On Monday, Georgia’s incumbent senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both Republicans, issued a joint statement calling on Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, to resign. “The Secretary of State has failed to deliver honest and transparent elections,” Loeffler and Perdue insisted. They did not provide any evidence, nor did they question a specific result. Loeffler—who was appointed to the Senate late last year by Georgia’s governor, the Republican Brian Kemp, after the longtime senator Johnny Isakson retired—ran against twenty-one candidates in a special election this fall, and finished second, securing a spot in a January runoff, against the Democrat Raphael Warnock. Perdue, in his race, received about 1.5 per cent more of the vote than the Democrat Jon Ossoff, and about a third of a point less than the fifty per cent threshold required for victory by Georgia election law. (A libertarian, Shane Hazel, received about two per cent of the vote.) Perdue is headed to a runoff, too. Neither Perdue nor Loeffler is entitled to a recount; both candidates are already campaigning. Their statement offered little of substance, but it did lay bare a key part of their shared campaign strategy: cling tightly to the lame-duck President, Donald Trump, and his baseless claims of voter fraud, with the hope of fuelling enough outrage among Georgia’s many Trump fans to drive turnout in January.
“It tells us that the two Senate candidates are gonna try to be attached to the hip of the President,” Charles Bullock, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, told me on Monday, when I asked him about the joint statement. “Their commitment to him is stronger than it is to their fellow-Republican,” by which they meant Raffensperger, “who they are throwing under the bus.” If Perdue and Loeffler both lose, there will be fifty Democrats and fifty Republicans in the next Senate, putting Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris in a position to cast tie-breaking votes. On Tuesday, the Senate Majority Whip John Thune said, of Trump’s role in the Georgia Senate races, “We need his voters. And he has a tremendous following out there.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that “the president and his top allies pressured the two Republican senators to take this step, lest he tweet a negative word about them and risk divorcing them from his base ahead of the consequential runoff.” Raffensperger, meanwhile, issued a response to Perdue and Loeffler, explaining that he was not going to resign, and insisting that, “from an election administration perspective,” the election in Georgia was “a resounding success.” He, too, was “unhappy with the potential outcome for our President,” he wrote, adding, “Was there illegal voting? I am sure there was. And my office is investigating all of it. Does it rise to the numbers or margin necessary to change the outcome to where President Trump is given Georgia’s electoral votes? That is unlikely.”
Bullock told me that he wasn’t sure how Perdue and Loeffler’s move would play with Georgia voters. “I could see where it could get the hackles of some folks up: ‘Why are you making our state look bad by levelling these allegations?’ But the true Trump folks—this feeds their narrative that the election is being stolen.” Holding fast to Trump might not seem like the obvious move in a state where Trump lost, particularly given that Republicans not named Trump, including Perdue, did better in Georgia than the President did. As Bullock put it to me, “Some share of the voters—the well-educated suburban white women—couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the President, so they voted for Biden. But then they recovered from that apostasy by voting Republican for the rest of the ticket.” Democrats picked up only a few seats in the Georgia House and one in the State Senate, far fewer than anticipated; Bullock described the President-elect’s coattails as about “as long as a cutoff T-shirt.” (Carolyn Bourdeaux did win her race for Georgia’s Seventh District, becoming one of few Democrats nationwide to flip a U.S. congressional seat.) Still, one lesson of the Trump years is that Republicans can win by getting white non-voters to go to the polls—and, in an oddly timed runoff election, when the parties can’t count on participation from casual voters, goosing the base is essential. “We should assume parity between the parties,” Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, told me. “And so this race comes down to get-out-the-vote. It comes down to mobilization.”
To participate in the Georgia runoffs, voters must be registered by December 7th. Early voting begins a week later, on the 14th. “People have a greater likelihood of forgetting to vote in this election, just because you’re distracted with the holidays,” Gillespie said. Both parties will rely on early voting and absentee ballots, despite Trump’s oft-stated animosity toward the latter method. “If you can get somebody to the polls before they have a chance to forget—to mail in a ballot before they get caught up with holiday stuff, all the better,” Bullock told me. He anticipates offers “for folks to pick people up after the office Christmas party to vote, or ‘On your way to the New Year’s Eve party, how about we run you by to turn in your absentee ballot?’ ”
Fortunately for Ossoff and Warnock, Democrats in Georgia have an exemplary ground game, partly thanks to the efforts of the former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. In 2014, Abrams founded the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit organization devoted to registering voters; two years later, Georgia implemented automatic voter registration through driver’s-license application forms. From 2018, eight hundred thousand new voters have joined the state’s rolls. Nearly half of them are nonwhite and about forty-five per cent are under thirty years old. As far as turning out these voters goes, it helps, Bullock said, that there will be two contests rather than one. It also helps, he added, that one of the candidates, Warnock, a pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church waging his first campaign for public office, is African-American. Georgia had a runoff election for the Senate in 2008 as well, Bullock pointed out. “There was a big drop-off across the board, but African-Americans were less likely to return than white voters. And, with African-Americans being the core constituency of the Democratic Party, it’s critical that they come back in numbers.”
I spoke to Terrence Clark, Warnock’s communications director, about the message that Warnock would be taking to voters. In Clark’s telling, that message is high-minded and policy-focussed. The reverend’s campaign is about “the dignity of working people,” Clark said, emphasizing Warnock’s commitment “to protect preëxisting-conditions coverage, to fight to expand health-care access and to secure a more fair and equitable economy for working families.” I also spoke to Jon Ossoff, who offered a similar multipart message: “Beat the virus. Jump-start the economy. Build a stronger and more prosperous, more just America.”
Stephen Lawson, Loeffler’s communications director, took a different tack. “Kelly and David are going to save this country from socialism,” he told me. “That is what’s on the line.” A spokesman for Perdue did not respond to questions about the Senator’s campaign message, but other Republicans have pushed a similar line. On Saturday, at an impromptu street party in New York celebrating Biden’s victory, the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a relatively moderate Democrat, said, “Now we take Georgia, and then we change America.” Brian Kemp shared a video of the comment on Twitter, describing it as “Chuck Schumer’s radical plan.”
Between Friday night and Tuesday morning, Democrats reportedly raised nearly ten million dollars for Ossoff and Warnock. The former Presidential candidate Andrew Yang announced that he was moving to the state to help out. Though Democrats were more cautious than Republicans about door-knocking in the summer and early fall, out of concern about the spread of the coronavirus, Gillespie suggested that such a disparity will diminish moving forward. “What I think they’ll probably do is ring doorbells, run and get off the porch, talk to people six to twelve to fifteen feet away and then go on about the business,” she said. “I’m calling it ‘ring-and-run.’ ” Given the stakes, and the national spotlight, record-breaking sums will be spent to mobilize voters. “The amount of money is just gonna be incredible,” Bullock told me. This is another way in which Republicans are capitalizing on Trump’s spurious legal challenges to the election he lost: as a way of driving fund-raising. Trump’s Keep Fighting Fund, for instance, asks supporters for money that will go to the President, the Georgia Senate campaigns, and recounts of House races. As the Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel put it on Twitter, “If you cynically think McConnell/Perdue et al are questioning the presidential election results to raise money for the Georgia runoffs . . . well . . .”
On Tuesday, the Republican Party of Georgia and the state’s Republican House delegation sent a pair of letters to Raffensperger, doubling down on the claims of fraud and irregularities. Among the signatories was the congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been raising money for herself through an online “Stop the Steal” campaign. On Wednesday, as Marco Rubio warned Republicans in Cobb County of a social takeover, Raffensperger ordered a hand recount of the Presidential race, which must be completed by November 20th the deadline for finalizing election results. When I spoke to Ossoff, he sounded calm, even as he admitted the unprecedented nature of the races to come. “There had been some joking about what if the Senate majority came down to two runoffs in Georgia,” he told me, “but that’s not necessarily how I expected the map to shape up.” “This,” he added, with a touch of drama, “will be the most epic, highest-stakes battle royale in American political history.”
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