President-elect Joe Biden campaigned in Atlanta Tuesday for the state’s two Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate ahead of their runoff elections on Jan. 5.
Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are locked in a fierce battle with incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, with control of Congress hanging in the balance.
Ossoff, who owns an investigative journalism company, and Warnock, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, have been constantly portrayed by their Republican opponents as too extreme for conservative Georgians to tolerate.
Biden, who won the presidential election last month, stepped in to punch back at the attacks from Perdue and Loeffler, pointing out the two Republican senators “fully embraced” a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn Georgia’s election results that the U.S. Supreme Court shot down last week.
“Maybe they thought they represented Texas,” Biden said at the Pullman-Pratt Yard on Tuesday. “Well, if you want to do the bidding of Texas, you should be running in Texas, not in Georgia.”
Perdue and Loeffler said in a joint statement they backed the lawsuit for transparency purposes to make sure President Donald Trump had “every legal recourse available” to probe the election’s integrity following his loss to Biden in Georgia by 11,779 votes.
Biden also pushed back on the images of Ossoff and Warnock as too radical for Georgia, noting he needs Peach State voters to put the two candidates in Congress to advance an agenda of unity after years of divisive politics under Trump.
“If you do, the doors of promise and progress are going to open in Washington,” Biden said. “We’re going to start to get done what we have to do, and more than anything, we’ll make the lives of every Georgian [and] the lives of every American better.”
That bipartisan message has not convinced national and local Republican leaders backing Perdue and Loeffler, who have made fears over a Democrat-controlled Congress and White House central to their runoff campaigns.
A Republican National Committee spokeswoman dismissed Biden’s speech as a smokescreen meant to obscure a “far-left, radical agenda” that Republicans say Ossoff and Warnock, if elected, would follow on orders from national Democratic leaders.
In particular, Republican leaders have sought to tie Ossoff and Warnock to calls from some national Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups to reduce funding for local law-enforcement agencies – though both Democratic candidates in Georgia have stressed they do not support defunding police.
“It’s crazy talk to say you want to defund police,” Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway said Tuesday. “I urge all Republicans, Independents and conservative Democrats to make sure we don’t have a government controlled by one party.”
Fending off the attacks, Ossoff and Warnock have largely stuck to platforms of expanding access to health care, increasing COVID-19 relief, raising the federal minimum wage and strengthening voting rights.
The importance of next month’s election for American government has been the main focal point since the four contenders advanced last month to the runoffs, particularly as Georgia flipped for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992.
Wins for both Ossoff and Warnock would give Democrats control of Congress and the White House for at least the next two years. A loss by either would hand Republicans a check in the Senate on the Biden administration.
Biden drove that point home Tuesday in Atlanta, echoing politicians on both sides who have spent weeks traveling to Georgia to stir up voter excitement for their preferred pair of candidates.
“I need two senators from this state who want to get something done, not two senators who are going to get in the way,” Biden said. “Because, look, getting nothing done just hurts Georgia.”
Biden’s visit to Georgia came a day after Electoral College members from states across the country sent him enough votes to formally claim victory over Trump, whose loss in Georgia was certified after two statewide recounts overseen by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
Trump still has not conceded defeat even as his most prominent backers like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, have acknowledged Biden’s win since Monday after weeks of silence.
Instead, the president has stuck to a strategy of casting doubt on the election by making fraud claims, posing a risk that many Georgia voters loyal to Trump may skip the runoff out of disillusionment in the state’s election system and scuttle Republicans’ efforts to keep a grip on the Senate.
Republican leaders are counting on conservative voters to outmatch the huge Democratic turnout seen in the Nov. 3 general election, largely by casting Ossoff and Warnock as “socialist” candidates bent on increasing spending in government programs and carving up police budgets.
“The moment of truth is right now,” Perdue said at a Monday night rally in Atlanta. “We’re going to stand up to this onslaught that will perpetrate a socialist state here in Georgia.”
Ossoff and Warnock have portrayed their opponents as out of touch with average Georgians by invoking controversial stock trades the wealthy Republican incumbents made early during the COVID-19 pandemic – though Loeffler and Perdue say federal investigators cleared them of any wrongdoing.
“[We’re] running against the Bonnie and Clyde of politics,” Ossoff said at a rally Monday afternoon in Atlanta. “We have two United States senators more concerned with using their offices to enrich themselves than taking care of ‘we the people’ who pay their salaries.”
The three-week early voting period for the Senate runoff elections started on Monday.
