Since November, Georgia has become the center of the political world—the ground on which battles for control of the Senate and Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss to Joe Biden are being waged. Those two fights have always been intertwined, with the president’s bogus claims of a rigged election looming over the runoff races that have massive implications for his successor’s ability to enact his agenda. But the two narratives collided with greater force over the weekend when the Washington Post published explosive audio clip of Trump pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for more than an hour to “recalculate” the state’s results and “find” enough votes to give him a win—or else.
The threats were characteristically vague—a reference to some unnamed “criminal offense”—but the consequences he suggested could be in store for his party’s prospects in Tuesday’s vote were a bit clearer. “You have a big election coming up, and because of what you’ve done to the president—you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam,” Trump said, referring to himself in the third person. “Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote, and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president.”
In invoking the Georgia runoffs in his shake-down attempt, Trump irrevocably tied his bumbling coup to the reelection bids of David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, making a messy race even more complicated. Republicans are worried that his insistence the system is “rigged” and the Georgia election “illegal and invalid” could, as he suggested to Raffensperger, depress turnout. For Democrats, meanwhile, Trump’s increasingly brazen authoritarianism, and the endorsement of his power grab by many Republicans, is underlining the dangers of allowing the GOP to keep control of the Senate. “Have y’all heard about that recorded conversation?” Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said Sunday at a Savannah rally for Georgia Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. “Well, it was…certainly the voice of desperation, most certainly that, and it was a bald, bald-faced, bold abuse of power by the president of the United States.”
Republicans, of course, are forgiving; a great many, including some party leaders and the two GOP Senate incumbents in Georgia, have participated in Trump’s attacks on democracy, and show no signs of stopping now. Speaking on Fox News on Sunday, Perdue said he found it “disgusting” not that Trump tried to bully a Republican official into fabricating a win for him, but that the Republican official taped and released the conversation. In her own appearance on Fox, Loeffler suggested she supports the certification challenge her colleagues Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are leading this week. “I’m looking very, very closely at it,” Loeffler said. “I’ve been one of the first to say everything is on the table.”
While none of that is likely to turn off an increasingly extremist Republican party, it could further energize Democrats and even moderates in the state. “That is a direct attack on our democracy,” Ossoff said of Trump’s call to Raffensperger during an appearance with Harris on Sunday. “And if David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler had one piece of steel in their spines, one shred of integrity, they would be out here defending Georgia voters from that kind of assault.” “Joe Biden is the president-elect and Kamala Harris is the vice president-elect,” Warnock said on CNN Saturday. “Georgia deserves a United States senator who will be thinking about the people and their issues rather than their own best interests.”
The Georgia run-offs are not just a referendum on Trump and the MAGA movement, of course. But in a high-stakes race that’s expected to come down to turnout, the national context is significant. The adoration Trump inspires in the Republican base and the revulsion of his opponents could boost participation on both sides, as it did in November. Turnout has been high already, with more than 100,000 people who didn’t vote in November casting early ballots in the runoff. A significant chunk have come from young and Black voters, who lean Democratic. Still, it’s not clear whether the turnout will help Democrats or Republicans, who seem to be participating in the race even as they buy into Trump’s claims that the electoral process is a “scam.”
Biden and Harris, the first Democratic ticket to win the Peach State in nearly three decades, will campaign there on the eve of the vote, as will Mike Pence and Trump, who treated the candidates he was ostensibly campaigning for like an afterthought during his last Georgia appearance. That he will do the same in his final visit is about the only certainty as the race comes to a close. “These numbers are going to be repeated on Monday night,” Trump warned Raffensperger Saturday, referring to bogus data he recited during the phone call. “The people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry, and there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”
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