The first day of in-person early voting for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate runoffs started Monday, and with it came the final, frenzied effort by all four Senate campaigns to get their supporters to the polls.
Jon Ossoff continued his “Health, Jobs, and Justice” statewide bus tour Monday with a stop in Gwinnett County, one of several crucial suburban counties outside of Atlanta that Ossoff will need to win handily to pull ahead in his effort to unseat GOP Sen. David Perdue.
Gwinnett was a GOP stronghold as recently as 2012, when Mitt Romney easily carried the county over then-President Barack Obama. But an influx of new residents and a rapidly diversifying population has all but solidified Gwinnett as a Democratic stronghold. Ossoff won the county by 12 percentage points in November.
Portions of Gwinnett were also once represented by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who lamented on Twitter over the weekend that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is adding more ways for Georgians to vote and making it “harder for Republicans to win.”
Ossoff slammed Gingrich’s comments as perpetuating voter suppression.
“Newt Gingrich is upset that Secretary Raffensperger is not abusing his authority to disenfranchise people,” he said. “Newt Gingrich wants the apparatus of voter suppression that’s been built in Georgia since the Shelby County v Holder decision in 2013 to suppress black voters in the state and win elections through voter suppression.”
Before leading the group to a nearby early voting polling station in Shorty Howell Park, Ossoff said, ““This is the new South, this is the new Georgia rising.”
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U.S. Sen. David Perdue capped a daylong flyaround with a stop in Atlanta, where he gave a brief stump speech to a cheering crowd that ended with his slogan: “We’re going to win Georgia, save America.”
As is typical, he was preceded by his cousin, Agricultural Secretary Sonny Perdue, who implored Republicans to “vote early and often” - the latter being an encouragement for supporters to urge their friends and family to vote. Alec Poitevint closed the event, held in an airport hangar at Peachtree-DeKalb Airport by “deputizing” the audience to help the campaign.
Left unmentioned was any recognition of the Electoral College vote in Georgia and across the nation that affirmed Joe Biden’s victory. He and U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler have refused to acknowledge Biden’s win, echoing other Republicans fearful of blowback from President Donald Trump and his allies pushing false claims of a “rigged” vote.
Instead, shortly after Biden crossed the threshold of 270 electoral votes, the two Republicans issued a joint statement opposing any effort to change the name of the Atlanta Braves, following the Cleveland franchise’s decision to rename the Indians baseball team.
“The Braves’ name honors our nation’s Native American heritage, which should not be erased — and under no circumstances should one of the most celebrated teams in sports cave to the demands of the cancel culture and the radical left,” the two said.
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Senate Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock, a first-time candidate for political office, cast a vote for himself on Monday. Warnock voted blocks away from Ebenezer Baptist Church, the historic church where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. presided and where Warnock has been senior pastor for the last 13 years.
After casting his ballot, Warnock said he was thinking about his mother, who grew up picking cotton in the southeast Georgia town of Waycross, and can now pick her son to be a United States senator.
“Only in America is my story even possible,” Warnock said.
