Trump to Rally Georgians on Eve of Senate Runoffs after Urging Raffensperger to Reverse His Loss

Fresh off a phone call where he may have broken the law by urging Georgia’s secretary of state to find votes for his failed re-election bid, President Donald Trump is heading to the Peach State to rally voters for senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue ahead of Tuesday’s runoff election.

Trump is slated to appear Monday at a 9 p.m. rally for the two incumbents in Dalton, in Northwest Georgia, where early voting turnout has not been strong.

Dalton is the county seat of Whitfield County, where less than 30 percent of registered voters cast a ballot early, either in-person or through the mail.

President-elect Joe Biden also is heading to Georgia Monday, where he is expected to appear at a 4:30 p.m. campaign event in Atlanta for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

If Ossoff and Warnock both win on Tuesday, Democrats will take control of the U.S. Senate and consolidate elected power in Washington D.C.

“If Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are successful and they take Georgia, it gives all three legs of the policy-making stool to Democrats,” said Chip Lake, a Georgia Republican strategist. “That should frighten and motivate any Republican in Georgia to get out to vote for Kelly and David.”

Early voting data shows that more than 3 million people in Georgia voted early, either in person or through the mail. That’s down from the more than 4 million people who voted early for November’s general election. But it’s enough to shatter the previous record for a Georgia runoff, which was set in 2008 when 2.1 million voters cast ballots in a race pitting Republican Saxby Chambliss against Democrat Jim Martin, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Early voting levels for the runoff are at about 76 percent of where they were in November, according to Georgia elections data compiled by the United States Elections Project.

Turnout has been high in some rural counties east of Atlanta, including in Republican strongholds like Greene, Morgan, Oconee and Putnam counties, where early voting has approached, and in some cases surpassed, 50 percent. Greene County led the state with 54.9 percent early voter turnout, but that was down from 71.5 percent in November.

In strong Democratic counties in the Atlanta area – including DeKalb, Fulton, Cobb and Gwinnett – more than 40 percent of registered voters cast ballots early, compared to roughly 60 percent in those counties in November.

So far, black voters make up a slightly larger percentage of the electorate than they did in November. About 31 percent of the runoff voters have been black, up from 28 percent in the general election. Non-Hispanic white voters remain about 56 percent of the electorate.

Lake described the efforts to get people to the polls as “get out the vote on steroids.”

“I like to call it harass out the vote, because everybody is conditioned to vote the first Tuesday in November. We’re not conditioned to vote the first Tuesday in January,” he said.

Campaign ads continue to dominate television in Georgia, and billboards advertising the candidates have sprung up along highways all around Atlanta.

“If you watch television, if you have a mailbox, if you have a telephone, if you have a computer, there’s no way of escaping this election,” Lake said. “There’s nowhere to hide.”

Republican strategists are worried that large numbers of their voters may skip the election, to either punish the Republican establishment or because of concerns of voter fraud.

On Sunday, the Washington Post published a recording of a phone call where Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that he wanted “to find 11,780 votes” to put him over the edge in the state. He has repeatedly alleged that Democrats stole the election.

While may Georgia Republicans have bought into Trump’s claims that the election was stolen, several rural Republicans who spoke to National Review last week said it wouldn’t prevent them from voting in the runoff.