Republicans deliver persistent message: Fear Dems
NORCROSS, GA » . The biggest applause lines in Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s stump speech are not about Loeffler at all.
When the crowd is most engaged, including Thursday morning at a community pavilion in suburban Atlanta, Loeffler invokes President Donald Trump or attacks her Democratic opponents as socialists and Marxists. Her own policy platforms are rarely mentioned.
“Are you ready to keep fighting for President Trump and show America that Georgia is a red state?” Loeffler said when she took the microphone. “We are the firewall to stopping socialism and we have to hold the line.”
Such are the themes of the closing arguments in
the all-important Georgia Senate runoffs, which have reflected the partisanship and polarization of the national political environment. Loeffler and her Senate colleague, David Perdue, are seeking to motivate a conservative base
that is still loyal to Trump while also clawing back some of the defectors who helped deliver Georgia to a Democratic presidential nominee for the first time since 1992.
Democrats are eager to prove that Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in Georgia was more than a fluke, and that the state is ready to embrace their party’s more progressive policy agenda, rather than anti-Trumpness alone.
But the race is also emblematic of each party’s current political messages. Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic Senate candidates, have put forth an array of policy proposals that blend the shared priorities of the moderate center and the progressive left: passing a new Voting Rights Act, expanding Medicaid without backing a single payer system, investment in clean energy while stopping short of the Green New Deal, and criminal justice reform that does not include defunding the police.
Republicans are seeking no such calibration. Perdue, who announced Thursday that he would quarantine after coming into contact with someone who had tested positive for the coronavirus, and Loeffler are banking that their loyalists are motivated more by what their candidates stand against than by what they stand for.
There are signs that this approach has resonated with many Republican voters. At Loeffler’s event in Norcross, and later at a New Year’s Eve concert in Gainesville, voters said their top priorities were supporting Trump and his allegations of voter fraud and beating back the perceived excesses of liberals and their candidates.
“The biggest factor for me is stopping socialism,” said Melinda Weeks, a 62year-old voter who lives in Gwinnett County. “I don’t want to see our country become the Chinese Communist Party.”
John Wright, 64, said that he was voting for Loeffler and Perdue but that he thinks Republicans must do a better job of reaching minority voters.
He cited the change in racial makeup that has continued apace in Georgia and fueled Democrats’ chances at winning statewide seats.
“Republicans need to figure out how to help these people, how to reach these people,” Wright said. “Those demographics are changing, and you can’t just pitch the American dream to people who haven’t been able to achieve the American dream.”
The statewide jockeying comes at a tumultuous time in Georgia politics, as Trump continues to upend the Senate races with his baseless accusations of voter fraud, persistent attacks on the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state, and bombastic tweets regarding the coronavirus relief package.