Last-minute fundraising pleas, court decisions, and campaign stops are punctuating the final week of the Georgia runoff election for the state’s two Senate seats. Both races are expected to be close.
Summary
In the final days of the Georgia runoff elections that will decide the majority in the Senate, the campaigns and outside groups are making their closing arguments. Incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler is facing off against pastor and Democrat challenger Raphael Warnock while Democrat Jon Ossoff is competing against incumbent Republican David Perdue.
- Early voting has not fallen off as much as previous runoff elections and while Democrats so far have the edge, Republicans are expected to make up for it through in-person voting.
- In the Warnock-Loeffler race, Republicans are expected to make sure previous supporters of Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler’s GOP opponent show up to vote for her according to an Emory University political science professor.
- As of Tuesday morning, nearly two and half million Georgians have already cast their ballot. GOP operative Karl Rove, who is in charge of the Republicans’ fundraising efforts for the race, told donors the Democrats are even more ahead now than they were in the November general election.
- On the Democratic side, Jon Ossoff’s and Raphael Warnock’s campaigns issued an alert to donors that they are falling behind in the money race, despite raising more than $100 million each.
- Amid the chaos of the campaign’s final days, a federal judge who is also the sister of failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, ordered two Georgia counties to stop the process of removing inactive voters from the rolls based on the National Change of Address system.
- President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden will be in Georgia to stump for their respective parties’ nominees.
- After Trump signaled his displeasure with the size of coronavirus stimulus checks passed by Congress, both Loeffler and Perdue came out in support of Trump’s efforts to increase the payouts from $600 to $2,000. Warnock and Ossoff criticized the Republicans over coronavirus aid.
- Several polls have the Perdue-Ossoff race neck-and-neck, according to Newsweek, which separately reported on attorney Sidney Powell’s belief that the runoff may be rigged for the Republicans to disprove her unfounded theories the November election was engineered to favor Democrats.
- The Independent highlighted concerns from Republican pollster Frank Luntz that President Trump’s “repeated attempts to overturn” the election is hurting Loeffler and Perdue.
- According to Business Insider, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should embrace Trump’s push for larger stimulus checks, as it is the “best hope” for Republican victory in Georgia.
- Fox News framed the latest developments as the Democratic candidates using McConnell’s procedural move to prevent a fast-track approval of the stimulus increase “as a club to hammer” their Republican opponents.
- The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece from James Freeman arguing the federal court’s ruling to prevent Georgia counties from updating voter rolls is “unlikely to reassure those concerned about accuracy of voter rolls.”
- The Washington Free Beacon reported on an anti-Warnock ad produced by a pro-Israel Christian group that blasts the candidate for what the group calls “statements critical of Israel.”
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© Dallas Gerber, 2020
