It’s judgment day for the four Senate candidates vying for the last two seats in Congress. The races will determine party control of the U.S. Senate — and possibly the entire U.S. government for two years.
Voting is underway following weeks of campaigning ahead of the crucial election.
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But just hours before the election, a bombshell uncovered tape shook up the race.
Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe has released undercover footage from inside Democratic candidate Reverend Raphael Warnock’s campaign… and what his investigators found is disturbing.
The conservative activist exposed audio material of Warnock’s campaign staff confessing some inside campaign tactics in a four-minute-long exposé.
In one of the clips, a staffer named Derrick Bhole, a campaign finance assistant, explained how Warnock makes an effort to tone down his stance on defunding the police for political points.
“… he avoids using defunding the police because he knows that the Republicans are gonna try to grab onto it and attack, right?” Bhole says.
“But in reality, his whole platform with police reform is along the lines of the same people who are saying defund the police.”
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In another clip, Sasha Williams, the director of small business engagement, expressed deep fears about dismal voter turnout in the Peach State come Election Day.
“We have to touch black voters a minimum of nine times to remind them to go vote,” she said. “A minimum.”
“… that’s the reality,” she added.
Williams and the Warnock campaign are also worried about the threat of violence at the polls.
“In the areas that are still rural and red, they’re getting hostile, there’s a lot of tension in those areas, they’re using intimidation.”
You can view a snippet of the expose below:
BREAKING: @ReverendWarnock Staff Admit Candidate's Bias Against Police
"Police officers are not all good…Most of them are bad, WE know that."
"He avoids using defunding the police…in reality his whole platform is along the lines of the same people saying defund the police" pic.twitter.com/MwC6xhm5JW
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 4, 2021
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You can watch the full video here:
The stakes of the election have national weight — Georgia voters will decide the balance of power in Congress.
Republicans are unified against Joe Biden’s plans, but some fear that President Donald Trump’s attempts to question the results of the 2020 election — as well as his allies calling for a boycott the election to punish Republican leaders — may discourage voters in Georgia.
At a rally in northwest Georgia on the eve of Tuesday’s runoffs, Trump repeatedly declared that the November elections were plagued by fraud that state Republican officials say did not occur.
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The president called Georgia’s Republican secretary of state “crazy” and vowed to help defeat him in two years.
Democrats must win both of the state’s Senate elections to gain the Senate majority, a longshot. In that scenario, the Senate would be equally divided 50-50 with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaker for Democrats.
Democrats already secured a narrow House majority and the White House during November’s general election.
Even a closely divided Democratic Senate likely won’t guarantee Biden everything he wants should he hold onto the election, given Senate rules that require 60 votes to move most major legislation. But if Democrats lose even one of Tuesday’s contests, Biden would have trouble with swift up-or-down votes on his most ambitious plans to expand government-backed entitlements. A Republican-controlled Senate also would create a rougher path for Biden’s Cabinet picks and judicial nominees.
“Georgia, the whole nation is looking to you. The power is literally in your hands,” Biden charged at his own rally in Atlanta earlier Monday. “One state can chart the course, not just for the next four years, but for the next generation.”
Georgia’s January elections, necessary because no Senate candidates received a majority of the general-election votes, have been unique for many reasons, not least because the contenders essentially ran as teams, even campaigning together sometimes.
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One contest features Democrat Raphael Warnock, who serves as the senior pastor of the Atlanta church where slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. grew up and preached. The 51-year-old Black man was raised in public housing and spent most of his adult life preaching in Baptist churches.
Warnock is facing Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a 50-year-old former businesswoman who was appointed to the Senate less than a year ago by the state’s Republican governor. She is only the second woman to represent Georgia in the Senate, although the race has emerged as a campaign focus far more than gender. Loeffler and her allies have seized on some snippets of Warnock’s sermons at the historic Black church to cast him as extreme. Liberal religious and civil rights leaders have pushed back.
The other election pits 71-year-old former business executive David Perdue, who held the Senate seat until his term officially expired on Sunday, against Democrat Jon Ossoff, a former congressional aide and journalist. At just 33 years old, Ossoff would be the Senate’s youngest member if elected. The fresh-faced Democrat first rose to national prominence in 2017 when he launched an unsuccessful House special election bid.
Despite fears among some Republican establishment figures that Trump’s claims of voter fraud could impact their grip on power, the two GOP candidates have pledged loyalty to the president. Perdue on Tuesday said that Trump would “of course” deserve the credit if the Republicans won.
“What the president said last night is, even if you are upset about all of that, you’ve got to stand up with us and fight,” Perdue told “Fox & Friends.” “We’ll look back on this day if we don’t vote and really rue the day that we turned the keys to the kingdom over to the Democrats.”
Democrats have hammered Perdue and Loeffler, each among the Senate’s wealthiest members, for conspicuously timed personal stock trades after members of Congress received information about the public health and economic threats of COVID-19 as Trump and Republicans downplayed the pandemic. None of the trades has been found to violate the law or Senate ethics.
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Perdue and Loeffler have answered by lambasting the Democratic slate as certain to usher in a leftward lunge in national policy.
This week’s elections mark the formal finale to the turbulent 2020 election season more than two months after the rest of the nation finished voting. The stakes have drawn nearly $500 million in campaign spending to a once solidly Republican state that now finds itself as the nation’s premier battleground.
“It’s really about whether an agenda that moves the nation forward can be forged without significant compromise,” said Martin Luther King III, the son of the civil rights icon and a Georgia native, who predicted “razor thin” margins on Tuesday. “There are a lot of things that are in the balance.”
The results also will help demonstrate whether the sweeping political coalition that fueled Biden’s victory was an anti-Trump anomaly or part of a new landscape.
Democratic success will likely depend on driving a huge turnout of African Americans, young voters, college-educated voters, and women, all groups that helped Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate since 1992 to be certified as Georgia’s winner. Republicans, meanwhile, have been focused on energizing their own base of white men and voters beyond the core of metro Atlanta.
More than 3 million Georgians voted before Tuesday.
The Associated Press contributed to this article