The last day of voting in the second round election for two US Senate seats in Georgia is fast approaching, and current Republican David Perdue is leading in one race and Democratic challenger Rev. Raphael Warnock is ahead in the other , according to a recent Insider Advantage / Poll Fox 5 Atlanta.
The early voting period ends on January 1, four days before election day on January 5, with the results of the two disputes set to determine whether Republicans or Democrats control the action in the US Senate for the next two years.
More than 1.6 million voters voted in the first week of early voting, a turnout that is unusually high for runoff contests and on par with the participation seen in the November general election, which produced the state’s first victory by a Democrat, Joe Biden, in three decades.
The Insider Advantage / Fox 5 Atlanta poll puts Perdue ahead of Democratic opponent Jon Ossoff, a media executive who gained prominence with a narrow loss in a run for Congress in 2017, by a narrow margin of 1%, 49% -48 %. Warnock, senior pastor of the legendary Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and a supporter of the right to vote, is ahead in the same poll, beating Republican Kelly Loeffler by a 2% margin with 49% -47%.
Both Warnock’s and Perdue’s leadership are within the researcher’s margin of error – 4.4 percentage points – and both runs, 13 days earlier, seem destined to remain close.
Loeffler, a former Illinois-born business executive and donor to the Republican Party, whose husband runs the ICE company,
owner of the New York Stock Exchange, has yet to win an election. She was nominated for her seat by Governor Brian Kemp following the retirement of former Senator Johnny Isakson, against President Donald Trump’s will, and took office on January 6 this year. Not long after that, she sided with Warnock and addressed her congregation at Ebenezer Baptist.
The second round of the Georgia Senate has important implications for President-elect Biden’s next administration. Victories in both contests for Democratic candidates would mean the Senate is split 50-50, with elected vice president Kamala Harris, who has just left her seat in the House as California’s Democratic senator, eligible to vote for the tiebreaker.
All eyes are on Georgia since the November general election left both Senate seats at stake, following strong finals by Ossoff and Warnock. Georgia state law requires that winning candidates have obtained 50% of the vote.
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Both Republican and Democratic candidates have been busy in the week of the campaign holiday. Loeffler met with black supporters, including Kelvin and Jenelle King, owners of Osprey Management, a high-profile construction firm in the Atlanta area, on Wednesday after receiving a letter with 100 signatures from black pastors asking her to modify the tone of his campaign towards black churches and clergy. Loeffler repeatedly referred to Warnock as “radical” and “socialist”.
Ossoff made a campaign stop in downtown Atlanta on Wednesday. During the demonstration, Ossoff agreed with the president’s recently taken position that the $ 600 checks set to be sent to most Americans under the terms of pandemic conciliatory relief legislation would be increased to $ 2,000.
Trump and Biden campaigned in Georgia on behalf of their favorite candidates in the Senate race, although Trump was criticized for running complaints about his electoral defeat, rather than giving a full endorsement to Republican candidates when he traveled to Valdosta, Georgia.
Read: Trump campaigned for Loeffler and Perdue – and for himself – Saturday night in Georgia