Democratic presidential nominee and former vice president Joe Biden speaks during a campaign stop in Warm Springs, Ga., on Oct. 27, 2020. (Biden campaign video)
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden rallied in Warm Springs, Ga., and Atlanta Tuesday to deliver a speech focused on unity and healing with one week left before the general election on Nov. 3.
Biden’s appearance at the retreat of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt highlighted Georgia’s growing importance as a potential swing state after years of firm Republican control and high hopes among local Democratic leaders for flipping state legislative, congressional and U.S. Senate seats.
In a roughly 20-minute speech, the former vice president invoked Warm Springs as a place of healing for the polio-stricken Roosevelt, likening it to the symbolic healing Biden said his campaign offers in contrast to the often chaotic administration of President Donald Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This place, Warm Springs, is a reminder that though broken, each of us can be healed,” Biden said. “That as a people and a country, we can overcome this devastating virus, that we can heal a suffering world and, yes, we can restore our soul and save our country.”
Recent polls have shown Biden and Trump neck-and-neck in the fight for Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, which have not gone to a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992.
Biden has sought to emphasize Trump’s response to coronavirus as evidence of the president’s being unfit for office and out of step with average Americans. Trump has largely stuck with questioning Biden’s physical health and likening his policies to socialism.
Georgia Democrats are banking on changing demographics and voting patterns, particularly in the Atlanta suburbs, to help flip the presidency, a congressional seat and control of the state House of Representatives in their favor.
Trump’s campaign and state Republican leaders are not sweating Biden’s late-race appearance in Georgia despite Trump’s narrow margin of victory in the 2016 election and strengthening support for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, who are competing for the state’s two U.S. Senate seats.
The president’s campaign was quick to note its field organizers have fanned out across the state and reached millions of people via mailers and phone calls.
“After ignoring Georgia for months, a last-minute visit from Biden won’t make a dent in the advantage we’ve built thanks to our field army and frequent visits from President Trump and his family,” said Savannah Viar, a Trump campaign spokeswoman.
The president as well as his son, Donald Trump Jr., and daughter, Ivanka Trump, have made several stops in Georgia in recent months. Tuesday’s speech in Warm Springs was Biden’s first visit to Georgia since winning his party’s nomination.
Speaking at a second rally Tuesday evening in Atlanta, Biden framed Georgia as a battleground state this election especially due to its two U.S. Senate seats being up for grabs, saying, “I can’t tell you how important it is that we flip the United States Senate.”
“There’s no state more consequential than Georgia in that fight,” Biden said.
Biden was joined at a get-out-the-vote rally in Atlanta Tuesday evening by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, local elected officials and the musician Common. His visit came on the heels of a campaign stop last week by his running mate, Kamala Harris.
While Biden spoke in Warm Springs, Ossoff and Warnock joined forces as they have done frequently in recent months to hold a rally in Jonesboro.
Trump supporters including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp also rallied in Manchester, Ga., just outside Warm Springs. Warnock’s opponents, U.S. Kelly Loeffler and U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, were scheduled Tuesday and throughout this week for campaign events elsewhere in the state.
The three-week early voting period, which has already drawn more than 3 million votes in Georgia along with absentee ballots, is set to last through Friday.
Part of the Cabin Bluff property in Camden County will become a state wildlife management area. (Photo Credit: The Nature Conservancy)
ATLANTA – The Georgia Board of Natural Resources voted Tuesday to acquire nearly 8,000 acres of the historic Cabin Bluff property in Camden County for designation as a state wildlife management area.
The Nature Conservancy and the Open Space Institute bought the property in 2018 along with an adjacent tract of nearly 3,200 acres. The smaller site is slated to become a retreat for a Jacksonville, Fla.-based church congregation.
Located just across the Intracoastal Waterway from the Cumberland Island National Seashore, Cabin Bluff includes a diverse landscape of salt marshes, tidal creeks and longleaf pine woodlands. It serves as habitat for threatened and endangered species including the gopher tortoise, wood stork and eastern indigo snake.
“Cabin Bluff and neighboring Ceylon are significant natural areas in Georgia,” said Kim Elliman, president and CEO of the Open Space Institute. “An incredible array of native species will continue to call the property and its waters home, and the public will have more access to the land than ever in its history.”
Several government agencies and nonprofits chipped in the $11 million purchase price of the portion of the property due to become a wildlife management area.
More than $2.5 million came through the first round of Georgia Outdoor Stewardship Act funding, a program Georgia voters approved as a constitutional amendment on the 2018 statewide ballot. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service provided $3 million in grants, and the Open Space Institute contributed 500,000.
The wildlife management area will be set aside for recreational pursuits including fishing, hunting, kayaking, wildlife viewing and nature photography. The state will officially assume ownership of the land next year.
The land also will serve as a buffer to the adjacent Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base.
Rev. Raphael Warnock (right) rallies with Jon Ossoff (left) at a joint campaign stop in DeKalb County in Georgia’s U.S. Senate races on Oct. 3, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Two Democratic candidates running for U.S. Senate seats from Georgia gained the backing of presidential nominee Joe Biden on Monday, a day before the former vice president is set to visit the state ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
The endorsements for Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff come as both face increased attacks from Republican opponents in their respective Senate races amid a blitz of television and social-media ads down the home stretch before Election Day.
Warnock, who is the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, is running with about 20 other candidates to unseat U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a Republican and Atlanta businesswoman appointed to fill retired U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson’s seat in January.
He has the double challenge of fending off fierce attacks from another Republican, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Gainesville, who is angling to top Loeffler in votes on Nov. 3 and make an expected runoff in January against Warnock.
Ossoff, who owns an investigative journalism company, is taking on U.S. Sen. David Perdue in a heated race that has shown the two campaigns neck-and-neck in the polls. Tens of millions of dollars have been poured into both Ossoff and Warnock’s campaigns as well as their opponents.
Biden’s endorsement particularly of Warnock highlighted tension in the race between Loeffler and Collins, neither of which have received the endorsement of their party’s top leader, President Donald Trump. The president has signaled he likely won’t endorse either Republican until one advances to the runoff.
In statements sent Monday, Biden praised Warnock and Ossoff for their campaigns’ focus on health care, voting rights and workers’ rights.
“We need [Warnock] in the Senate to keep up that fight and help push our country forward to restore the soul of this nation,” Biden said of Warnock.
“I know Jon will put [his] passion to work for all Georgians, fighting for Georgia’s working families, not the powerful,” Biden said of Ossoff.
More than 2.8 million Georgians have cast ballots so far in the upcoming general and special elections. Early voting lasts through Friday.
ATLANTA – Health-care transparency legislation aimed at filling a gap in Georgia’s new surprise billing law will take effect this Sunday, in time for the annual insurance enrollment period.
House Bill 789 will establish a rating system Georgians can use to determine which physician specialty groups in their insurance plan’s provider network serve a given hospital.
The legislation will apply to anesthesiologists, pathologists, radiologists and emergency room doctors, typically specialists responsible for the most incidents of surprise billing, the extra hospital charges that result from procedures performed by out-of-network specialists.
The surprise billing legislation that gained the most attention during this year’s General Assembly session applies only to health insurance plans regulated by the state, Georgia Rep. Mark Newton, R-Augusta, House Bill 789’s chief sponsor, said Monday.
Newton’s companion bill is aimed at the approximately 60% of Georgians enrolled in plans that are exempt from state regulation, typically large employer plans regulated through federal law.
“The public deserves to know when they go to an emergency room if the doctor who fixes their kid’s leg or sews them up is in their [insurance plan’s network],” said Newton, who works as an emergency room doctor.
Under House Bill 789, when an insurance company advertises a hospital as in its coverage network, the insurer will be required to disclose that hospital’s “surprise bill rating.” If the hospital’s rating is less than four, the insurer will have to disclose which of the four specialties are not in its network.
Ethan James, executive vice president for external affairs at the Georgia Hospital Association, said the legislation originally called for using a “star” system to rate hospitals, prompting concerns that patients could confuse the rating with the hospital’s quality of care.
The rating system was changed as the bill went through the House to use red lights and green lights to indicate how many specialties are within a hospital’s network, he said.
James said the legislation will go a long way toward easing patients’ concerns over how much their health care will cost.
“A patient cannot heal physically if they are stressed financially,” he said. “[Now], patients will have this information when making health-care decisions.”
The legislation requires insurance companies to post hospital ratings on their websites for easy consumer access.
But Newton said he hopes the ratings system eventually will be used primarily by the human resources officers who buy insurance plans for large employers, leaving consumers free from the hassle of doing their own research.
That’s likely to happen because the disclosure the legislation requires will serve as an incentive for insurance companies to work with hospitals and specialists to offer patients robust coverage plans, he said.
“What we want is the transparency spotlight to be on the insurer, the hospital and the [specialty] provider,” Newton said. “It’s going to put pressure on all of them to come up with four checks.”
The line stretched around the block at South Cobb Regional Library in Mableton where voters waited in line for hours to cast ballots on the first day of early voting in the Nov. 3 general election on Oct. 12, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
With the Nov. 3 elections just around the corner, Georgians are already heading to the polls in record-breaking numbers amid the dual challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the biggest test of the state’s new voting machines.
More than 2.4 million ballots had been cast by mail and in person during the early-voting period as of noon Friday, marking around one-third of Georgia’s roughly 7.5 million registered voters.
Georgians are facing one of the most consequential elections in their lifetimes with a presidential contest, both of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats, congressional, state and local offices all on the ballot, while state Democratic leaders are vying to flip the Georgia House for the first time since 2005.
Concerns over the virus, recent instances of long lines and doubts over the election’s integrity have driven unprecedented numbers of voters to cast absentee ballots and take advantage of the three-week early-voting period that started last week and ends next Friday.
Nearly 900,000 absentee ballots had been cast by noon Friday, vastly more than the roughly 109,000 ballots cast at this point in the 2016 election. Add those numbers to the roughly 1.5 million in-person early votes logged so far and Georgia’s ballot count to date has exceeded this point in the 2016 election by 121%.
“We are working to make Georgia’s election system fair, voter-centric, smooth and uniform,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said at a recent news conference. “So far with the numbers, we are succeeding.”
Even so, thousands of voters in metro Atlanta and elsewhere in the state have endured hours-long waits in line at local polling places to vote early, echoing the lengthy queues Georgia saw in the June 9 primary elections and prompting worries over how voting for Election Day on Nov. 3 will fare.
And election officials have met with some technical issues involving the new machines including an overwhelmed check-in system that contributed to delays and a software glitch that wiped some candidates’ names from the ballot. Officials have said both issues were fixed.
County officials who manage the nuts-and-bolts of elections at the local level have pushed to staff up poll workers with adequate training in the new machines and implement sanitization practices amid the pandemic that aim to keep voters safe but have prolonged wait times.
In particular, delays have come as voters who requested absentee ballots but show up to vote in person must formally cancel their mail-in ballots before they can vote. That extra step has extended wait times in precincts across the state, according to local officials.
“That’s slowing things down a bit,” said Janine Eveler, director of the Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration.
Eveler, like other county election chiefs, will have help from a temporary rule allowing election officials to start opening and processing absentee ballots as of this week. Those ballots can’t be tabulated yet, but officials agree the head start should relieve some counting pressure on Election Day.
Raffensperger and other officials are also expecting the three weeks of early voting with such large turnout will give poll workers ample preparation in how to run the new machines before Nov. 3. Lack of know-how at some polling places was a major factor in long lines seen during the June 9 primaries, according to officials.
Installed statewide earlier this year, the new $104 million voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems drew intense scrutiny well before the COVID-19 pandemic set in, largely from voting-rights groups pushing for Georgia to adopt an all-paper ballot system instead of touchscreens.
A lawsuit brought to halt use of the new machines for the 2020 elections prompted a federal judge to require paper backups of voter registration information at polling places to be available if the check-in equipment experiences glitches.
Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance that filed suit, is seeking the court’s intervention to require that certain precincts allow observers inside polling places so they can more closely monitor the machines’ performance for the rest of early voting and on Election Day.
“We think that in this next week, it’s going to be really important to try and gather evidence of what’s wrong,” Marks said in a recent interview. “We’re trying very hard to get in.”
Raffensperger has sought to assure quick technical assistance will be on hand for Election Day from the vendor Dominion as well as with backing from local companies that are helping provide tech support, donate plexiglass screens at polling places and purchase more absentee ballot drop-off boxes for counties.
With turnout expected to top 5 million voters, Raffensperger has called for more Georgians to cast ballots by mail or during early voting to help ease the bottleneck that could strain polling places on Election Day. So far, the state appears on track to have enough votes collected before Nov. 3 to make the upcoming election more manageable, Raffensperger said.
“That will be a manageable election,” Raffensperger said. “The more they vote early, the less there will be left on the playing field to show up on Election Day.”
