Democrats and Republicans take different approaches to the Georgia Senate bombing

ATLANTA: Jon Ossoff took the stage in Columbus and looked out into a parking lot full of cars, fans honking their horns in approval as he declared that “change has come to Georgia.”

Hours earlier, Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler stepped up to a microphone in suburban Atlanta and addressed hundreds of enthusiastic supporters at the Cobb County Republican Party headquarters.

The first-year senator and her Florida colleague, Senator Marco Rubio, shocked the crowd with their insistence that the change offered by Ossoff and his fellow Senate Democrat Raphael Warnock meant that “radical elements” would control Washington.

Those opening salvoes of Georgia’s twin Senate runoff campaigns – Ossoff seeks to topple Republican Senator David Perdue and Warnock facing off against Loeffler – show the totally different approaches the two parties are taking to the unusual circumstances that make this new. bipartisan battlefield is the epicenter of a national battle for control of the Senate.

Both sides are playing with the central supporters, the most reliable voters among the 5 million who divided their ballots more or less evenly between the two parties in the first round.

But for Democrats, it’s apparently a more fragmented, vote-for-voter approach, while Republicans are pushing a broad brand message through the media.

Whichever strategy is most effective on January 5 next year will help determine the ambitions and scope of President-elect Joe Biden’s term, depending on which party controls the chamber.

Republicans need only one of Georgia’s seats to get a majority, while Democrats must win both to get a 50-50 Senate, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in the runoff vote.

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“This is literally the showdown of every showdown,” Rubio told the Cobb County crowd, many of them without masks like the Florida senator. “This is Georgia’s decision. But it is the United States that will live with the consequences.”

In that context, Democratic campaigns are still limiting the scope of their in-person events as COVID-19 cases rise nationally, observing social distancing and masking protocols just as Biden did in his presidential bid.

Meanwhile, they are quietly increasing voter contact and registration efforts as they try to replicate their record turnout after Biden garnered nearly 2.5 million votes to lead President Donald Trump to the top of the list.

Republicans are responding by mirroring their presidential standard bearer as well, even after his national defeat.

They are embracing in-person events without restrictions just as Trump spent the final weeks of the presidential campaign holding his signature mass rallies in battle states across the country, including two rallies in Georgia.

And Republicans are using the events to fully embrace the nationalization of the second round, urging voters to view the election as a simple one: a Senate with New York Democrat Chuck Schumer as Majority Leader or one with Republican from Kentucky Mitch McConnell continuing in that role.

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“Runoff favors strong, well-organized campaigns,” Ossoff’s campaign manager Ellen Foster told the Associated Press, explaining the tactical emphasis of the Democrats beyond their public events.

In the days after the confirmation of the second round, Foster said the campaign has made “tens of thousands of calls” to existing voters while hiring new employees focused on registering new voters before the registration deadline of Sept. 7. December.

Its targets include some 23,000 young Georgians reaching the legal voting age of 18 between the general elections on November 3 and the second round of January.

The Democratic campaign also said it has nearly 22,000 volunteers scheduled for more than 60,000 hours of volunteer shifts over the next two weeks.

To be sure, Republicans have the expansive campaign infrastructure to reach their voters as well.

But the first days of the second round have been dominated, publicly at least, by radical attacks, from framing Ossoff and Warnock as too leftist to questioning Georgia’s electoral process with Biden with a narrow lead over the state’s 16 electoral votes. .

Loeffler went on Wednesday to accuse Warnock of possessing “a Marxist ideology,” an exaggerated caricature that, according to Atlanta minister Terrence Clark’s campaign spokesman, was intended to “scare Georgians away.”

The day before, Loeffler had joined Perdue in a joint statement condemning Georgia’s vote-counting procedures as “disgraceful” and calling for his Republican colleague, Brad Raffensperger, to resign as secretary of state.

In both cases, Republicans have lacked supporting details, but that’s not necessarily the point.

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The goal, said former Senate candidate and US Rep. Doug Collins, is to keep Republican voters “buzzed.”

Collins is now leading Trump’s recount effort in Georgia, although there is no evidence that the process will reverse Biden’s leadership before the recount is finalized and certified.

Meanwhile, Democrats hope that the presidential result will be a boon for turnout simply because it finally validates the perennial assertion by party leaders that Georgia is a true battleground state.

However, replicating the feat would go against the party’s history in recent decades, as Republicans proved more adept at maintaining enthusiasm for the second-round vote.

“They know they say we’re not running for second elections,” former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin told Democrats this week at another Ossoff rally. “Well, we are going to prove them wrong.”