ATLANTA (AP) – For more than four years, President Donald Trump has dominated the Republican Party and all of American politics. Now Georgia can decide what comes next.
Two Senate reruns on Tuesday, just 15 days before Trump leaves office, will not only determine which party controls the Senate, but also provide the first clues as to how long Trump can maintain his grip on the country’s politics once he does. is out of the White House.
Democrats want to prove that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia and nationally was not just a backlash from Trump, but a permanent shift to a once-solid Republican state. Their candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, have pushed for strengthening democratic gains among young voters in urban areas and younger Atlanta suburbs, along with a strong black turnout.
For Republicans, who have seen David Perdue and Senator Kelly Loeffler run as Trump loyalists, the question is how long will it be embracing the president’s disruptive politics – even giving in to his demands that election officials defy the law to undo his defeat – can bring victories on battlefields. .
“The party has a real choice to make about where we’re going,” said Michael McNeely, a former Georgia Republican Deputy Chairman. “Either candidates or those already in office will say, hey, we will go beyond Trump’s presidency or we will continue to take our lead from President Trump or former President Trump.”
Republicans only need to win one of two seats to maintain Senate control. Democrats must both win for a 50-50 split, which would break the standoff for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, as Senate President. The stakes are high enough that Biden and Trump will duel in Georgia on Monday. Harris was in the state on Sunday.
Loeffler, an appointee in her first campaign, and Perdue, trying to win a second term after his first expired Sunday, opted for a strategy that worked for several of their GOP colleagues who won hotly contested races in November.
Trump fueled Republican rise, especially in rural areas and small towns, overwhelming Democrats in less diverse states than Georgia. If the trend holds for Perdue or Loeffler, the Republicans would owe their majority in large part to Trump’s success in attracting voters who previously tuned in.
But Democratic victories would allow Republicans to more directly account for Trump’s rise and fall. The worst-case scenario for Republicans would be for Ossoff and Warnock to re-capitalize in the Atlanta suburbs as they see turnout drop in rural and small towns from November, when Trump was on the ballot.
Those growing, diversifying suburbs, which not long ago spawned GOP statewide victories, were not just in Georgia in the Trump era, but metropolitan cities like Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix toward Democrats.
Trump has shown since November that he has no intention of going quietly. He has repeatedly denied defeat, and during a weekend phone conversation with Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanded he “find” enough votes to undo Biden’s victory.
That phone call, a recording of which was obtained by The Associated Press, shows what Perdue and Loeffler went through – and chose to embrace. Both are wealthy businessmen who came to politics from the center-right faction of the American establishment, rather than the more populist crowd that Trump propelled. But Perdue and Loeffler determined their tenure in Washington by how closely they tie in with a president who has recreated republicanism in his image.
“I was with the president 100% of the time. I am proud to do that, ”said Loeffler in one of her closing interviews on Fox News.
While Trump lashed out in November over election fraud that even his then Attorney General said had not happened, Perdue and Loeffler called for Raffensperger to step down. Raffensperger instead chaired multiple counts, making Biden the winner in Georgia with about 12,000 votes out of 5 million votes cast. The senators have also never defended Governor Brian Kemp, as Trump labeled him “incompetent” and called for his resignation less than three years after the president endorsed Kemp in a controversial GOP primary.
Many Republicans in Georgia are embracing Trump’s stamp, at least publicly.
“Trump has taken a lot of people off the couch,” said former US Representative Jack Kingston, an ally of Trump, in a recent interview. He appealed to disenfranchised, disaffected voters. Now that he’s gone it’s a different ball game and that’s what Republicans, starting with David and Kelly, are trying to replicate. “
Trump received about 385,000 votes in Georgia more than four years ago. It was part of a nationwide rise to 74 million votes, the second-highest number of presidential votes in history. However, Biden set the record at 81 million, and his Georgia total was about 600,000 higher than Hillary Clinton’s 2016.
The president’s brand is even more risk-and-reward in Georgia because of the way the votes of the two parties are divided: democratically trending metropolitan areas grow, while rural pockets and small towns – Trump’s core – usually aren’t . The suburbs in between shift as they become less white and as younger white Georgians, whether indigenous or transplanted, become less conservative.
Linda Graham, a 52-year-old Republican, explained the scenery when she greeted canvasers from the conservative Americans for Prosperity last month. “Absolutely four Republican votes in this house,” she said, including her young adult children who cast absentee ballots. But as she looked around her dead-end street, she mentioned the more recent newbies with much younger children who were still at home.
“I love them, but they are Democrats,” said Graham. “They’re not old enough to influence their money, I guess,” she mused.
The early turnout of votes adds to the concern of the GOP. Three million voters have already voted, a record evidenced by a run-off in Georgia. The total early votes for the general election was 3.6 million.
According to Ryan Anderson, an impartial data analyst in Atlanta, early turnout in Democratic congressional districts outpaces Republican districts compared to the November election. There are still at least 300,000 outstanding ballots in the absence.
Only three of Georgia’s 14 home districts reached 80% of the fall’s early ballots. But all three are Democratic districts, and they comprise the two most concentrated Democratic districts, the 4th and 5th in the Atlanta metro.
The worst-performing Democratic district has a score of 74.8% compared to November, but that’s still higher than five of Georgia’s eight Republican districts. And in one of the Republicans’ two most concentrated districts, the early turnout is only 69.2% of what it was in the general election.