If the Democrats seize the two Senate seats in contention, they would wrest control of the Upper House from the Republicans
The US state of Georgia celebrates the second round of the country’s Senate elections on Tuesday, a vital election for the president-elect, Joe Biden, because if the Democrats win the two seats at stake, they will have the majority of the Upper House, which that will enable you to implement your presidential agenda more easily.
The southern state has already held an electoral process to elect its two senators in the November 3 elections, where, in addition to electing a president, voters chose 34 members of the Senate.
Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are defending their seats, as in November, to the same Democratic hopefuls: documentary filmmaker and ex-congressman Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock. Neither managed to exceed the threshold of 50 percent of the vote on November 3.
If the Democrats win both seats, they would be able to tie 50 senators with the Republicans, so the casting vote that allows the future president of the Senate, Kamala Harris, to break ties, would give the Democrats effective control of the Senate, as they already do with the House of Representatives.
Both Biden and the still president of the United States, Donald Trump, have called rallies this Monday in Georgia to give their respective candidates a final push.
In Trump’s case, the trip to the city of Dalton – in the northwest, a key locality for Republican participation – is especially important to stoke the Republican vote and that the electoral base of the party goes to the polls, after the repeated assertions about an alleged “fraud” committed in the November elections in the state, which could hold back voters.
Losing control of the US upper house would be a huge blow to Republicans, who have tried to make the second round a kind of plebiscite on Trump’s legacy and his ability to put a stop to the future Biden Administration.
Loeffler and Perdue have entrusted their future to the New York tycoon, despite the fact that Trump has questioned the fate of the economic stimulus package due to the pandemic that both have supported and has constantly questioned the legitimacy of the elections in the southern state, which has also been a reason for division among the republican ranks.
In fact, the last time the president visited Georgia to support his candidates, he spent much of his time denouncing the “theft” of the presidential elections, which has led him to initiate a judicial battle to try to derail Biden’s victory.
For their part, Biden and Harris have each already made a trip to Georgia, while former President Barack Obama has held a virtual rally in favor of Ossoff and Warnock. Democrats, arriving on Election Day after a smooth campaign, think Trump’s rhetoric will ultimately help his candidates.
Several polls collected by ‘The Hill’ show a tight race between Perdue and Ossoff and Loeffler and Warnock, who have struggled to point out what the second round of elections means to increase participation.
GEORGIA, ‘KEY’ STATE
Georgia, a traditionally conservative state, became a ‘key’ territory for the results of the November 3 elections. Trump lost it by fewer than 13,000 votes, marking the first time that state voters opted for a Democratic candidate in nearly 30 years.
On the eve of the elections, the eye is on the southern state also for the call that Trump made to the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, which was made public on Sunday. In it, the president would have pressured the senior official to “find” enough votes to turn the electoral result around.
“It is not possible that Georgia lost. It is not possible. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes,” Trump says in the recording. “People in Georgia are angry. People in the countryside are angry and there is nothing wrong with saying, how to say … you have recalculated,” he adds. “Good, Mr. President. The resource you have, the data you have, are wrong,” Raffensperger responds.
Nearly three million Georgia voters have already voted early, a record high, while Republicans expect their voters to go to the polls en masse Tuesday.
In addition, almost 90,000 voters who did not participate in the November elections have already cast their votes for this second round, according to the data analysis consultancy TargetSmart, of Democratic affiliation, collects ‘The Hill’. Also, about 75,000 people registered to vote in the weeks after Biden won Georgia.
Early voting tends to benefit Democrats as it is a more widely used option among minorities and their political base, while Republicans prefer to vote in person on Election Day due, among other reasons, to Trump’s anti-voting campaigns. by mail.
UNCERTAINTY DURING DAYS
The result of the election is expected to be delayed by several days or even weeks, the Bloomberg news agency has reported, which has already happened with the count of the November 3 elections in Georgia.
The US press did not project Biden’s victory in Georgia until ten days after the elections. In addition, the state electoral authorities took another week to certify the results, and they re-certify them two more times, the last on December 7.
Thus, and with the forecast that this second round will be close, the partisan control of the Senate will probably be in the air until February. “There is almost no chance of it being known on election night,” summarized Kennesaw University political scientist Kerwin Swint.
A senior official who has preferred to remain anonymous told Bloomberg that Georgia authorities expect the counties that make up the state to have counted the votes cast in advance before Election Day so that only the votes cast have to be counted. before 7:00 p.m. (local time), the time at which the polling stations close.
