ATLANTA (AP) – For more than four years, President Donald Trump has dominated the Republican Party and all American politics. Now Georgia decides what comes next.
Two Senate second rounds on Tuesday, just 15 days before Trump leaves office, will not only determine which party controls the Senate, but will also offer the first clues as to how long Trump can maintain his control over the country’s politics afterwards leaving the White House.
Democrats are trying to prove that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia and nationally was not just a reaction by Trump, but a lasting change to a once solidly republican state. Its candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, have been pushing to solidify Democratic gains among young voters in younger urban and suburban areas around Atlanta, along with strong black participation.
For Republicans, who saw David Perdue and Senator Kelly Loeffler run as loyal to Trump, the question is how long to embrace the president’s disruptive policy – even in response to his demands that election officials defy the law to nullify his defeat – can generate victories on the battlefield.
“The party has a real choice to make as to where we go from here,” said Michael McNeely, a former Republican vice president for Georgia. “Candidates or those already in office will say, hey, we will go beyond the Trump presidency or we will continue to assume the leadership of President Trump or former President Trump.”
Republicans need to win only one of two seats in the vote to maintain control of the Senate. Democrats need to win both by a 50-50 split that would make vice president-elect Kamala Harris, as president of the Senate, the tiebreaker vote. The stakes are high enough that Biden and Trump were campaigning in the state hours apart on Monday.
In Atlanta, Biden urged his supporters to “make their voices heard again”. Trump was scheduled for an evening rally in the city of Dalton, in northern Georgia.
Loeffler, a nominee in her first campaign, and Perdue, who is trying to win a second term after the end of the first Sunday, chose a strategy that worked for several of her Republican colleagues who won highly contested races in November.
Trump fueled Republican turnout, especially in rural areas and small towns, which oppressed Democrats in states less diverse than Georgia. If the trend continues for Perdue or Loeffler, Republicans owe their majority in large part to Trump’s success in attracting voters who had previously left.
But Democratic victories would hold Republicans more directly accountable for Trump’s rise and fall. The worst case scenario for Republicans would be Ossoff and Warnock capitalizing again on the outskirts of Atlanta, as they watched the drop in turnout for rural and small towns in November, when Trump was in the vote.
The growing and diversified suburbs, which not long ago ensured state victories for the Republican Party, have turned to Democrats in the Trump era not only in Georgia, but in metropolitan areas like Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix.
Trump has shown since November that he has no intention of taking it easy. He repeatedly denied defeat and in a weekend call to Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanded that he “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory.
This call, recorded by The Associated Press, demonstrates what Perdue and Loeffler faced – and chose to embrace. Both are wealthy businessmen who came to politics from the center-right faction of the American establishment, rather than the more populist crowd that propelled Trump. But Perdue and Loeffler defined their mandates in Washington by the proximity to which they align themselves with a president who remade republicanism in his image.
“I supported the president 100% of the time. I’m proud to do that, ”said Loeffler in one of his final interviews on Fox News.
While Trump criticized the electoral fraud in November that even his then attorney general said did not happen, Perdue and Loeffler asked Raffensperger to step down. Instead, Raffensperger presided over several counts that left Biden as the winner in Georgia by about 12,000 votes out of 5 million. Senators also never defended Governor Brian Kemp, as Trump considered him “incompetent” and asked for his resignation, less than three years after the president endorsed Kemp in a Republican primary dispute.
Many Georgia Republicans embrace the Trump brand, at least publicly.
“Trump took a lot of people out of the bank,” former US Representative Jack Kingston, a Trump ally, said in a recent interview. “He appealed to disenfranchised and disaffected voters. With him out, it’s a different ball game and that’s what the Republicans, starting with David and Kelly, are trying to replicate. “
Trump received about 385,000 more votes in Georgia than he did four years ago. It was part of a national increase to 74 million votes, the second largest popular presidential vote in history. Biden, however, set the record at 81 million, and his total in Georgia was about 600,000 ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 mark.
The president’s brand is even more risky and rewarding in Georgia because of how the votes of the two parties are distributed: metropolitan areas with democratic trends are growing, while rural pockets and small towns – the center of Trump – are not. Suburbs are changing as they become less white and as young white Georgians, whether native or transplanted, tend to be less conservative.
Linda Graham, a 52-year-old Republican, explained the landscape as she greeted the canvassers last month from conservative Americans for Prosperity. “Absolutely four Republican votes in this house,” she said, including her young adult children who voted absent. But when looking around her dead end, she cited newcomers with much younger children still at home.
“I love them, but they are Democrats,” said Graham. “They are not old enough to affect their money, I think,” she mused.
Participation in early voting is raising concerns for the Republican Party. Three million voters have already voted, a record for a runoff in Georgia. The total number of early votes for the general election was 3.6 million.
According to Ryan Anderson, a nonpartisan data analyst in Atlanta, early participation in Democratic electoral districts outpaces Republican districts compared to the November election. There are still at least 300,000 pending absentee ballots.
Only three of the 14 districts of the House of Georgia reached 80% of the total votes in the early autumn. But all three are Democratic districts and include the two most concentrated Democratic districts, the 4th and 5th in the Atlanta metropolitan center.
The worst-performing Democratic district has a 74.8% mark compared to November, but is still larger than five of Georgia’s eight Republican districts. And in one of the two most concentrated districts for Republicans, early participation is only 69.2% of what it was in the general election.