ATLANTA (AP) – For more than four years, President Donald Trump has dominated the Republican Party and all of American politics. Now Georgia decides what happens.
Two Senate qualifiers on Tuesday, just 15 days before Trump leaves office, will not only determine which party controls the Senate, but will provide the first clues as to how long Trump can keep his policy on the country’s politics once he leaves. of the White House.
Democrats want to show that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia and nationally was not just a Trump reaction, but a lasting change for a once-solid Republican state. His candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, have lobbied to consolidate democratic gains among young urban voters in Atlanta’s younger urban areas and suburbs, along with strong black turnout.
For Republicans, who have seen David Perdue and Sen. Kelly Loeffler present themselves as Trump loyalists, the question is how long to embrace the president’s disruptive policy, even fulfilling his demands for election officials to defy the law to nullify their defeat, they can achieve victories on the battlefields.
“The party has a real choice to make where we’re going from here,” said Michael McNeely, a former Republican vice president of Georgia. “Either the candidates or those already in office will say, ‘Well, we’ll go beyond the Trump presidency or we’ll continue to take our lead from President Trump or former President Trump.”
Republicans have to win just one of two ballot seats to maintain control of the Senate. Democrats must win both by a 50-50 split that would make Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, as Senate president, the tiebreaker vote. The stakes are high enough for Biden and Trump to be campaigning for Monday’s stays.
In Atlanta, Biden urged his supporters to “make your voice heard again.” Trump was preparing for a night rally in the northern Georgian town of Dalton.
Loeffler, named in his first campaign, and Perdue, who is trying to win a second term after the first Sunday expired, chose a strategy that would work for several of his GOP colleagues who won the most contested races in the November.
Trump fueled Republican participation, especially in rural areas and small towns, which overwhelmed Democrats in less diverse states than Georgia. If the trend were to be maintained by Perdue or Loeffler, Republicans would owe their majority largely to Trump’s success in extracting voters who had previously tuned in.
But Democratic victories would leave 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 watched the decline in the participation of rural towns and small towns starting in November, when Trump was at the polls.
Those growing and diversifying suburbs, which not long ago secured GOP victories across the state, have tended toward Trump-era Democrats not only in Georgia, but in metropolitan areas like Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix.
Trump has shown since November that he has no intention of going quietly. He has repeatedly denied defeat and, over the weekend, in a phone call to Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, demanded that he “find” enough votes to nullify Biden’s victory.
This call, the recording of which was obtained by The Associated Press, demonstrates what Perdue and Loeffler have faced and chosen to adopt. Both are wealthy business figures who came into politics from the center-right faction of the American establishment, rather than the more populist crowd that pushed Trump. But Perdue and Loeffler have defined their positions in Washington by their close alignment with a president who has rebuilt Republicanism in his image.
“I was with the president 100% of the time. I’m proud to do that, ”Loeffler said in one of his final interviews on Fox News.
While Trump denounced in November the election fraud that even his attorney general said did not happen, Perdue and Loeffler called for Raffensperger’s resignation. Raffensperger chaired several accounts that left Biden as the winner in Georgia by about 12,000 votes out of 5 million votes. Senators also never defended Gov. Brian Kemp, as Trump despised him as “incompetent” and demanded his resignation, less than three years after the president endorsed Kemp in controversial Republican primary primaries.
A lot of Republicans in Georgia accept Trump’s imprint, at least publicly.
“Trump pulled a lot of people out of the bank,” former U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, Trump’s ally, said in a recent interview. “He appealed to unauthorized and disaffected voters. With him 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 more votes in Georgia than four years ago. He was part of a national increase to 74 million votes, the second highest total of presidential votes in history. Biden, however, set the record with 81 million, and his Georgia total was about 600,000 ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 mark.
The president’s brand has even more risk and reward in Georgia due to the distribution of votes from both parties: democratically lean subway areas are growing while rural pockets and small towns (Trump’s core) aren’t much . The suburbs between the two are changing as they become less white and as younger white Georgians, whether native or transplanted, tend to be less conservative.
Linda Graham, a 52-year-old Republican, explained the landscape as she greeted U.S. Conservative pitchers last month for prosperity. “Absolutely four Republican votes in this house,” he said, including his young adult children who voted by ballot for absence. But as he looked around his cul-de-sac, he called the latest arrivals with much younger children still at home.
“I love them, but they’re Democrats,” Graham said. “I guess they’re not old enough to affect their money,” he reflected.
Early turnout adds to the concerns of the Republican Party. Three million voters have already voted, a record showing a second round in Georgia. The total early vote for the general election was 3.6 million.
According to Ryan Anderson, a nonpartisan data analyst in Atlanta, early turnout in Democratic Congressional districts outperforms Republican districts compared to the November election. At least 300,000 ballots are still pending due to absence.
Only three of Georgia’s 14 districts have garnered 80% of the total early votes of the fall. But all three are democratic districts and include the two most concentrated democratic districts, the fourth and fifth in the core of the Atlanta subway.
The lowest-performing Democratic district has a 74.8% mark compared to November, but is still higher than five of Georgia’s eight Republican districts. And in one of the two most concentrated districts of Republicans, early turnout is only 69.2% of what it was in the general election.