Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff was sure to hammer U.S. Sen. David Perdue over his mocking of Kamala Harris' name at a long-scheduled debate Tuesday. So when the showdown was rescheduled to next week, he staged a press conference in Atlanta to deliver his message.
“What David Perdue has done is waste his office and his platform to divide us to avoid discussing issues of substance, and instead to belittle his political adversaries for their heritage,” Ossoff said at Grant Park.
The Democrat has raised $2 million from 60,000 donors in the two days since Perdue made fun of the vice presidential nominee’s name Friday at President Donald Trump’s rally in Macon, mangling its pronunciation as: “Kamala? Kamala? Kamala-mala-mala? I don’t know. Whatever.”
Perdue has claimed it was inadvertent and his spokeswoman Casey Black said Tuesday’s event showed “how desperate his campaign really is” by pushing “divisive smears.”
Ossoff was joined on Tuesday by several Democratic state legislators from diverse backgrounds who echoed his message.
“Let me tell you: It was intentional and it was not an accident,” said Nikema Williams, the chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia and a congressional candidate. “His mispronunciation of Senator Harris' name is a bigoted and racist tactic straight from President Trump’s playbook.”
State Rep. Angelika Kausche talked of immigrating to the U.S. in 1997 and becoming a citizen, along with her family, in 2011 because “we saw the strength in diversity and the respect that people from every corner of the world deserve.”
“It took (Perdue) seconds to tell so many people who chose to make America our home that he thinks of us as foreign, as outsiders," said Kausche, D-Johns Creek. "But we are just as American as he is. And we vote.”
Though both Democrats and Republicans have mispronounced Harris' name — the correct way to say it, she says, is “comma-la” like the punctuation mark — critics say the intentional mangling is an effort to portray the senator as un-American. Harris' parents both immigrated to the United States, her mother from India and her father from Jamaica.
Ossoff said that Perdue owes more than an apology to Harris.
“He had the opportunity to address the state and the nation, to be candid with us about the challenges that we face, to present real solutions to unify and inspire us to meet this moment,” said Ossoff. “And instead he squandered his power, his office and his influence on schoolyard insults.”
Why Trump and Biden are competitive in Georgia
The latest New York Times/Siena College poll of Georgia showed the same dynamics as about every other recent survey. But a closer look reveals some interesting findings.
The poll found that Joe Biden and President Donald Trump deadlocked at 45% apiece and U.S. Sen. David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff tied at 43%. In the chaotic special election, Democrat Raphael Warnock has a solid 32-23 edge over U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, while U.S. Rep. Doug Collins trails at 17%.
A dive into the crosstabs shows Biden continuing to challenge Republicans among white voters – who heavily favored Trump four years ago. About 28% of white voters support the former vice president, compared to 21% who said in exit polls of the 2016 contest they backed Hillary Clinton.
Over all, Mr. Trump led Mr. Biden by 12 percentage points among white college graduates, 52 percent to 40 percent. A 12-point lead among this group would ordinarily count as good news for the president, but not in Georgia, where Republicans have traditionally counted on huge margins among white voters — with or without a college degree — to overwhelm the state’s large share of Democratic Black voters.
But the Times noted that Trump’s chances of holding Georgia are buoyed by surprising support among non-white voters, a group he has heavily courted with recent stops in Atlanta.
Over all, Mr. Biden led by only 70-19 among nonwhite voters, quite a bit weaker than any estimate of Hillary Clinton’s strength among the group four years ago. Nonwhite respondents to the survey said they backed her, 81-12, in 2016, and Mr. Biden would hold a comfortable lead in the survey if he merely matched her tally.
The margin of error on the subgroup of nonwhite voters is fairly large, at plus or minus 6.8 percentage points, and it’s possible that the president’s apparent strength is mainly because of the inevitable noise of smaller samples. But the results are consistent with the trend in national surveys that Mr. Trump tends to fare better among nonwhite voters than he did four years ago.
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My oh my Mao
The sniping between U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler and U.S. Rep. Doug Collins carried over from Monday’s debate to Tuesday’s campaign trail stops.
Collins continued to berate Loeffler over a portrait of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong that apparently hung on the wall of her Buckhead mansion. (A previous post from Collins that included his rival’s address was edited to delete it.)
The Loeffler campaign implied the image is fake and a spokesman said Tuesday that the senator and her husband do not own the portrait. As the AJC’s Morning Jolt team notes, the image has deep GOP roots:
“The work can easily be defended as marking a significant episode in Republican political history – President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. (Andy) Warhol was so inspired by the event that he churned out nearly 200 silkscreen paintings of Mao, in various shades of color.”
Loeffler, meanwhile, poked fun at Collins' frequent nudging of debate moderator Scott Slade for more time during the hourlong showdown:
No pressure?
State Democrats had a surprise interloper in their morning call: U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
“All eyes are on Georgia,” she told the staffers. “No pressure, y’all.”
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