» Tom Price and David Perdue will join Handel rally,

Pair to appear at Saturday event at Peachtree-DeKalb.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price will return to the congressional district he represented until recently to attend his first public campaign rally to urge Republicans to back Karen Handel as his replacement. And he’ll be joined at this weekend’s event by fellow Cabinet member Sonny Perdue in what’s billed as a final get-out-the-vote push.

The event, set for 9:30 a.m. Saturday at the PeachtreeDeKalb Airport, is the latest and perhaps last in a string of high-profile visits that have brought President Donald Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Vice President Mike Pence to the Atlanta area to back Handel in Tuesday’s 6th Congressional District runoff against Democrat Jon Ossoff.

But this one holds more local flair for voters of the suburban district. Price won the seat in 2004 and notched commanding victories every two years until Trump tapped him as his health secretary. Perdue, now the agriculture secretary, was elected in 2002 as the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction.

With polls showing a tight race, Handel is seeking every advantage she can to consolidate Republican support and thwart Ossoff. Both parties have poured enormous resources into the election, which is seen as an early referendum on Trump’s presidency and a dry run for the 2018 midterm elections.

Ossoff has not countered the string of big names Handel has brought into the conservative-leaning district with his own set of high-profile supporters. Wary of giving Republicans new reason to cast him as a liberal, he has only campaigned publicly with a handful of Democratic officials.

Saturday’s event has been organized by John Watson, the newly minted Georgia GOP chairman, who has made boosting Handel one of his first priorities. A former aide to Perdue, Watson won this month’s vote to lead the cash-strapped state party on a pledge to shore up its finances and make it more relevant.

Cabinet officials are permitted by the Hatch Act, a 1939 law, to engage in electoral politics as long as they’re not acting in an official capacity. The campaign invitation mentions nothing of the word “secretary,” instead calling the two Cabinet officials “special guests.”

Handel and Price have a long friendship, and he supported her 2010 bid for governor. But Price has stayed largely quiet about the race to replace him, and his wife, Betty, a Roswell physician and state legislator, briefly considered running for the seat. Neither publicly backed any candidate in the first round of voting, and neither had donated to Handel in the latest fundraising reports.

Perdue has a sometimes-bumpy history with Handel, whom he named as his deputy chief of staff after his 2002 election. He backed his first cousin David Perdue over Handel in the 2014 race for an open U.S. Senate seat.