About half a point separates the candidates in both races. The Republican is up in one, and down in the other. (Read story here.)
Polls overestimated the Democratic advantage in the November election across the board — in the White House, Senate, and House races. If that repeats in Georgia’s Jan. 5 runoffs, Republicans will keep both seats.
David Perdue, a well-known businessman with an additional name-recognition advantage from being head of Georgia’s port authority and also the fact his cousin was governor, comfortably won a Senate election in 2014 against a spirited Democratic opponent in his first try at elective politics. His opponent in this race, Jon Ossoff, is a journalist and former congressional candidate. Perdue slightly leads.
Kelly Loeffler, a wealthy businesswoman who married the very wealthy owner of the New York Stock Exchange, has never won an election. She was appointed by current governor Brian Kemp in December 2019 to replace a senator who resigned for health reasons. Her opponent, Rev. Raphael Warnock, a black man, is the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebeneezer Baptist Church, a post once held by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He slightly leads.
The Democratic candidates are well-funded in this election, which will determine Senate control and whether Biden’s agenda gets enacted.
Loeffler seems incapable of independent thinking; she votes 100% of the time for whatever Trump wants. Both Perdue and Loeffler have been accused of insider stock trading ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic, and both have loudly supported Trump’s baseless claims that Biden won Georgia with fraudulent votes.
Biden won Georgia with the vital help of a strong turnout of black voters, and as I’ve written before on this blog (here), Republicans think letting black people vote is “fraud,” consider black votes “fraudulent,” and are making strenuous efforts to prevent blacks from voting in this runoff election (as I wrote here).