Trump’s legacy is ‘on the chopping block’ during Georgia Senate runoffs: Bill McGurn
WSJ’s Bill McGurn says Biden’s goals would be ‘much more difficult’ to achieve under a Republican-led Senate.
President Trump, his predecessor and soon-to-be successor in the White House, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, are all weighing in on Georgia’s two Jan. 5 Senate runoff elections, where the Republican majority in the chamber is up for grabs.
President-elect Joe Biden on Friday took to Twitter to urge people in Georgia who are not registered to vote to do so by Monday’s deadline.
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“Georgia — Our work isn’t over yet. Register to vote by December 7th, and let’s flip the Senate,” Biden tweeted as he linked to a video from Iwillvote.com, a website launched by the Democratic National Committee to help Americans learn more about how to register to vote.
Ron Klain, who Biden selected as his White House chief of staff in his incoming administration, said the president-elect planned to campaign in Georgia before the Jan. 5 elections, which will determine if the GOP holds onto its Senate majority or if the Democrats will control both houses of Congress as well as the presidency.
The balance of power for the next Senate coming out of last month’s elections is 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats. That means Democrats must win both of Georgia’s runoffs to make it a 50-50 Senate. If that occurs, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would be the tie-breaking vote, giving her party a razor-thin majority in the chamber.
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In Georgia, where state law dictates a runoff if no candidate reaches 50% of the vote, GOP Sen. David Perdue narrowly missed avoiding a runoff, winning 49.75% of the vote in the November election. Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff trailed by roughly 87,000 votes.
In the other race, appointed Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler captured nearly 26% of the vote in a whopping 20-candidate special election to fill the final two years of the term of former GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson. Democratic candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock won nearly 33% of the vote.
Biden’s tweet came a couple of hours before his old boss, former President Barack Obama, held a virtual rally with Ossoff and Warnock. The former president stars in an ad for Ossoff that started airing on TV earlier this week.
Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia House Democratic leader and her party’s 2018 gubernatorial nominee who was narrowly defeated by GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, also joined the virtual rally Friday, which comes just 10 days before the start of early in-person voting in the runoff elections.
Obama called Georgia the “center of our civic universe, because the special election in Georgia is going to determine ultimately the course of the Biden presidency and whether Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can deliver legislatively all the commitments they made.”
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Around the same time that Obama’s headlined the Democrats’ virtual rally, Pence joined Perdue for a “Defend the Majority Rally” in the coastal city of Savannah.
Loeffler cancelled at the last minute, after a staffer on her campaign was killed in an auto accident.
"President Trump and I need David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler back in the Republican majority in the United States Senate," Pence emphasized. We need the Peach State to defend the majority. The road to the Senate Republican majority runs right through the state of Georgia."
It was Pence’s second trip to campaign in Georgia. He made stops on a bus tour with Perdue and Loeffler in the northern Georgia cities of Canton and Gainesville on Nov. 20.
CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST FOX NEWS REPORTING ON THE GEORGIA RUNOFFS
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia was scheduled to join the vice president and the two GOP senators in Savannah, but cancelled due to what was described as a family emergency.
Pence’s visit on Friday came one day before Trump is scheduled to parachute into Georgia to campaign on behalf of Perdue and Loeffler.
The president will headline a rally at 7 p.m. Saturday at the airport in the southern Georgia city of Valdosta. The event will be carried live by Fox News.
On Friday, the president promoted his stop, tweeting “Big Rally Saturday Night in Georgia!!!”
Saturday’s event will be Trump’s first stop in Georgia since he campaigned there on his own behalf in October, when he held a large rally in Macon.
The president’s visit comes as he and his allies continue to try and reverse the results of the presidential contest in Georgia, a once solidly red state that’s turned into a crucial battleground in recent years. Biden carried the state by roughly 12,000 votes in last month’s election.
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