ATLANTA (AP) – President Donald Trump has dominated the Republican Party and all of American politics for more than four years. Now Georgia can decide what comes next.
Two run-offs by the Senate 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 is out of office. Withuis is.
Democrats want to prove that elected President Joe Biden in Georgia and nationally was not just a Trump setback, but a lasting shift for a once solid Republican state. Their candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, have insisted on strengthening the democratic gains among young voters in urban areas and younger suburban areas around Atlanta, 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 the disruptive politics of the president can be embraced – even the demand of the election officials to defy the law to reverse his defeat – can deliver victories in battlefields. .
“The party has a right choice to decide where we are going from here,” said Michael McNeely, a former Georgia vice president. “Candidates or those who are already in office are going to say, hey, we are going beyond the Trump presidency or we are going to continue to take our lead from President Trump, or former President Trump.”
Republicans only need to win one of two seats on the ballot to retain Senate control. Democrats must both win for a 50-50 split that will make Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, as chair of the Senate, the equalizing vote. The stakes are high enough for Biden and Trump to campaign hours apart on Monday.
In Atlanta, Biden urged his supporters to “make your voice heard again.” Trump was for a night meeting in the town of Dalton in North Georgia.
Loeffler, a nominee in her first campaign, and Perdue, who is trying to win a second term after her first Sunday expired, chose a strategy that worked for a number of their GOP colleagues who raced very strongly in November won it.
Trump fueled Republican rise, especially in rural areas and small towns, which overwhelmed Democrats in countries less diverse than Georgia. If the trend were for Perdue or Loeffler, Republicans would owe their majority in large part to Trump’s success in pulling out voters who were cast earlier.
But democratic victories would allow Republicans to take more direct account of Trump’s rise and fall. The worst-case scenario for Republicans would be for Ossoff and Warnock to capitalize again on the outskirts of Atlanta, watching the rise of rural and small towns from November, when Trump was on the ballot.
The growing, diversifying suburbs, which not long ago secured nationwide GOP victories, have moved toward the Democrats not only in Georgia but also in metro areas like Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix toward the Democrats. tends.
Trump has shown since November that he has no plans to remain silent. He repeatedly denied the defeat and asked in a telephone conversation with Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger over the weekend that he should “find” enough votes to stop Biden’s victory.
The call, a survey obtained by The Associated Press, shows what Perdue and Loeffler encountered – and chose to accept. Both are wealthy businessmen who came to politics from the center-right faction of the American establishment, rather than the more populist crowd that drove Trump. But Perdue and Loeffler defined their tenure in Washington by how now they join a president who is rebuilding the Republican in his image.
“I stood by the president 100% of the time. I’m proud to do that, ”Loeffler said in one of her closing remarks on Fox News.
While Trump boasted in November about election fraud that even his then-attorney general said did not happen, Perdue and Loeffler asked that Raffensperger resign. Raffensperger instead led multiple counts that left Biden as the winner in Georgia with about 12,000 votes out of the five million cast. The senators also never defended government Brian Kemp, as Trump belittled him as ‘incompetent’ and requested his resignation, less than three years after President Kemp endorsed the GOP in a controversial by-election.
Many Republicans of Georgia embrace Trump’s imprint, at least in public.
“Trump has got a whole bunch of people off the bench,” former US Representative Jack Kingston, an ally of Trump, said in a recent interview. “He appealed to the rightful, dissatisfied voters. With him gone, it’s another ball game and that’s what Republicans, starting with David and Kelly, are trying to repeat. ‘
Trump received about 385,000 more votes in Georgia than he did four years ago. It was part of a national increase to 74 million votes, the second highest presidential total in history. However, Biden set the record with 81 million, and his Georgia total was about 600,000 ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 mark.
The president’s trademark is even more in jeopardy and reward in Georgia due to the spread of the votes of the two parties: democratic-leaning metro areas are growing while rural pockets and small towns – the core of Trump – are mostly not. The suburbs between them are changing less and less white and younger white Georgians, whether indigenous or transplanted, are becoming less conservative.
Linda Graham, a 52-year-old Republican, explained the landscape when she greeted decades of conservative Americans last month for prosperity. “Absolutely four Republican votes in this House,” she said, including her young adult children who are absent. But as she looked around her cul-de-sac, she mentioned the more recent arrivals with many younger children still at home.
“I like them, but they are Democrats,” Graham said. “I think they are not old enough to influence their money,” she thinks.
The rise of early votes contributes to the concerns of the IDP. Three million voters have already cast ballots, a record set for a runoff in Georgia. The total early vote for the general election was 3.6 million.
According to Ryan Anderson, a non-partisan data analyst in Atlanta, the early turnout in Democratic congressional districts is more than the Republican districts compared to the November election. There are still at least 300,000 absentee ballots.
Only three of Georgia’s 14 Home districts achieved 80% of the total early turnout. But all three are Democratic districts, and that includes the two most concentrated Democratic districts, the 4th and 5th in the metro Atlanta core.
The lowest-performing Democratic district has a point of 74.8% compared to November, but it is still higher than five of Georgia’s eight Republican districts. And in one of the two most concentrated districts of the Republicans, early turnout is only 69.2% of what it was during the general election.