Eliana Willis

Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud dominated a tense debate in Georgia ahead of a crucial Senate runoff election as Republican senator Kelly Loeffler refused three times to acknowledge the result of the November ballot, which Trump lost by a convincing electoral college margin and by more than 7m votes.
The future of the US senate hangs on the outcome of the 5 January election in Georgia with the two seats at stake determining whether Republicans or Democrats will hold an effective majority in the upper chamber. The result will play a major role in president-elect Joe Biden’s ability to legislate and govern during his tenure as the next president of the United States.
Loeffler faces Democrat Raphael Warnock in the first race, while incumbent Republican David Perdue faces Democrat Jon Ossoff in the second.
On Sunday Ossoff debated alone next to an empty podium as Perdue declined to partake in the televised debate amid allegations of corruption tied to his stock market trading during the pandemic.

Ossoff argued that Perdue avoided the debate in Atlanta as he did not want to “incriminate himself” over his financial dealings, which include suspiciously timed investments in companies set to benefit from the pandemic.
“It shows an astonishing arrogance and sense of entitlement for Georgia’s senior US senator to believe he shouldn’t have to debate at a moment like this in our history,” Ossoff said.
Both Perdue and Loeffler appeared at a rally held by Donald Trump on Saturday night in south Georgia, ostensibly staged for the president to show his support for both senate candidates, but which saw the outgoing president make repeated baseless claims of election fraud and criticism of Republican state officials who certified a victory for Biden in Georgia.
Although Loeffler and Perdue have not articulated the same baseless conspiracy theories as Trump, like the majority of their Republican colleagues they have not recognized Biden as the president-elect.
On Sunday, Loeffler was asked on numerous occasions whether she believed Trump’s fictitious claims of election fraud and declined to answer directly each time.
She argued that Trump, who has so far lost all meaningful decisions in his numerous legal attempts to subvert the results through the courts, had “every right to every legal recourse” in the election.
Trump lost the state of Georgia, a long time Republican stronghold, by over 12,000 votes in a result that was certified by the Republican secretary of state over two weeks ago.
Loeffler attempted to pivot away from the issue by arguing that Trump had also encouraged his supporters on Saturday to vote for her in January.
“The president was also clear that Georgians need to come out and vote for David Perdue and myself because of what’s at stake,” she said.
Both Republicans candidates face a rhetorical tightrope. On the one hand they are refusing to acknowledge that Biden has won, but on other framing the Georgia Senate race as crucial to prevent Democratic control of government, itself a tacit acknowledgement that Trump has lost the White House.
Warnock, pastor of the historic Ebenezer baptist church in Atlanta, criticised Loeffler for her position, and used one of his own questions in the debate to ask: “Yes or no, Senator Loeffler: did Donald Trump lose the presidential election?”
The senator dodged the answer again.
Loeffler, who is a multi-millionaire, also faces allegations of shady stock market trading tied to the pandemic, hit back by branding Warnock, a centrist Democrat, as a “radical liberal” and at one point asked the pastor to renounce Marxism in public.
Warnock did not engage, and concluded the debate by stating: “It’s dark right now. But morning is on the way. It’s our job, Georgia to put our shoes on and get ready because there are those engaged in the politics of division. They have no vision and so they engage in division.”
Early voting in the Georgia runoff begins on 14 December with polls indicating an extremely tight election in both races. More

Donald Trump campaigned for two Republican senators in Georgia on Saturday, at a rally that some in the party feared could end up hurting their chances by focusing on his efforts to reverse his own election defeat. In his first rally appearance since he lost to Joe Biden, Trump repeated baseless claims of widespread fraud in the presidential election. The crucial January runoff will determine which party controls the Senate
Trump rails against election result at rally ahead of crucial Georgia Senate runoff More

Donald Trump has held his first political rally since losing the presidential election, delivering an incoherent speech laced with baseless conspiracies theories about election fraud and attacks on Republican state officials in Georgia who have refused to help him subvert the results.In front of a crowd of thousands of mostly maskless, non-socially distanced supporters in south Georgia, Trump repeatedly claimed, falsely, that he had won the presidential election, and called for those in government with “courage and wisdom” to help him reverse the result.The president’s rally, on a cold evening at a regional airport in the small city of Valdosta, came ahead of a critical US Senate runoff election in January, which will decide control of the upper house and ultimately play a decisive role in president-elect Joe Biden’s ability to legislate.Trump had ostensibly travelled to Georgia as a show of support for the two Republican Senate candidates for the January poll, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, but spent the majority of speech railing against the results of the presidential election.He began his speech, which lasted more than 90 minutes, by falsely claiming he had won the state of Georgia, which he lost to Joe Biden by over 12,000 votes in a result that was certified by the Republican secretary of state more than two weeks ago.“They cheated and they rigged our presidential election, but we will still win it,” Trump falsely claimed. “And they’re going to try and rig this [Senate] election too.”The president read from a prepared list of nonsensical evidence that he said highlighted his victory. This included arguing that by winning the states of Ohio and Florida he had in fact won the entire election, and also that winning an uncontested Republican party primary earlier this year was proof he had won against Biden in November.Trump lost the electoral college vote by 306 votes to 232 and the popular vote by over 7m. His campaign has launched numerous legal challenges in various states. An Associated Press tally showed that of roughly 50 cases brought by Trump’s campaign and his allies, more than 30 have been rejected or dropped, and about a dozen are awaiting action.Trump vented fury at the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, a one-time political ally of the president, who has resisted calls to join Trump’s attempts to overturn the result in the state.“Your governor could stop it very easily if he knew what the hell he was doing,” Trump told the crowd.He added: “For whatever reason your secretary of state and your governor are afraid of Stacey Abrams” – a reference to the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate, who is a staunch voting rights advocate and helped drive turnout in the election and secure the state for Biden.The rally came hours after the Washington Post reported that Trump pressured Kemp to overthrow the results of the election in the state during a Saturday morning phone call. Trump pushed Kemp to convene a special session of the state legislature in a bid to send Trump backing presidential electors when the electoral college convenes on 14 December. Kemp denied the request, the Post reported.Trump then made a similar demand on Twitter in the afternoon.The president also demanded an audit of absentee ballot signatures in the state, which Kemp does not have the power to authorise.At the rally, which was reminiscent of many of his campaign rallies, Trump railed against coronavirus and resulting restrictions, and stoked fears of tax changes under a Democratic administration.He also claimed if he thought he had lost the presidential election, he would be “a very gracious loser”. “I’d go to Florida … I’d take it easy” he said. More

Donald Trump will return to the campaign trail on Saturday – not, notionally at least, in his quixotic and doomed attempt to deny defeat by Joe Biden, but in support of two Republicans who face January run-offs which will decide control of the US Senate.The president and first lady Melania Trump are due to appear in Valdosta, Georgia at 7pm local time.“See you tomorrow night!” Trump tweeted on Friday, as Vice-President Mike Pence stumped in the southern state.But the president couldn’t help tying the Senate race to his baseless accusations of electoral fraud in key states he lost to Biden.“The best way to insure [sic] a … victory,” he wrote, “is to allow signature checks in the presidential race, which will insure [sic] a Georgia presidential win (very few votes are needed, many will be found).“Spirits will soar and everyone will rush out and VOTE!”To the contrary, many observers postulate that Trump’s ceaseless baseless claims that the election was rigged could depress turnout among supporters in Georgia, handing a vital advantage to Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the Democratic challengers to senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.If Ossoff and Warnock win, the Senate will be split 50-50, Kamala Harris’s vote as vice-president giving Democrats control. Polling in both races is tight.Trump’s recalcitrance is being encouraged by congressional Republicans. On Saturday the Washington Post reported that only 25 of 247 Republican representatives and senators have acknowledged Biden’s victory.Biden won the electoral college by 306-232, the same result Trump said was a landslide when it landed in his favour over Hillary Clinton. The Democrat is more than 7m ballots ahead in the national popular vote, having attracted the support of more than 81 million Americans, the most of any candidate for president.Democrats performed less well in Senate, House and state elections, however, making the Georgia runoffs vital to the balance of power in Washington as leaders look for agreement on much-needed stimulus and public health measures to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic and its attendant economic downturn.Earlier this week, two lawyers who have both been involved in legal challenges to Biden’s victory and trafficked in outlandish conspiracy theories, Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, told Trump supporters not to vote in Georgia unless Republican leaders act more aggressively to overturn the presidential result.“We’re not gonna go vote 5 January on another machine made by China,” Wood said on Wednesday. “You’re not gonna fool Georgians again. If Kelly Loeffler wants your vote, if David Perdue wants your vote, they’ve got to earn it. They’ve got to demand publicly, repeatedly, consistently, ‘Brian Kemp: call a special session of the Georgia legislature’.“And if they do not do it, if Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue do not do it, they have not earned your vote. Don’t you give it to them. Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election?”After a rush of defeats on Friday, Trump has won one election-related lawsuit and lost 46. But he continues to attack, in Georgia slamming Governor Brian Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger for overseeing a contest in which the state went Democratic for the first time since 1992.Matt Towery, a former Georgia Republican legislator now an analyst and pollster, told Reuters Trump could help in the state “if he spends most of his time talking about the two candidates, how wonderful they are, what they’ve achieved.“If he talks about them for 10 minutes and spends the rest of the time telling everyone how terrible Brian Kemp is, then it will only exacerbate things.”Gabriel Sterling, the Republican manager of Georgia’s voting systems, this week blamed the president and his allies for threats of violence against election workers and officials. On Friday, he said: “I think the rhetoric they’re engaged in now is literally suppressing the vote.”At a rally in Savannah, the vice-president was greeted by chants of “stop the steal”.“I know we’ve all got our doubts about the last election,” Pence said, “and I actually hear some people saying, ’Just don’t vote.’ My fellow Americans, if you don’t vote, they win.”Kemp and Loeffler missed campaign events on Friday after a young aide to the senator was killed in a car crash.Former president Barack Obama held a virtual event in support of Warnock and Ossoff. From Wilmington, Delaware, where he continues preparations to take power on 20 January, Biden said he would travel to Georgia at some point, to campaign with the Democratic candidates. More

For a man obsessed with winning, Donald Trump is losing a lot.In the month since the election, the president and his legal team have come no closer in their frantic efforts to overturn the result, notching up dozens of losses in courts across the country, with more rolling in by the day.According to an Associated Press tally of roughly 50 cases brought by Trump’s campaign and his allies, more than 30 have been rejected or dropped, and about a dozen are awaiting action.The advocacy group Democracy Docket put Trump’s losses even higher, tweeting on Friday that Trump’s team had lost 46 post-election lawsuits following several fresh losses in several states on Friday.Trump has notched just one small victory, a case challenging a decision to move the deadline to provide missing proof of identification for certain absentee ballots and mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.Five more losses came on Friday. The Trump campaign lost its bid to overturn the results of the election in Nevada and a Michigan appeals court rejected a case from his campaign. The Minnesota supreme court dismissed a challenge brought by GOP lawmakers. And in Arizona, a judge threw out a bid to undo Biden’s victory there, concluding that the state’s Republican party chairwoman failed to prove fraud or misconduct and that the evidence presented at trial wouldn’t reverse Trump’s loss. The Wisconsin supreme court also declined to hear a lawsuit brought by a conservative group over Trump’s loss.Trump’s latest failings came as California certified Joe Biden as the official winner in the state, officially handing him the electoral college majority needed to win the White House. Secretary of State Alex Padilla’s formal approval of the state’s 55 pledged electors brought Biden’s tally so far to 279, according to a count by the Associated Press – just over the 270 threshold needed for victory.The Republican president and his allies continue to mount new cases, recycling the same baseless claims, even after Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, declared this week that the justice department had uncovered no widespread fraud.“This will continue to be a losing strategy, and in a way it’s even bad for him: he gets to re-lose the election numerous times,“ said Kent Greenfield, a professor at Boston College Law School. “The depths of his petulance and narcissism continue to surprise me.”Trump has refused to admit he lost and this week posted a 46-minute speech to Facebook filled with conspiracy theories, misstatements and vows to keep up his fight to subvert the election.Judges in battleground states have repeatedly swatted down legal challenges brought by the president and his allies. Trump’s legal team has vowed to take one Pennsylvania case to the US supreme court even though it was rejected in a scathing ruling by a federal judge, as well as an appeals court.After recently being kicked off Trump’s legal team, the conservative attorney Sidney Powell filed new lawsuits in Arizona and Wisconsin this week riddled with errors and wild conspiracy claims about election rigging. One of the plaintiffs named in the Wisconsin case said he never agreed to participate in the case and found out through social media that he had been included.In his video posted Wednesday, Trump falsely claimed there were facts and evidence of a mass conspiracy created by Democrats to steal the election, a similar argument made by his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others before judges, which have been largely unsuccessful.Most of their claims are rooted in conspiracy theories about voting machines, as well as testimony from partisan poll watchers who claimed they didn’t get close enough to see ballots being tallied because of Covid safety precautions.“No, I didn’t hear any facts or evidence,“ tweeted the Pennsylvania attorney general, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, after watching the video Wednesday night. “What I did hear was a sad Facebook rant from a man who lost an election.” More

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