Parties race to finish for Ga. seats in Senate
Strategists warn of ‘cataclysmic failure’ to motivate voters
ATLANTA — Debate over President Donald Trump’s own electoral grievances dominated the final day of campaigning for two U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia on Monday, raising concerns among Republican strategists and local officials that his conspiracy theories would depress GOP turnout and jeopardize continued Senate control.
The Republican secretary of state’s office on Monday held a news conference with a top election official to denounce Trump’s false claims of election fraud over the weekend, urging Georgians to “please turn out and vote tomorrow.” At an earlier event in Milner, Ga., Vice President Mike Pence was interrupted by someone who shouted a demand that Pence vote to overturn the presidential election results.
President-elect Joe Biden, who also traveled to the state on Monday, turned Trump’s efforts to overturn the November election results into a rallying cry to drive Democrats to the polls on Tuesday. Only by winning both seats would Democrats control the Senate, giving Biden far better odds of pushing through his agenda.
“In America, as our opposition friends are finding out, all power flows from the people,” Biden said at an Atlanta rally, in a reference to Trump’s efforts — unsuccessful so far — to force the courts or state officials to overturn the results. “Politicians cannot assert, seize or take power. Power is granted by the American people and we cannot give that up.”
Little about the first campaign clash of 2021 suggested a fresh political start for the new year. The president’s nine-week effort to reverse the November vote, which he hopes will come to a head Wednesday when the House and Senate meet to accept those results, have become the biggest applause lines at Republican events in the state, popping up even when party leaders wanted to focus on issues closer to home.
As a result, Republican strategists spent the final hours of the contest focused on pressuring Trump and his aides to script his Monday night appearance in the state in away that does not further undermine their chances.
“If he tells people not to vote,” said one Republican involved in the race who requested anonymity to speak frankly, “that is a cataclysmic failure.”
‘White-knuckle moment’
Another strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for similar reasons, said there was broad concern that Trump would use his rally in the state to spread the same threats that he aired in a weekend phone call with Georgia Republican officials, in which he told them that “because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote.”
“It is a white-knuckle moment for Republicans all over the place,” said the second strategist. “He wants attention more than he wants the win, and that could really screw us. Somuch of these elections are about momentum.”
Though Republicans had confidence they could shape what went into Trump’s teleprompter when he spoke at night in Dalton, Ga., they said they had no idea what he would improvise and were worried about his mood.
Democratic strategists, also, expected Trump to play a decisive role in the outcome.
“All of the story is about their turnout,” said J.B. Poersch, the president of the Senate Majority PAC, the largest outside group supporting Democrats in the state. “If they win it is because they had enough enthusiasm to go to the polls. And if they lose it is because there was a lot of ambivalence.”
Widely circulated false conspiracy theories have animated Republican crowds on the campaign trail in the closing days. At the final public rallies for Sen. Kelly Loef--
fler, R-Ga., her loudest applause came not when discussing her background in business, or the “radical liberal” agendas of the Democrats, but when discussing Republican challenges to the Nov. 3 vote.
“We have to get to the bottom of these elections,” Loeffler said at a Sunday night rally in Cherokee County, one of the Republican strongholds where the party is trying to boost turnout. “The Democrats will never look into this. That’s what we’re fighting for, integrity in this country.”
But she also was concerned that the focus on the last election could divide her own voters. She had refused as the runoff date neared to take a clear position on whether shewould support Trump’s efforts to get the Senate to refuse the electoral college result later this week, although late Monday she said she would support the president. Asked on Saturday about the challenge to the electoral college that Trump has backed, she offered a vague comment: “Everything is on the table,” she said, before returning to a familiar line.
“This president has fought for us,” she said. “I’m fighting for him every day.”
The party’s other candidate, David Perdue, whose Senate term lapsed on Sunday, leaving him on the sidelines for the electoral college fight in that chamber, has said he would support the effort to challenge the election result.
“They stole the election. That’s the truth. We’ve got tons of evidence,” said Patty Smith, 61, who interrupted Pence during his event by shouting for him to “do the right thing on Jan. 6,” when Congress will meet to accept the election results.
‘Easily provably false’
Republicans have not submitted credible evidence of widespread fraud, but the sentiment was widespread enough that local Republican officials held the news conference to contest, point by point, the case Trump argued in a phone call over the weekend with state officials that the election result was wrong.
“This is all easily, provably false,” Gabriel Sterling, a Republican official who oversaw the voting systems in the state, said at the news conference. “Yet the president persists and by doing so undermines Georgians’ faith in the electoral system, especially Republican Georgians, which is important because we have a big election coming up.”
When they could, both Perdue and Loeffler focused on a unified message that blanketed the state’s airwaves: Only their election would save the nation from the socialist decline they said would result from victory for their rivals, filmmaker Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who both reject the “socialist” label.
“The very future of our republic is on the line,” Perdue said at the Pence rally, addressing the crowd by telephone because of a coronavirus exposure that has put him in quarantine. He said the result could set the country’s course for “at least 50 to 100 years.”
The Democratic candidates spent the closing days of the race trying to refocus the campaign on more local concerns such as health care and job opportunities, even as they brought in star power from around the country to help seal the deal and continued to jab at Trump. A closing ad for Ossoff featured narration by former president Barack Obama and amusical appearance by John Legend.
“When the president of the United States calls up Georgia election officials and tries to intimidate them to change the election results . . . that is a direct attack on our democracy,” Ossoff said in Savannah on Sunday, at an event with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. “And if David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler had one piece of steel in their spine, one piece of integrity, they would be out defending Georgia voters from that assault.”
’Pay him no mind’
Warnock, speaking at a Monday afternoon rally in Clayton County, ridiculed Trump for his appeal to state election officials to reverse the presidential results — especially “in the middle of a pandemic” — but told his own supporters to “pay him no mind.”
“The only way this thing goes in the wrong direction is if we become overly confident and give in to the ghosts of complacency and indifference,” Warnock said. “We lose only by themargin of our disengagement.”
Georgia election officials, who have been beating back unfounded claims of fraud and malfeasance since the November election, say they’re prepared to be in the spotlight once again after the runoffs.
“All the counties in Georgia are in the spotlight right now, so we are all prepared for this as well as we can be,” Richard Barron, Fulton County’s elections director, said at a news conference Monday afternoon.