President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will head to Georgia to stump for Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock ahead of Tuesday’s Senate runoff elections.
Harris will be in Savannah on Sunday, and Biden will be in Atlanta on Monday.
President Trump will also be in the Peach State Monday night to rally support for Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in Dalton, Georgia.
The visits underscore the importance of Tuesday’s election, with the winners not only determining which party controls the upper chamber of Congress but also the success of Biden’s legislative agenda.
If either Perdue or Loeffler beat their Democratic rivals, the GOP will maintain its current control of the Senate and could push back on every nominee and bill that Biden supports.
If Ossoff and Warnock both win, it would give Democrats a 50-50 split, with Harris casting a tiebreaker vote.
Biden became the first Democratic White House candidate to flip Georgia from red to blue since 1992. His victory bolstered his party’s hopes of picking up two senatorial wins.
It will be up to Trump on Monday night to energize his base and get them to vote in the runoffs. While he has supported Loeffler and Perdue via Twitter, the last time Trump held a rally in Georgia, he spent the majority of his 100-minute speech talking about himself and attacking the integrity of Georgia’s voting system. He also slammed the state’s GOP leaders, including Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, for not doing enough to investigate allegations of voter fraud.
“He needs to stay focused and not go off on tangents,” one political analyst based in Athens, Georgia, told the Washington Examiner.
With so much on the line, massive amounts of money from wealthy donors and special interest groups have flooded the state. Experts believe about $500 million will have been spent in the nine weeks between the general election and the Jan. 5 contest.
