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ATLANTA: President-elect Joe Biden urged Georgia voters on Monday (January 4) to send two Democrats to Washington in Tuesday’s runoff that will decide control of the United States Senate, while President Donald Trump prepared his own speech to keep the camera in Republican hands.
The Georgia races pit a pair of incumbent Republicans, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, against Democratic rivals Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, respectively.
“It’s a new year and tomorrow may be a new day for Atlanta, Georgia and the United States,” Biden said at his event in the state capital, while criticizing the outgoing president.
He said the Trump administration had “gotten off to a terrible start” with the slow rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. “The president spends more time whining and complaining than doing something about the problem,” he said.
He said Democratic candidates, if elected, will ensure that US $ 2,000 stimulus checks are awarded to Americans as the economy struggles through the coronavirus pandemic.
READ: Why Georgia’s runoff winners might not be known for days?
Georgia, a long-established solid Republican state, surprised the nation in November by backing a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in nearly three decades. That has raised the Liberals’ hopes for Warnock and Ossoff, although they face an uphill battle and need twin victories to deny Republicans a majority in the Senate that they could use to block Biden’s legislative agenda.
Later Monday, Trump will address a rally in Dalton, a heavily Republican city in northwest Georgia.
Biden and Trump’s dueling appearances in the southern state on Monday illustrated the high stakes of the contest, in which 3 million have already voted.
A sweep by the two Democrats would hand over control to Biden’s party, as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would carry out the 50-50 House tiebreaker vote. That would make it easier for Biden to enact further coronavirus relief and address climate change, as Democrats also control the House of Representatives.
Neither of the Senate candidates won a majority in the November 3 election, prompting the runoff elections.
‘NEGATIVE VOTE’
Trump continues to claim, without evidence, that his loss in November was the result of widespread voter fraud, a claim that reviews by state and federal election officials, multiple courts and the US Department of Justice have rejected.
In a call Saturday to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump pressured the Republican official to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat, suggesting that Raffensperger’s failure to change the November results could hurt turnout. Republican in the second round of the Senate.
“There is nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump said, according to an audio recording of the call published by the Washington Post. Raffensperger rejected his request.
Democrats and election experts say Trump’s efforts almost certainly broke the law. Biden, who won Georgia by nearly 12,000 votes, did not mention the call directly in his comments Monday.
Loeffler said Monday night that he would object to the certification of the election results in Congress on Wednesday, joining a dozen other Republican senators and more than 100 Republican members of the House. The move has virtually no chance of nullifying Biden’s victory.
READ: Leave your guns at home, Washington police warn pro-Trump rally attendees
It is unclear whether Trump’s actions and his repeated claims of voter fraud will affect the outcome of the Senate election. Strategists from both parties say the outcome could likely depend on how many Republican voters turn out Tuesday, given the strong Democratic turnout in early voting.
“If we get our vote on Election Day, I think Perdue and Loeffler have a good chance of winning,” Cobb County Republican Party Chairman Jason Shepherd told Reuters.
Trump warned Raffensperger on Saturday that Republican voters could become discouraged if Biden’s victory was allowed to stand.
“Because of what he has done to the president, a lot of people are not going to vote and a lot of people are going to vote against,” he said on the call. He previously asked Raffensperger and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, also a Republican, to resign for failing to support his allegations of voter fraud.
Senate campaigns have erased spending records and spurred unprecedented turnout, as political groups have inundated the state with a tsunami of publicity.
