ATLANTA (AP) – The merchandise featured in Senator Kelly Loeffler’s campaign online store includes t-shirts and stickers with the name of Donald Trump and the message: “He’s still my president.”
The Georgia Republican is running television ads ahead of the Senate’s second round on Tuesday that criticizes his opponent, Rev. Raphael Warnock, as “dangerous” and “radical”.
Meanwhile, Loeffler’s colleague, Senator David Perdue, is warning Georgians that Democrats will pass a “socialist agenda” if their opponent, Jon Ossoff, wins on Tuesday.
In the last days of the campaigns that will decide to control the US Senate, Republican presidents are appealing to the most conservative part of the electorate. His firm embrace of the far right Trump wing of the Republican Party – even though he repeatedly refuses to acknowledge Trump’s defeat – and his caricatures of Democratic opponents may seem like a risky approach in a state that narrowly voted Democrat Joe Biden for president in November after years of steady democratic gains.
However, the strategy reflects the Republican wisdom prevalent in the Trump era: Republicans’ clearest path to victory, even in decisive states, is to increase support among a Republican base motivated by loyalty to the President and fear of Democrats. Still, the approach comes at the expense of a broader Republican coalition that included more urban and suburban and independent Republican-prone moderates who rejected the Republican brand under Trump.
“The president resonates with many people, as well as the buzzwords, so you hear a lot of ‘Trump’ and ‘socialism’,” said Michael McNeely, former vice president of the Republican Party of Georgia. “I would like us to live in a society where people talk about ideas, but it is not where we are.”
Trump may have complicated Perdue and Loeffler’s bet even more with the way he handled his defeat to Biden.
The president spread unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud and criticized Georgia’s Republican officials, including Governor Brian Kemp, who defended the election process. When Trump’s allies, including Perdue and Loeffler, supported the claims, some Republicans expressed concern that it might discourage some Trump loyalists from voting in the second round. Now, other Republicans are concerned that Republican candidates have turned away the more moderate voters repelled by Trump.
“No Republican is really happy with the situation we are in,” said Chip Lake, a former Republican Party adviser and principal adviser to Loeffler’s defeated rival, Dep. Doug Collins. “But sometimes when you play poker, you have to play the hand you received, and for us it starts with the president.”
Trump will visit Georgia for a final rally with Loeffler on Monday night, hours before the polls open. It is not clear whether Perdue will attend. The senator said on Thursday that he was in quarantine after being exposed to an aide who tested positive for coronavirus.
Democrats are fine with the decision by Republican senators to run as Trump Republicans and use exaggerated attacks. Opposition to the president has been a unifying force among his main supporters, and Democrats believe that the general tenor of Republicans falls apart with intermediate voters.
“We talked about something like expanding Medicaid. We talked about expanding the Pell Grants ”for low-income college students, said Ossoff at a recent stop in Marietta, north of Atlanta. “Does David Perdue denounce these things as socialism?”
Ossoff noted Perdue’s claims that a Democratic-led Senate would abolish private insurance; Ossoff and Warnock, in fact, support Biden’s proposal to add a federal insurance plan to private insurance exchanges, and not to abolish private insurance. “I just want people to have a choice,” said Ossoff.
The November comeback demonstrates the GOP trap. Biden beat Trump by about 12,000 votes out of 5 million cast in Georgia, making him the first Democratic presidential candidate to occupy the state since 1992. Biden’s record total vote for a Democrat in the state was driven by racial and ethnic diversification of metropolitan areas, but also changes in major Atlanta suburbs, where white voters have historically been inclined towards Republicans.
Still, Perdue got a few thousand votes from Trump’s total and led Ossoff by about 88,000 votes. Attendance to Republicans has also increased in small towns and rural areas, while Democrats in Georgia have had a negative disappointment in the general election, failing to achieve the expected gains in legislative disputes.
“We have already won this race once,” says Perdue on some of his campaign stops, echoing his consultants’ belief that his top priority is to maintain the enthusiasm of the Trump base. They add that they can corner the narrow slice of undecided voters with arguments that warn against giving Democrats into control of the House, Senate and White House.
Lake and McNeely, however, predicted that far-right attacks and Trump-centric appeals will not yield votes beyond the base, particularly amid a flood of publicity in a run-off campaign whose total spending could reach $ 500 millions.
“We came to the point of diminishing returns a long time ago,” said Lake.
They also deplored Trump’s continuing complaints about his defeat, even after his own attorney general said there was no evidence that the election was marked by fraud and courts across the country rejected the challenge to the result.
“If, for any reason, Republican candidates lose,” Lake said, “it will be difficult to write an autopsy on this runoff and not look directly at all the chaos that was created with electoral fraud.”
Early voting ended Thursday, with just over 3 million Georgians voting absent or in person. This is behind the final 3.65 million initial vote count before the general election. But early voting has already set a record for second-round attendance across the state of Georgia.
Jen Jordan, a Democratic state senator who in 2017 conquered a suburban Atlanta district long occupied by Republicans, acknowledges that her party has also shifted to grassroots strategy. But Jordan argued that Democrats still rooted her speech more in policy ideas, especially in access to health and public education, which she said had broad appeal. She said Perdue and Loeffler undermined their warnings of “socialism” by separating from most Republicans in Congress to support the president’s request for $ 2,000 pandemic aid payments to individual Americans.
“I have never heard the word socialism so much in my life, and they both think, yes, we are going to give everyone checks for $ 2,000,” said Jordan.
McNeely, the former state leader of the Republican Party, lamented that even if Perdue and Loeffler win, their campaigns keep Georgia away from a more centrist tradition. He cited Republican Senator Johnny Isakson, whose retirement paved the way for Kemp to nominate Loeffler.
Unlike many southern Republicans of his generation, Isakson was never a Democrat. But he passed the Georgia General Assembly at a time when Democrats dominated the state. In Washington, Isakson was a reliable Republican vote, but he avoided just parties and intensely avoided talking about Trump whenever possible.
“Sen. Isakson has learned to see things from a different perspective, “said McNeely, adding that Republican politicians must” think beyond campaigns and what the president is thinking “and that more voters must decide that” it doesn’t make you a bad guy or girl because you make a commitment. ”