Want to Know Who Will Win in Georgia? Look Beyond Atlanta
You may think it’s all about Atlanta and its suburbs. But the state’s smaller cities are really where Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock will win or lose this thing.
Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
Georgia is still reeling with excitement at being the first crack in the Republican red wall of the deep South. Georgia Democrats could feel Joe Biden’s narrow but important win coming. Now, with the two U.S. Senate seats on the line to determine control of the upper chamber for Biden's first two years, the country has a front-row seat to watch us demonstrate that Biden's win was no fluke.
Democrats’ 18-year journey through the Georgia political wilderness began in 2002, when U.S. Senator and Vietnam war hero Max Cleland was defeated by ads charging that he was palling around with Osama bin Laden. That same year, Democratic Governor Roy Barnes was unseated by long-shot candidate Sonny Perdue (first cousin to now-Senator David Perdue), who ran animated commercials depicting Barnes as a “Rat King.”
Thus ended approximately 140 years of Democratic domination in Georgia. No surprise, then, that in our present bare-knuckled fight for a Georgia Democratic Renaissance, the Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue Senate campaigns—when they are not ripping their own party apart—are running improbable ads that Jon Ossoff is a Chinese Communist operative and Rev. Raphael Warnock is a terrorist sympathizer. This theatre of the absurd has not failed Republicans, yet.