Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff is looking forward to his rematch against current Republican Party Sen. David Perdue on January 5th. thinks the result may be different in the second round.
The general election was split: Democrat Joe Biden ended up winning the state, but Republicans from Georgia and from both races in the Senate got more votes. Senator Kelly Loeffler, who ran in the other Republican race, attracted fewer votes than the top Democrat, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, but competed in a field of 20 and the third highest voter was GOP representative Doug Collins, who won 20% of the vote.
In an interview with CBS News on Wednesday, Ossoff, acknowledging that he won fewer votes than Joe Biden, while Perdue won more votes than President Trump, predicted that a more focused face-to-face race would be different.
Ossoff noted, “I got more votes than any Georgia Democrat running across the state in the history of that state,” and noted that “Georgia has become younger and more diverse each year during the last decade “.
Among the voters Democrats plan to target are the “tens of thousands of people who became eligible to vote because they turned 18 between November and January,” Ossoff said. “We continue to increase the momentum to get a record turnout. We generated a record turnout in November; we’ll do it again in January.”
While turnout in the Senate is often drastically lower because there is no presidential race, the Georgia national team is prepared to be different because the two seats will decide who controls the Senate when Mr. Biden takes office. . Voters and politicians, including Ossoff, see this race as a joint ticket to Warnock.
“What’s happening in Georgia right now is special and people wouldn’t have believed it ten years ago: that you have the young, Jewish son of an immigrant, tutored by Congressman John Lewis, who runs alongside a preacher black that has Dr. King’s pulpit in Ebenezer Church as bearers of the standard in these two races in the Senate to control the Senate in the most competitive state in the country, ”Ossoff said.
Ossoff always mentions Warnock in his stump speech and highlights the fact that Warnock is the pastor of the church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached. He calls Warnock “the moral voice of our state and our country.”
“We’re running really well together and we travel together through the state,” he said. “We met yesterday with President-elect Biden. We will meet in Savannah on Saturday and he will send an extraordinary statement when we elect as one of Georgia’s two state senators the senior pastor of Ebenezer Church.”
CBS News has asked for interviews with all the candidates. Loeffler and Perdue have not responded to our requests.
Kathryn Wienner and Kelly Johnstone contributed to this report.