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Tag: runoff elections

  • Early voting is now underway for May 21 primary election in Georgia

    Early voting is now underway for May 21 primary election in Georgia

    Don’t forget to make your voice heard and vote in the upcoming primary election on May 21. Early voting has already started on April 29, so make sure to mark these important dates and deadlines in your calendar. This is your chance to exercise your right to vote and make a positive impact.

    Early Voting April 29 – May 17
    Absentee Ballot Request Deadline May 10 
    Absentee Ballot Return Deadline May 21 (7 p.m.)
    Election Day May 21 (Polls open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.)
    Runoff Elections (if needed) June 18

    To help you prepare for the election, we have attached the Composite Ballots for the May 21, 2024 General Primary & Nonpartisan General Election below. Please note that these ballots include all contest for each district and are not specific to a voter’s individual precinct/ballot. If you want to see your assigned ballot, please visit the Secretary of State’s My Voter Page.

    Cherokee County Democratic Sample Ballot

    Cherokee County Nonpartisan Sample Ballot

    Cherokee County Republican Sample Ballot

    Clayton County Democratic Sample Ballot

    Clayton County Nonpartisan Sample Ballot

    Clayton County Republican Sample Ballot

    Clayton County Commissioner- District 1 Sample Ballot

    Cobb County Democratic Sample Ballot

    Cobb County Nonpartisan Sample Ballot

    Cobb County Republican Sample Ballot

    Dekalb County Sample Ballot

    Douglas County Sample Ballot

    Fayette County Democratic Sample Ballot

    Fayette County Republican Sample Ballot

    Forsyth County Democratic Sample Ballot

    Forsyth County Nonpartisan Sample Ballot

    Forsyth County Republican Sample Ballot

    Fulton County Democratic Composite Ballot

    Fulton County Nonpartisan Composite Ballot

    Fulton County Republican Composite Ballot

    Gwinnett County Democratic Sample Ballot

    Gwinnett County Nonpartisan Sample Ballot

    Gwinnett County Republican Sample Ballot

    Kennesaw Special Sample Ballot

    Rockdale County Democratic Sample Ballot

    Rockdale Nonpartisan Sample Ballot

    Rockdale County Republican Sample Ballot

    Staff Report

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  • Ecuador election heads to run-off vote, with González to face surprise second-place Noboa | CNN

    Ecuador election heads to run-off vote, with González to face surprise second-place Noboa | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Luisa González, of the Movimiento Revolución Ciudadana party, on Sunday took a lead in the first round of Ecuador’s presidential and legislative elections, which have been marred by political assassinations as the Andean nation struggles with a wave of violence that has brought homicide rates to record levels.

    Gonzalez is set to face the surprise second-place finisher Daniel Noboa in a run-off election in October, according to the National Electoral Council of Ecuador (CNE), as neither candidate won more than 50% of the ballot.

    “These preliminary results already show a trend that guarantees that Ecuadorians will go to a run-off on October 15,” CNE president Diana Atamaint said Sunday.

    González is seen as a protégé of former leftist President Rafael Correa – who still wields great influence in the country and has supported her run from exile in Belgium. The former president was sentenced in absentia in 2020 to eight years in prison for aggravated bribery, a charge he has repeatedly denied.

    González has promised to enhance public spending and social programs and wants to address the security crisis by fixing the root causes of violence, such as poverty and inequality. A former tourism and labor minister in Correa’s government, González has also called for the judiciary to be reinforced to help with prosecutions, analysts say.

    Daniel Noboa is the son of banana businessman Álvaro Noboa – who himself has run for the presidency at least five times. The 35-year-old was a lawmaker before outgoing President Guillermo Lasso dissolved the legislature and called for early elections.

    The centrist, from the Accion Democratica Nacional party, has pledged to create more work opportunities for the young, bring in more foreign investment, and has suggested several anti-corruption measures including sentences for tax evasion.

    Crime has topped the agenda of this year’s presidential race, which was punctuated by the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, an outspoken anti-corruption journalist.

    His killing has put a spotlight on a recent escalation of violence, fueled by a cocaine boom, which has seen transnational criminal organizations and local gangs engage in high-level graft and extortion, overrun prisons, and murder anyone who gets in their way.

    Days after Villavicencio’s murder, a left-wing local party official, Pedro Briones, was shot dead in Esmeraldas province.

    Gunfire interrupted Noboa’s caravan on Thursday as he was traveling in Guayas province, but authorities say the presidential candidate was not the target of the incident.

    Candidates wore bulletproof vests on election day while security forces were stationed outside polling stations amid threats of violence.

    Villavicencio’s replacement, Christian Zurita, cast his vote in the capital Quito surrounded by heavy security protection from Ecuador’s police and armed forces.

    A different threat, however, emerged on Sunday when authorities reported cyberattacks from several countries, including Russia, Ukraine, China and Bangladesh, on the country’s telematic voting platform. The attack affected access to the vote, the country’s National Electoral Council said, but it added that votes recorded were not violated.

    The mounting violence and lack of economic prospects have compelled many Ecuadorians to leave the country.

    But the winner of October’s run-off vote will have relatively little time to work on a solution. They will hold office only until 2025, which would have been the end of Lasso’s six-year term – a short time frame for even the most seasoned politician to turn things around in the country, experts say.

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  • Incumbent Lightfoot fights to make runoff in Chicago mayoral primary | CNN Politics

    Incumbent Lightfoot fights to make runoff in Chicago mayoral primary | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is fighting for her political survival, seeking to finish in the top two in Tuesday’s crowded primary and advance to an April runoff in her quest for a second term.

    Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first out gay person to serve as mayor of a city often pilloried by conservatives in national debates over violence and gun control, rose to prominence as a pugnacious reformer promising a break from the corruption and clubby governance that had long marked Chicago politics.

    But years of contentious brawls over policing, teacher pay and Covid-19 public safety policies, as well as mounting complaints about long waits in Chicago’s public transit system, have left Lightfoot vulnerable, raising the prospect of the Second City ousting its Democratic mayor in the first round of voting.

    Voters on Tuesday will sort through the nine-candidate field – including eight Democrats and one independent. No candidate is expected to top 50% of the vote, which would mean the top two finishers will advance to an April 4 runoff.

    Campaigns and Chicago political observers describe the contest as wide open, with four candidates emerging at the top: Lightfoot; progressive US Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García; Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson; and Paul Vallas, a law-and-order candidate and a onetime head of schools in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans.

    If the outcome is close, it could take days to determine the top two finishers, as mail-in votes postmarked by election day get delivered.

    Powerful interests with which Lightfoot has at times brawled are split among her major challengers. Conservatives and the police have aligned behind one rival. Teachers have backed another. And many progressives are backing a third major contender.

    Above all else, concerns about crime and public safety have rattled Chicago. Violence in the city spiked in 2020 and 2021. And though shootings and murders have decreased since then, other crimes – including theft, car-jacking, robberies and burglaries – have increased since last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s 2022 year-end report.

    Lightfoot and her rivals have placed the issue at the forefront of their campaigns.

    “We absolutely need to hire more officers,” Lightfoot said at a WTTW mayoral forum earlier this month. “This is one of the toughest times in the country to recruit, and mayors all over the country are experiencing the difficulty.”

    Chicago’s municipal elections are nonpartisan, which means all voters – Democrats, Republicans and independents – can participate. However, Chicago is an overwhelmingly blue city, and all the major contenders say they are Democrats.

    Vallas, however, has attracted support from conservatives, and has described the Democratic Party as moving away from him in recent years on certain issues. Lightfoot, in an email to supporters, said Vallas “has so strongly aligned himself with Republican views that he can’t even be considered a moderate Democrat.”

    Vallas, who unsuccessfully ran for Illinois governor as a Democrat in 2002 and was the losing Democratic lieutenant governor nominee in 2014, was endorsed by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, the same organization that hosted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in nearby Elmhurst earlier this week.

    “I have talked about the need to take our city back from the criminals that are preying on our residents and preying on our businesses,” Vallas told CNN in an interview.

    Johnson, meanwhile, has floated the idea in the past of diverting some funds from the police budget to alternate sources, saying he wants to “invest in people.”

    He has the backing of the Chicago Teachers Union, a powerful organization that has repeatedly clashed with Lightfoot – including over teachers’ pay and class sizes in 2019 that led to an 11-day strike and then last year as Lightfoot pushed teachers to return to classrooms at a time of rising Covid-19 cases.

    “The reason we don’t have enough police officers is because we are asking them to be social workers, therapists and marriage counselors,” Johnson said at the WTTW forum. “I’m actually investing in actually having social workers, therapists to show up on the front line, to actually free up law enforcement to deal with the more severe crime that happens in the city of Chicago.”

    García – a former Cook County commissioner who in 2015 forced then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel into a runoff – has sounded similar themes.

    “Hiring more civilians to free up more police officers with their guns and badges to walk the walk, to talk to people, rebuild trust is the most important. The other important element is investing in communities and investing in violence prevention programs,” he told CNN.

    Vallas, whose message has revolved around a tough-on-crime message, said Chicago needs more police on “L” station platforms and on trains as part of a push to place more officers on local beats.

    He said combating violent crime is the “first, second and third priority” of his campaign.

    “Everything becomes undermined if you can’t provide public security,” Vallas told CNN.

    Lightfoot in recent days has lambasted Vallas after he told a crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.”

    The mayor told reporters that Vallas was “blowing the ultimate dog whistle.”

    “Take our city back, meaning what? To what time? And take our city back from whom?” she said.

    When pressed by CNN, Vallas said he was referring to criminals in his remark that Lightfoot has criticized.

    “I have talked about the need to take our city back from the criminals that are preying on our residents and preying on our businesses,” he said.

    For her part, Lightfoot has touted Chicago’s lawsuit against an Indiana gun store – part of an effort to demonstrate that the influx of firearms into the city isn’t a result of Chicago’s gun policies, but rather neighboring states with more lax laws.

    She has also touted her administration’s efforts to hire nearly 1,000 additional police officers, put privatized, unarmed security on public transit and create teams and task forces focused on car-jacking, halting the flow of guns into the city and more.

    The Chicago Tribune, the city’s largest newspaper, has endorsed Vallas. The newspaper’s editorial board credited Lightfoot’s financial management of the city and her navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic and said it hopes the mayor will advance to face Vallas one-on-one in the runoff.

    “Vallas has the ear of rank-and-file police officers on the street. We will expect him to use that trust to improve police conduct and the abysmal clearance rate for violent offenses,” the editorial board said.

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  • Strong midterm turnout in Georgia sparks new debate about a controversial election law | CNN Politics

    Strong midterm turnout in Georgia sparks new debate about a controversial election law | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The strong turnout in Georgia’s runoff election that cemented Democrats’ control of the US Senate is sparking fresh debate about the impact of the state’s controversial 2021 election law and could trigger a new round of election rule changes next year in the Republican-led state legislature.

    Voters showed up in droves for the midterms, with more than 3.5 million casting ballots in the December 6 runoff – or some 90% of the general election turnout, a far higher rate than typical runoffs. And top Republicans in Georgia, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, argued those numbers refute claims that the 2021 law was designed to suppress votes in this increasingly competitive state.

    “There’s no truth to voter suppression,” Raffensperger said in an interview this week with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, a day after Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock secured reelection in the first federal election cycle since Georgia voting law took effect.

    Georgia Democrats and voting rights groups, however, continue to criticize the 2021 law – enacted in the wake of Democratic gains two years ago – as erecting multiple barriers to voting. And the surging turnout, they said, masked extraordinary efforts by voters and activists to overcome both new and longstanding obstacles to the franchise in this once deep-red state.

    “Just because people endured long lines that wrapped around buildings, some blocks long … doesn’t mean that voter suppression does not exist,” Warnock said during his victory speech Tuesday – echoing a theme he made repeatedly on the campaign trail. “It simply means that you, the people, have decided that your voices will not be silenced.”

    Warnock’s victory Tuesday solidified Georgia’s standing as a battleground state and comes after Warnock and fellow Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff won runoffs in the 2020 election cycle. In that election, President Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the Peach State in nearly three decades.

    Voting rights activists said the 2021 law made it harder to cast a ballot in myriad ways: It limited the number and location of ballot drop boxes, instituted new ID requirements to vote by mail and shortened the window for a runoff from the nine weeks in the 2020 election to four weeks, contributing to long lines during the early voting period.

    Additionally, the voter registration deadline fell on November 7 – the day before the general election and before Georgians knew for certain that the contest would advance to a runoff because neither Warnock nor his Republican challenger Herschel Walker had surpassed the 50% threshold to win outright in the general election.

    In the 2020 election cycle, at least 23,000 people who registered after Election Day went on to vote in the Senate runoff in January 2021, according to an analysis of Georgia’s Secretary of State data by Catalist, a company that provides data, analytics and other services to Democrats, academics and nonprofit issue-advocacy organizations.

    And only an 11th hour court victory for Warnock and Democrats paved the way for counties to hold early in-person voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. State election officials had opposed casting ballots on that date, saying Georgia law prohibited voting on a Saturday if there is a state holiday on the Thursday or Friday before.

    “It’s death by a thousand cuts,” Kendra Cotton, CEO of the voting rights group New Georgia Project Action Fund, said of the new restrictions. “They are not trying to hit the jugular, so you bleed out at once. It’s these little nicks, so you slowly become anemic before you pass out.”

    “It’s a margins game,” she added. “I wish folks would stop acting like the purpose of SB202 was to disenfranchise the masses. Joe Biden won this state by a little less than 12,000 votes. I can guarantee you that there are more than 12,000 people across this state who were eligible to vote in this election and they could not.”

    Even Cotton’s 21-year-old daughter, Jarah Cotton, became ensnared.

    The younger Cotton, a Harvard University senior, said she had planned to vote absentee in November’s general election – but misunderstood a new requirement of Georgia’s law: that she print out her online application for absentee ballot, sign it “with a pen and ink” and then upload it.

    In the runoff, Jarah Cotton said she successfully completed her application for an absentee ballot but did not receive it before she returned home to Powder Springs, Georgia, for the Thanksgiving holiday.

    The court ruling permitting voting the Saturday after Thanksgiving allowed her to cast an in-person ballot in the runoff – but only after her family paid $180 to delay her return flight to Boston by a day.

    “I don’t think it should be this hard,” Jarah Cotton said of her experience. “It should be more straightforward, but I think that’s reflective of the voting process in Georgia.”

    Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the secretary of state’s office, said too many critics of the state’s voting process are comparing the 2022 election with the ease of voting during the height of the pandemic in the 2020 election cycle when election officials across the state “moved heaven and earth” to guarantee the franchise.

    That so many people voted in a four-week runoff shows “the system works really well,” he told CNN in an interview Friday. “The problem now is that it that is has become so politicized. I’ve been saying now, for 24 months, that both sides have to stop weaponizing election administration.”

    Voting rights activists say the state’s runoff system, first enacted in 1964, itself is a vestige of voter-suppression efforts from the state’s dark past. Its original sponsor sought to guarantee that candidates backed by Black Georgians could not win outright with a plurality of the vote.

    Most states decide general election winners based on which candidate gets the most votes, unlike Georgia, where candidates must win more than 50% of the votes cast to avoid a runoff.

    Runoffs also are costly affairs.

    A recent study by researchers at Kennesaw State University estimated that the Senate runoffs in the 2020 election cycle had a $75 million price tag for taxpayers.

    In the CNN interview earlier this week, Raffensperger suggested that the Republican-controlled General Assembly might revisit some of the state’s election rules, including potentially lowering to 45% the threshold needed to win a general election outright.

    He also said he wanted to work with counties to guarantee more polling places are available to ease the long lines voters endured during the early voting window in the runoff.

    And Raffensperger said lawmakers might weigh a ranked-choice instant runoff system. In so-called instant runoffs, voters rank candidates by order of preference. If one candidate doesn’t receive more than 50% of the vote, voters’ second choices would be used to determine the winner, without the need to hold a second election.

    Given the shortened runoff schedule in Georgia, state lawmakers instituted the instant runoff for a narrow slice of voters – those in the military and overseas – in this year’s midterms.

    “There will be a push for this in the upcoming legislative session,” said Daniel Baggerman, president of Better Ballot Georgia, a group advocating for the instant runoff.

    “It’s asking a lot from voters” to show up again for a runoff “when there’s a simple way that achieves the same outcome,” he said.

    Sterling agreed that there “needs to be a discussion about general election runoffs,” but he said he worries that moving to an instant runoff system risks disenfranchising a wide swath of Georgians who might not understand the process without “a tremendous amount of voter education.”

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  • Georgia runoff highlights GOP worries about Trump — and excitement surrounding DeSantis | CNN Politics

    Georgia runoff highlights GOP worries about Trump — and excitement surrounding DeSantis | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Herschel Walker’s success in his upcoming runoff against incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock could depend on GOP luminaries flocking to Georgia between now and December 6, several Republicans say.

    Many are torn over whether that should include former President Donald Trump, whose status as the anchor of the party is under renewed scrutiny amid an underwhelming midterm outcome for Republicans.

    “Since Tuesday night, the No. 1 question I’ve been getting is, ‘Is Trump going to screw this up?’” said Erick Erickson, a prominent Georgia-based conservative radio host who backed Trump’s 2020 reelection bid.

    Though the former president helped recruit Walker, a Georgia football legend and longtime Trump family friend, into the Senate contest last year, he was ultimately advised to campaign elsewhere during the general election, two people familiar with the matter told CNN. Some Republicans are still haunted by Trump’s appearances in Georgia leading up to a pair of 2021 runoffs that ended with Democrats winning both seats and gaining control of the Senate. At the time, then-President Trump littered his campaign speeches with false claims that voter fraud was rampant in Georgia and that Republican officials had worked against him.

    Walker allies feared that a Trump appearance ahead of the midterms would turn off independents and suburban women, critical voting blocs in the battleground state. Those concerns remain as Walker now enters the runoff period after neither he nor Warnock took more than 50% of the vote on Tuesday.

    Some Georgia Republicans said Trump’s decision to proceed with an anticipated 2024 campaign launch next week will distract from what should be paramount for every Republican at the moment – helping the party secure a Senate majority. Trump aides sent out invitations late Thursday for a November 15 event at Mar-a-Lago, which the former president hopes will blunt the momentum behind Ron DeSantis, the popular Florida governor and potential presidential primary rival who glided to reelection this week.

    In fact, while a debate unfolds over whether Trump should campaign for Walker in the coming days, several Republicans said they would eagerly welcome an appearance by DeSantis.

    “We need every Republican surrogate we can get into the state to put their arm around Herschel. I think that [Virginia Gov. Glenn] Youngkin or DeSantis is a better fit for soft Republicans or independents in the suburbs that we need to turn out,” said Ralph Reed, president of the Faith & Freedom Coalition.

    Reed later noted that he believes Trump could also be helpful in driving turnout among rural Georgia voters, though he cautioned that he was “not speaking for the [Walker] campaign.”

    “I’ll let them work that out,” he said.

    Walker campaign manager Scott Paradise did not return a request for comment.

    A person close to the Walker campaign said DeSantis would be “a huge draw if we could get him,” noting that the Florida governor did not campaign for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp despite being just over the border and recently stumping for candidates in New York, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Kemp won his own reelection bid on Tuesday, defeating Democrat Stacey Abrams for the second time. And the Georgia governor has told allies he wants to help Walker any way he can, including by hitting the campaign trail for him, according to a person briefed on those conversations.

    “DeSantis would be helpful. Youngkin would be helpful. Kemp will be helpful. I think those are the biggest draws in Georgia,” said Erickson.

    A Republican with knowledge of DeSantis’ political operation said DeSantis’ interest in campaigning for Walker “depends on what happens with the remaining two races” for Senate in Arizona and Nevada. Both contests remain too close to call but if Republicans win one of the races, control of the upper chamber will come down to Georgia.

    “It becomes the center of the political universe at that point,” this person said.

    A spokesman for DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment about his future travel plans. Though DeSantis endorsed Republicans in tough battlegrounds and campaigned for controversial candidates like Arizona’s Kari Lake and Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano, he made no such effort during the midterms to aid Walker amid a flurry of headlines about the former Heisman Trophy winner’s tumultuous past and personal troubles.

    DeSantis – whose Tallahassee executive residence is 20 miles from the Florida-Georgia border – also did not join the GOP fight in the Peach State two years ago for a pair of Senate runoffs Republicans ultimately lost.

    But a Republican fundraiser close to DeSantis said the Florida governor would likely make the trip across the border if he believes he can help Walker. “He’s a Republican leader and wants Republicans to take the Senate,” the fundraiser said.

    But if DeSantis shows up in Georgia, Trump allies said it would be exponentially harder to convince the former president to stay out of the state himself. Much to the frustration of those who want a distraction-free environment for Walker, Trump has continued to hurl insults at DeSantis in recent days, snapping at the Florida governor in a statement Thursday that referred to him as “an average Republican governor” who lacked “loyalty and class” for refusing to rule out a White House bid of his own.

    If the Florida Republican goes to campaign for Walker, those attacks would likely intensify, said a person close to Trump.

    “Imagine [Trump] seeing Ron campaign for Herschel while he is being told, ‘Please stay away.’ He would go ballistic,” this person said.

    One Trump aide, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said one idea being floated is to have the former president help Walker financially with a generous check. Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC gave $16.4 million to candidates in the closing weeks of the 2022 cycle and he was sitting on more than $100 million across his fundraising committees at the end of September, according to federal election data.

    “He is looking at how he can salvage this moment and one of the ways for him to do that is to help Walker win,” said a Trump adviser, referring to Tuesday’s underwhelming outcome for Republicans and the stinging defeat of Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, whom Trump had endorsed in the Republican Senate primary.

    “But I think there’s no way he can announce a campaign for president and not go campaign for Walker,” the person added, claiming that Trump’s absence from Georgia as the presumptive frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination would suggest he is a liability for vulnerable Republicans – a toxic message to be sending at the outset of a presidential campaign.

    Michael Caputo, a 2016 Trump campaign aide who remains close to the former president, said Trump should do as much as possible to raise money for Walker because a presidential announcement will likely cause a surge in Democratic contributions to Warnock.

    “You have to offset that on the Walker side. From my perspective, the best thing Trump can do is donate and raise a ton of money for Herschel because he can,” Caputo said.

    Trump’s political team has held discussions about how he can best help Walker since it became clear the Georgia Senate race would advance to a runoff, according to two sources familiar, both of whom said nothing has been firmly decided.

    “President Trump is 220-16 in races that have been called, and with the support of President Trump, Herschel Walker, after forcing a run-off, is well-positioned to win,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said in a statement to CNN.

    Much of the sensitivity around a Trump visit to Georgia stems from his campaign appearances for former GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler two years ago, when both Republicans were fighting for survival in their own runoff contests.

    On the eve of those runoffs in 2021, Trump tore into statewide Republican officials for refusing to challenge the 2020 election results in Georgia, falsely claiming that he had won the state and promising to return when Kemp was up for reelection to campaign against the GOP incumbent, which Trump later fulfilled by recruiting Perdue to challenge Kemp in a primary.

    Republicans back in Washington watched the rally in horror at the time, deeply concerned that Trump’s intense focus on election fraud and various attacks on statewide Republican officials would depress voter turnout among his core supporters the following day. In the end, both Loeffler and Perdue lost their runoffs, catapulting Warnock and Jon Ossof into the Senate and handing Democrats a narrow majority.

    The episode has come back to haunt Trump as Republicans face a potentially identical scenario to 2021, with control of the Senate riding on Georgia if Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly wins reelection in Arizona and Republican Adam Laxalt unseats incumbent Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada. Laxalt currently has a razor-thin lead while Kelly is more than 100,000 votes ahead of his Republican challenger, according to the vote counts as of Friday morning. Less concerned that he would deliver a message that depresses turnout, Republicans are primarily worried this time around that Trump would ultimately be a drag on Walker in a once deep-red state that is now trending purple and where the polarizing former president might alienate the exact voters Walker needs to prevail.

    “Herschel needs to do better among Kemp voters and independents in the suburbs,” said Reed. “About 5% of the voters that went to Kemp didn’t go to Herschel and he needs to get a minimum of 1 out of every 4 of them.”

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