ATLANTA (AP) – The merchandise in Senator Kelly Loeffler’s online campaign store includes T-shirts and bumper stickers with Donald Trump’s name and the message, “Still my president.”
The Georgian Republican shows television commercials in the run-up to Tuesday’s second Senate election accusing her opponent, Reverend Raphael Warnock, of being ‘dangerous’ and ‘radical’.
Loeffler’s colleague, Senator David Perdue, meanwhile, warns Georgians that Democrats will set a “ socialist agenda ” if his challenger, Jon Ossoff, wins on Tuesday.
In the closing days of campaigns that will determine control of the US Senate, the Republican incumbent parties are appealing to the most conservative section of the electorate. Their steady embrace of the hard-right Trump wing of the GOP – even repeatedly refusing to acknowledge Trump’s defeat – and their caricatures of the Democratic challengers may seem like a risky approach in a state that narrowly voted Democrat Joe Biden in November as president. after years of steady democratic gains.
Still, the strategy reflects prevailing GOP wisdom in the Trump era: The clearest path to Republicans victory, even in swing states, is to increase support at a GOP base motivated by loyalty to the president and fear for Democrats. Still, the approach comes at the expense of an ever-wider Republican coalition with more urban and suburban moderates and GOP-leaning independents who have rejected the Republican brand under Trump.
“The president resonates with a lot of people, and so are the buzzwords, so you hear ‘Trump’ and ‘socialism’ a lot,” said Michael McNeely, a former Georgia Republican Party deputy chairman. “I wish we lived in a society where people talked about ideas, but that’s just not where we are.”
Trump may have complicated Perdue and Loeffler’s gamble even more with the way he handled his defeat to Biden.
The president has spread unfounded allegations of voter fraud and quashed Georgia Republican officials, including Gov. Brian Kemp, who defended the election process. When Trump allies, including Perdue and Loeffler, backed the claims, some Republicans expressed concern that it could discourage some Trump loyalists from voting in the second round. Now other Republicans are concerned that GOP candidates have instead turned off the more moderate voters who were repelled by Trump.
“No Republican is really happy with the situation we find ourselves in,” said Chip Lake, a longtime GOP adviser and top advisor to Loeffler’s defeated rival, Rep. Doug Collins. “But sometimes when you play poker, you have to play the hand you get, and for us it starts with the president.”
Trump will visit Georgia on Monday evening for a final meeting with Loeffler hours before the polls open. It is unclear whether Perdue will be present. The senator said on Thursday that he was quarantined after being exposed to an assistant who tested positive for the coronavirus.
Democrats are okay with the GOP senators’ decision to run like Trump Republicans and use excessive attacks. Opposition to the president has been a unifying force among their main supporters, and Democrats believe the Republicans’ general tendency is falling flat with voters in the middle.
“We’re talking like expanding Medicaid. We’re talking about expanding Pell Grants ”for low-income students, Ossoff said at a recent stop in Marietta, north of Atlanta. “David Perdue denounces such things as socialism?”
Ossoff took note of Perdue’s claims that a Democrat-led senate would abolish private insurance; In fact, Ossoff and Warnock support Biden’s proposal to add a federal insurance plan to private insurance exchanges, not to ditch private insurance. “I just want people to have a choice,” said Ossoff.
November returns showcase the GOP snare. Biden defeated Trump by approximately 12,000 votes out of 5 million votes cast in Georgia, making him the first Democratic presidential candidate to hold the state since 1992. Biden’s record number of votes for a Democrat in the state was fueled by racial and ethnic diversification of metropolitan areas, but also shifts in major Atlanta suburbs where white voters historically tended to be Republican.
Still, Perdue landed within a few thousand votes of Trump’s total and led Ossoff with about 88,000 votes. The turnout of the Republicans also soared in small towns and rural areas, while the Democrats in Georgia had a disappointing downward vote in the general election and failed to make the expected gains in legislative races.
“We’ve already won this race once,” Perdue said at some of his runoff campaign stops, echoing his advisers’ belief that maintaining Trump’s grassroots enthusiasm is their top priority. They add that they can round up the small fraction of the varying voters with arguments against handing over control to the Democrats over the House, Senate and White House.
However, Lake and McNeely predicted that hard-right attacks and Trump-targeting calls will not garner votes outside the base, especially in the midst of a buzz of ads in a run-off campaign with total costs reaching $ 500 million.
“We reached the point of diminishing yields a long time ago,” Lake said.
They also complained about Trump’s lingering grievances over his defeat, even after his own attorney general said there was no evidence the election was marred by fraud, and courts across the country rejected the outcome.
“If, for some reason, the Republican candidates lose,” Lake said, “it will be difficult to write a post-mortem on this run-off and not look directly at all the chaos created by voter fraud. “
The early vote ended on Thursday with just over 3 million Georgians taking absent or personal ballots. That lags behind the latest early vote of 3.65 million ahead of the general election. But the early vote has already led to a record turnout in Georgia.
Jen Jordan, a Democratic state senator who won a suburban Atlanta district in 2017 that had long been in the hands of Republicans, acknowledges that her party, too, has switched to basic strategy. But Jordan argued that Democrats still base their pitch more on policy ideas, especially in the areas of access to health care and public education, which she believes have broad appeal. She said Perdue and Loeffler undermined their “socialism” warnings by splitting from most Congressional Republicans to back the president’s call for $ 2,000 pandemic aid payments to individual Americans.
“I’ve never heard the word socialism so many times in my life, and they both say, yeah, let’s give everyone $ 2,000 checks,” Jordan said.
McNeely, the state’s former GOP leader, lamented that even if Perdue and Loeffler win, their campaigns take Georgia further away from a more centrist tradition. He cited Republican Senator Johnny Isakson, whose retirement opened the way for Kemp to appoint Loeffler.
Unlike many Southern Republicans of his generation, Isakson was never a Democrat. But he rose through the Georgia General Assembly in an era when Democrats dominated the state. In Washington, Isakson was a reliable Republican voice, but he shunned party-political jousts and intently avoided talking about Trump whenever possible.
“Sen. Isakson learned to see things from a different perspective,” McNeely said, adding that Republican politicians “need to think beyond campaigns and what the president thinks” and more voters need to decide that “you’re not a bad guy or girl. of being because you compromise. ”