Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler refused multiple times to acknowledge that President Trump lost the presidential election during a contentious debate with her opponent Sunday night ahead of the runoff election for her Georgia Senate seat next month.
“The president has every right to every legal recourse, and that’s what’s taking place,” Loeffler said several times in response to whether she thinks the president lost his reelection bid to President-elect Joe Biden last month.
“We’ve run two audits and those audits discovered thousands of ballots across several counties here in Georgia that were not counted,” she continued.
“We need to hold folks accountable involved in these investigations to make sure that they move more quickly, because everything’s at stake,” said Loeffler, who was appointed to the Senate last year after her predecessor resigned.
A day earlier on Saturday, Trump held a rally supporting Loeffler and Georgia’s other GOP Senate candidate, Senator David Perdue, whose race is also headed towards a runoff election next month. The two seats will decide which political party controls the upper chamber. Republicans have won 50 seats already, but if Democrats win both Georgia seats, incoming vice president Kamala Harris would become the deciding vote.
The Trump campaign has claimed Biden’s razor-thin victory of about 12,000 votes in usually reliably red Georgia was the result of widespread voter fraud but has failed to produce evidence of fraud on a massive enough scale to change the election result. The campaign and its supporters have lost a slew of legal challenges in Georgia and other battleground states seeking to overturn the former vice president’s victory. Georgia’s results were certified last month.
During the hour-long debate, Loeffler also repeatedly called her opponent, Rev. Raphael Warnock, a “radical liberal.”
“The Democrats want to fundamentally change America, and the agent of change is my opponent,” Loeffler said.
Warnock, who is pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, accused Loeffler of attacking him in lieu of having a plan to combat the coronavirus and to deflect from her controversial stock trades while a senator.
“It’s clear to me that my opponent is going to work really hard spending millions of dollars of her own money trying to push a narrative about me because she’s clearly decided that she does not have a case to be made for why she should stay in that seat,” Warnock said.