFS
Parties make final pitch as control of chamber hangs in the balance
President-elect Joe Biden on Monday told Georgia Democrats they had the power to “chart the course” for a generation as President Donald Trump urged Republican voters to “swamp” the polls ahead of runoff elections that will determine control of the U.S. Senate.
Trump made his final-hours pitch to voters at a nighttime rally in north Georgia, where Republicans were banking on strong voter turnout today to re-elect Sen. Kelly Loeff ler and David Perdue and hold control of the chamber.
Biden campaigned with Democrats Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock in Atlanta, hoping he could re-create the coalition that secured him a narrow victory in the state in the presidential race in November.
“Folks, this is it. This is it. It’s a new year, and tomorrow can be a new day for Atlanta, for Georgia and for America,” Biden said at a drive-in rally. “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.”
The stakes have drawn hundreds of millions of dollars in
campaign spending to a once solidly Republican state that now finds itself as the nation’s premier battleground. Biden won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes by about 12,000 votes out of 5 million cast in November, though Trump continues pushing assertions of widespread fraud that even his now-former attorney general and Georgia’s Republican secretary of state — along with a litany of state and federal judges — have said did not happen.
The president’s trip Monday comes a day after disclosure of a telephone call he made to the
Georgia secretary of state over the weekend. Trump pressured Republican Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Georgia’s election results ahead of Wednesday’s joint session of Congress that will certify Biden’s Electoral College victory.
Angry after the Raffensperger call, Trump f loated the idea of pulling out of the rally but was persuaded to go ahead with it. Republicans were wary as to whether Trump would focus on the presidential election and fail to promote the two GOP candi
dates.
But Trump, at the rally in Dalton, Ga., spent much of his address on message, making an impassioned case that the Loeffler and Perdue races were among the most important Georgia voters would ever face.
He also spent a fair amount of time rehashing claims that the November election was “rigged” and urged Republicans to “swamp” the polls today. “The Democrats are trying to steal the White House, you cannot let them,” Trump said. “You just can’t let them steal the U.S. Senate, you can’t let it happen.”
He repeated his assertion that he won “by a landslide” and said that he hopes Vice President Mike Pence “comes through for us,” an allusion to Pence’s role presiding over Congress when it meets to certify Biden’s victory Wednesday. “He’s a great guy,” he said of Pence. “Of course if he doesn’t come through I won’t like him quite as much.”
Biden on Monday took aim at Trump’s efforts by declaring that “politicians cannot assert, take or seize power” by undermining legitimate elections.
Addressing a few hundred supporters splayed out on the hoods and roofs of their cars in a parking lot in downtown Atlanta, Biden said Trump was absorbing a harsh lesson in democracy.
“As our opposition friends are finding out, all power f lows from the people,” said the president-elect.
Clad in a black mask emblazoned with the word “VOTE,” Biden encouraged the multiracial audience of Georgians to do just that.
“It’s not hyperbole, you can change America,” he said.
Hours before Trump’s appearance in Dalton, many of his die-hard supporters defended his phone call to Raffensperger.
Neal Fitzgibbons, of Kennesaw, said the president just wanted the secretary of state “to look really closely at all the irregularities we saw.”
Fitzgibbons cited many of the same debunked claims that the president made, including that ballots were stuffed in population centers like Fulton and Cobb counties, which Biden won handily.
“Things were questionable, if not downright thievery, and should be looked at,” he said.
The visits by Biden and Trump ratcheted up the intensity in races that have already become the most expensive Senate contests in U.S. history. Including the campaigning before the runoff, more than $469 million has been spent in the Perdue-Ossoff contest, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and more than $362 million has been spent in the Loeffler-Warnock race. The streams of cash have produced a torrent of negative advertising in recent weeks.
As they have throughout the race, Republicans continued to warn Monday of a dire slide into a hard-left socialism if Democrats gain control of both Congress and the White House.
And Democrats are making the case that Trump sought nothing less than to nullify the will of the electorate and undermine democracy with his call to Raffensperger.
Earlier in the day, Pence amplified the Republican message in a visit to a megachurch in the central Georgia city of Milner.
Standing before an image of a U.S. flag and twin screens that declared, “DEFEND THE MAJORITY,” Pence said, “We need Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeff ler to get in the way of the radical left agenda in Washington, D.C.,” as the crowd broke in with chants of both “Four more years” and “Stop the steal.”
Pence did not mention the president’s phone call Saturday to Raffensperger. A number of legal scholars said that the president may have violated state and local laws, although they also said that pursuit of criminal prosecutions would be unlikely.
Nonetheless, Georgia elections officials Monday had received at least two formal calls for investigations into whether Trump had violated state laws.
In an appearance Monday in Conyers, a suburb east of Atlanta, Ossoff, the head of a video production company who is challenging Perdue, sought to draw parallels between Trump’s phone call and Georgia’s long history of voter suppression and disenfranchisement.
“The president of the United States on the phone trying to intimidate Georgia’s election officials to throw out your votes,” Ossoff said to a gathering of volunteers preparing to go canvassing. “Let’s send a message: Don’t come down to Georgia and try to mess with our voting rights.”
Loeff ler, a wealthy businesswoman facing off against Warnock, def lected questions about Trump and his phone call as she campaigned around the state before heading to join the president Monday night. “My sole focus is on tomorrow, Jan. 5,” she said at an Atlanta-area airport.
On Monday evening, Loeffler tweeted that she would join the dozen or so U.S. senators Wednesday to vote against the certification of the election results granting Biden’s victory. “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 said.
Perdue, who has been quarantined because of a possible exposure to the coronavirus, appeared Sunday night on a Fox News program where he said that he did not think the president’s pressure campaign on Raffensperger would affect the election.
Perdue blamed Raffensperger for the leaked recording of the one-hour conversation.
He also defended Trump’s assertions about electoral fraud. “What the president said is exactly what he’s been saying the last few months, and that is, the last two months anyway, we’ve had some irregularities in the election in November and he wants some answers. He has not gotten them yet from the secretary of state.”
Though Georgia has suffered a number of problems administering elections of late, with long lines, delayed results and technical glitches, some elections officials expressed confidence that today’s election would go smoothly.
Officials in Fulton County said that 370,000 ballots had already been cast there. While not specifically mentioning Trump, the Fulton County elections director, Richard Barron, addressed an “audio recording late yesterday” in which Fulton County was mentioned more than a dozen times.
In the tape, Trump made a number of claims about election fraud by Fulton County, including allegations of what he called “ballot stuffing.” Raffensperger’s office said those claims were investigated and rejected as unfounded.
“There’s been a great deal of misinformation out there,” Barron said. “We don’t have the resources to respond to each one of them. And we’ve been focusing on preparing for tomorrow and conducting the election legally and fairly.”