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      Democratic candidates say Georgia Senate elections will be decisive for US

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      In separate interviews on Sunday, the two Democratic candidates for US Senate in Georgia said their runoff elections in January would be decisive for America’s future.
      If Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock beat their Republican incumbent opponents, Democrats will regain control of the Senate, Kamala Harris serving as a tie-breaking vice-president in a chamber split 50-50. Though precarious, that would give Joe Biden greater hope of implementing his legislative agenda.
      Democrats hold the US House but fear a Republican-controlled Senate would hamper everything from a nationwide Covid-19 response to economic stimulus initiatives. Republicans fear losing a vital foothold on Capitol Hill. As a result, tens of millions of dollars are flowing into Georgia, where Ossoff will face David Perdue and Warnock will face Kelly Loeffler in the 5 January runoffs, necessitated by no candidate receiving more than 50% of the vote this month.
      “Trump is leaving, whether he knows it or not,” Ossoff told ABC’s This Week, referring to the president’s refusal to concede defeat by Biden. “And the question now is how we’re going to contain this pandemic which is raging out of control, which is spreading at an accelerating rate.”
      Ossoff won 48% of the vote to Perdue’s 49.7%. The remainder went to a Libertarian who is now out of the race.
      “There are hundreds of thousands of lives hanging in the balance, there are millions of jobs and homes and livelihoods hanging in the balance,” Ossoff said. “And that’s why it’s so important to win these two Senate races so that the incoming presidential administration can govern, can lead, can enact the solutions necessary to contain this virus and invest in economic recovery.”
      Georgia went to Biden in the presidential election, a recount unlikely to change the result. Crediting former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ organizing efforts for shifting Georgia’s vote – no Democratic presidential candidate had won the state since 1996 – Ossoff said: “What we’re feeling for the first time in four years is hope.
      “With Trump departing, we have the opportunity to define the next chapter in American history, to lead out of this crisis. But only by winning these Senate seats.
      “The GOP at the national level has no leader, has no message and has no vision other than stopping Joe Biden. But we are in a crisis, we need leadership, we need to make sure that Joe Biden can govern and this administration is successful.”
      Warnock, a pastor, won 33% of the vote over Loeffler’s 26%, with the rest going to other candidates including Doug Collins, a Republican US representative. In total, Democratic candidates polled 35.7% and Republicans 45.8%. Warnock told CNN’s State of the Union that did not worry him.
      “I finished first, handily, far ahead of a candidate who’s the wealthiest member of Congress, who poured millions of dollars into this race,” he said.
      “And we finished in a strong position. There’s no question in my mind that as Georgians hear about my commitment to access to affordable healthcare, the dignity of work, the work I’ve been doing for years standing up for ordinary people, we will prevail come 5 January.”
      The CNN host Jake Tapper pointed out that Republicans have tried to link Warnock to Democrats in Washington, to cast him as a dangerous radical.
      “Listen,” Warnock said. “This is a Georgia race. And I’m Georgia. I grew up in Savannah, Georgia, my church is in Atlanta. I’m pastor of the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr.
      “I grew up in public housing, one of 12 children in my family. I’m number 11. And the first graduate of a four-year college in my family. I know personally the importance of good federal policy, combined with personal responsibility, work, grit and determination. That’s the reason I’m able to run for the United States Senate. I am an iteration of the American dream.
      “I’m running for the Senate because that promise is slipping away from far too many people. That’s what this race is about … and that’s what I can take, I will continue to lift up. Even as I move across the great state of Georgia, people are responding to that message.” More

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      ‘They know their vote matters’: the Georgia Senate runoffs battle is already on

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      Donald Trump may have forced a recount of the votes in Georgia that helped end his presidency, but the activists who organised the surge in turnout that helped defeat him have already turned their attention to two elections that will decide who controls the US Senate and the course of Joe Biden’s presidency.
      Tens of millions of dollars are pouring in to the Georgia runoff races, which can be expected to draw Biden back to the campaign trail as voters have the opportunity to make history by defeating the state’s two Republican senators to give the new president control of both houses of Congress.
      Traditionally, turnout has been low for runoff elections and that has favoured Republicans. But the presidential race in Georgia has already turned conventional political wisdom on its head. A concerted get out the vote campaign over recent years, combined with a surge of political engagement by younger people over demands for racial justice, narrowly swung the state for Biden. More

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      Latinos could swing Georgia. Don't repeat the mistakes of Florida and Texas | Chuck Rocha

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      In less than eight weeks, voters of the now-blue state of Georgia will head to the polls to vote in the Senate runoff election on 5 January 2021 to decide if the Rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff will join their Democratic colleagues in Congress. These two seats are crucial to deliver the mandate needed by Joe Biden to enact his ambitious vision for America’s future.
      With the Democratic party’s hopes and dreams resting on Georgia’s shoulders, it would be a costly misstep to overlook a key demographic: Latinos. There are nearly a million Latinos living in Georgia, the majority of whom live in and around the Atlanta metro area. About 300,000 persuadable Latino voters who are registered to vote identify as neither Democrat nor Republican. These voters represent a small but decisive 5% of the electorate. In a world in which races are won on razor-thin margins, that 5% is a crucial swing vote.
      In the days leading up to the 2020 general election, I watched my colleagues’ hopes rise at the sight of a string of polls showing Biden with the lead in Florida and record-breaking early voter turnout in my home state of Texas. These hopes were quickly dashed. In the wake of defeat, my phone started to buzz with people asking, urgently: what went wrong with the Latino vote? It was the first time in my 30 years of political experience that the nation finally learned a truth that Latino organizers have been trying to convey for ages. We are not a monolith and you must ask us for our vote if you want to earn our vote.
      Let’s set the record straight: President-elect Joe Biden won Latino voters. He spent more money engaging with Latino voters in his 2020 campaign than either Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton. This investment paid off for Biden, with decisive Latino victories in the states he focused on competing in, including Florida.
      By now, we have all heard about the heroine of Georgia’s historic blue shift. Stacey Abrams’ unprecedented grassroots voter registration and mobilization efforts have unequivocally proven that the antidote to poisonous voter suppression tactics and lagging voter engagement involves two key ingredients: both statewide and community-led operations.
      Fair Fight Action was responsible for the registration of over 800,000 voters in Georgia – a force to be reckoned with in the once reliably red south. This level of mobilization, focused on Latinos, will be critical to swing the Georgia special election toward Democrats and clinch these two remaining Senate seats.
      Every 30 seconds in America, a Latino turns 18 and becomes eligible to vote. Over half of Georgia’s Latino population is under the age of 18. This means there are thousands of Latino youth in Georgia who will turn 18 on or before 5 January who qualify to register to vote in the Senate elections. This is in addition to hundreds of thousands of Latinos already over the age of 18 who are currently unregistered to vote.
      The registration deadline for all Georgians who wish to vote in the runoff elections is less than a month away, on 7 December. These next three weeks present a small window of opportunity for Democrats to expand their electorate. Emerging Latino populations can and will tip the balance in this election.
      Latino organizers and groups on the ground such as Galeo, a non-profit that helps register new Latino voters across Georgia, need funding and resources right now in order to mobilize Latinos in large enough numbers to swing the state. Over the past four months, Nuestro Pac – now the largest Latino-focused Super Pac, which I helped found – spent over $5m to galvanize Latino voters for Biden in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. These efforts helped deliver the margins of victory for Biden in many of the states he won.
      Georgia presents an enormous opportunity for Democrats, in part because the unique nuances of Latino voters in Texas and Florida, who are culturally distinct from elsewhere, are not present to the same extent in Georgia. The most pressing issue for Latinos in Georgia – and Latinos in general – is Covid relief funds, which are currently being held hostage by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Healthcare is a similarly critical issue for Latinos in Georgia – yet the Republican party has voted over 50 times to strip Americans of health protections provided by the Affordable Care Act, and are trying to defeat it through the supreme court.
      Through the appointment of a new and diverse Covid-19 taskforce, Biden has already taken a crucial first step to instill confidence in these voters. Now it is time for investment in grassroots organizing so that Latinos can deliver Biden a mandate.
      Chuck Rocha is the president of Solidarity Strategies and the founder of Nuestro Pac. He was a senior adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign More

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      'Whatever it takes': how Black women fought to mobilize America's voters

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      Even before networks projected the presidential race for Joe Biden last Saturday, Wanda Mosley, a 50-year-old organizer based in Atlanta, Georgia, began to prepare to mobilize voters for her state’s two critical Senate runoff elections on 5 January.
      After one of the most turbulent presidential elections in US history, the two races in the battleground state will determine if the balance of power in Washington will fall to the president-elect once he is sworn into office. Georgia has yet to be called for Biden, a Democrat, though he currently leads Donald Trump, which motivates organizers such as Mosley who until early December will continue to register voters planning to vote in the January runoffs.
      “We understand fully how important these races are,” says Mosley, the senior state coordinator for Georgia’s Black Voters Matter, a nonprofit dedicated to voter engagement.
      “We’re still here. We’re still working,” Mosley said.
      Democrats have long pointed to Black voters, more specifically, Black women, as a crucial voting bloc, decisive to elections since former president Bill Clinton’s victories in the 1990s. But this November, successfully flipping the southern, Republican-led state of Georgia to the Democrats for the first time in 28 years has drawn attention to the organizational power of Black women, whose large-scale mobilization efforts appear to have resulted in massive turnout among people of color in those cities, experts say.
      “What might have been different is the greater role of on the ground mobilization and voter registration efforts in states like Georgia, and I think that that was the effort that was largely built by Stacey Abrams and others on the ground,” said Jamil Scott, an assistant professor in the government department at Georgetown University.
      Rather than rely on outside political consultants swarming into battleground states, Abrams, who lost to the Republican Governor Brian Kemp in 2018, led that charge in Georgia this year, says Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a national network advocating for women of color in politics. There was a 69% increase in voter turnout among women of color in Georgia this year compared to 2016, according to Allison, who cites data She the People analyzed from progressive data firm Catalist.
      “You have a group of voters of Black women who are the most effective organizers on the ground because they are trusted voices and are working in organizations year round. They don’t come in six weeks before and kind of rent out a storefront, they’re actually invested in, long-term, empowering the community through civic and political action,” she said.
      In America, this election year has not played out in a vacuum. Rather, it has been met with – and compounded by – America’s year of reckoning with police brutality and systemic inequality, which has driven even more people to vote.
      Thousands of Americans took to the streets to protest against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths earlier this year as the Black community also shouldered the disproportionate impact of Covid-19. The meeting of those moments spurred political mobilization among Black voters, says Tim Stevens, the CEO of Pittsburgh’s Black Political Empowerment Project, a non-profit voting rights organization based in Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, where Trump was swiftly defeated last week.
      “The tragedies … made what was already present in the heart of Black people and people of color even more evident and more urgent,” said Stevens.
      Those mobilization efforts were evident as ballots were counted in diverse urban centers in key states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania where large populations of Black voters in Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia helped push Biden towards victory.
      Then there were a number of prominent Black women in leadership roles – like Abrams, Nikema Williams, who took on John Lewis’s congressional seat and is chair of Georgia’s state Democratic party, and Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms – helped fuel mobilization efforts among Black women this election, suggests Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor of political science and the chair of the department of Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame.
      One organizer in Pennsylvania points to the most prominent: the first Black and south Asian American vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris. “We had the same feelings we had when Obama was first elected,”says Brittany Smalls, the Pennsylvania state coordinator for Black Voters Matter. “We just never thought we would see the day that a woman in leadership looks like us.”

      Kamala Harris
      (@KamalaHarris)
      I want to speak directly to the Black women in our country. Thank you. You are too often overlooked, and yet are asked time and again to step up and be the backbone of our democracy. We could not have done this without you.

      November 9, 2020

      Now, as Americans across the country shift their attention away from the presidential race and to the runoff elections in Georgia, organizers like Mosley say they are keen to build on their success, in an election that could ultimately determine what kind of presidency Joe Biden will have.
      “This is the culmination of years and years and years of work, when other people didn’t think it was possible,” said Mosley. “We know how important the Senate is, and so if we can play a role in getting one – or possibly two seats – to try to shift that balance of power, you need to understand that Black women will do whatever it takes.”
      This piece was published in partnership between the Guardian and The Fuller Project. More

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      Trump's longshot election lawsuits: where do things stand?

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      Since election day, Donald Trump and other Republicans have filed a smattering of lawsuits in battleground states that have provided cover for Trump and other Republicans to say that the election still remains unresolved.
      Legal experts have noted these suits are meritless, and even if they were successful, would not be enough to overturn the election results. Indeed, judges in several of these lawsuits have already dismissed them, noting the Trump campaign has failed to offer evidence to substantiate allegations of fraud.
      Here’s where some of the key lawsuits stand:
      Pennsylvania
      One of the main rallying cries for Trump and his supporters has been that they were not allowed to observe vote counting in Philadelphia, the overwhelmingly Democratic city that helped Biden carry Pennsylvania.
      That’s not true. The Trump campaign did secure a court order to allow observers to get closer to the vote counting process, but there’s no evidence observers were excluded and Philadelphia had a 24/7 livestream of its counting. When the campaign went to federal court arguing that its observers didn’t have access to vote counting, a campaign lawyer was forced to admit there was a “non-zero” number of campaign observers watching the vote count.
      Pennsylvania Republicans and the Trump campaign are also still pushing the US supreme court to reject mail-in ballots that were postmarked by election day and arrived at election offices by 6 November. Pennsylvania law requires ballots to arrive by the close of polls on election night, but the Pennsylvania supreme court, where Democrats have a majority, pointed to mail delays and the pandemic to justify the extension. Several other states in the US allow ballots to be counted if they arrive after election day but are postmarked before.
      Republicans have been trying to get these ballots rejected since early September, when the Pennsylvania supreme court extended the receipt deadline by three days. The number of late-arriving ballots is thought to be relatively small, so even if the supreme court were to ultimately reject them, it would not be enough to overturn Biden’s lead of nearly 45,000 votes in the state.
      Trump and Republicans have also pursued a number of cases to try and get courts to reject mail-in ballots where voters made a mistake, but have been unsuccessful in all of their suits. Even if Republicans succeeded, it wouldn’t be enough to overturn the results of the race.
      On Monday evening, the Trump campaign filed another lawsuit in federal court offering a new legal theory – Pennsylvania’s election was illegitimate because it had different processes for voting by mail and voting in person. Many legal experts quickly noted the theory was bogus.
      The suit was “inexcusably late”, said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, who noted the differences between in-person and mail-in voting were known for months.
      “The core theory on which it rests – that there’s some kind of right to have all ballots counted through precisely the same procedures – would effectively invalidate mail-in voting not just in Pennsylvania, but nationwide,” he said. “Yet again, it offers no actual evidence of any impropriety or fraud in how Pennsylvania has counted these ballots. It’s just a transparent effort to throw out legal votes – or, at least, to muddy the waters long enough to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying its slate of electors in time.”
      Arizona
      The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Arizona on Saturday that seemed to be based on a discredited conspiracy theory that voters who used Sharpie pens to fill out their ballots would not have them counted.
      The campaign’s suit didn’t specifically mention Sharpies, but contained allegations from voters who said they noticed ink had bled through their ballots, which could potentially cause their ballots not to count if the ballot scanners believed they had cast a vote for more than one candidate in a contest, something known as an overvote. The suit says that poll workers failed to avail voters of the opportunity to cast a new ballot when scanners notified them of the issue.
      The Trump campaign submitted affidavits from two voters who said they were not notified of the chance to fix their ballots. A poll watcher submitted an affidavit saying he observed around 80 instances in which voters were given vague or confusing information about the possibility their vote could be rejected. He said he observed about 40 instances in which the poll worker had pressed the button to submit the ballot on behalf of the voter. Biden leads Trump in Arizona by more than 17,000 votes. More

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      How Georgia's Senate runoffs could finally hand Stacey Abrams her victory

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      Two years ago, Stacey Abrams became a household name when she ran for governor of Georgia against Brian Kemp, then secretary of state. Though her votes came in short, she refused to concede – citing widespread voter suppression in a state where the election was run by the opponent himself.
      In 2020, she is still not the governor. But in some ways, Abrams never lost.
      Though it is poised for a recount, Georgia surprised America and the world when – on the basis of the first count –the Democrats outpolled the Republicans last week. If the result survives the recount then Joe Biden will become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia in 28 years.
      He could not have done it without Stacey Abrams.
      The huge voter turnout – inspired by Abrams’s work and a groundswell of Black community organizers in her circle – means that both Georgia Senate races will go to a runoff and, if the Democrats were to win both races, they would control the Senate. Without them Joe Biden will be significantly constrained by a Republican held Senate – the leader, Mitch McConnell, could even veto cabinet appointments.
      The date of the Senate run-offs, 5 January, looms large as another day of destiny for Georgia – and America. At its heart is a woman who, two years after losing, might be on the brink of a spectacular victory. As a CNN article last week noted, using popular shorthand for “Democratic”: “For Stacey Abrams, revenge is a dish best served blue.”
      Tearing down barriers
      In 2018, the race for governor in Georgia was a highly contested one. The final tally said Abrams lost by just 55,000 votes. But Abrams, who had earned endorsements from Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama, wouldn’t accept the result.
      More than 1 million Georgians had been purged from voter rolls, with nearly 670,000 cancelled from the roles in 2017. An Associated Press analysis revealed that 70% of the cancelled voters were Black – a stark racial disparity since only 32% of Georgia’s population is Black. This would cut deeply into Abrams’ voter base.
      Meanwhile, the person in charge of maintaining the voter rolls was her opponent himself. At the time of the race, Kemp was serving as Georgia secretary of state, a position that oversees the state’s elections – a clear conflict of interest.
      The New Yorker, a few weeks before that election day two years ago, ran a profile headlined Brian Kemp is the Martin Shkreli of Voter Suppression. (A reference to Kemp’s insider influence while referencing the notorious ‘Pharma Bro’ who was convicted of fraud for hiking drug prices.)
      The New Yorker said of Kemp: “His tenure as secretary of state has been marred by a record of voter suppression and intimidation tactics. In general, it’s impossible to talk about these actions without talking about how they hurt minority turnout.”
      Abrams didn’t concede. But she also didn’t stop working. More

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      How Georgia built on legacy of a civil rights titan and finally tilted blue

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      Downtown Atlanta boarded up when it became clear that Georgia could decide the fate of Donald Trump by just a few thousands votes one way or the other.The city worried that the president might unleash his well-armed supporters against an unfavourable result or that Trump’s opponents might turn out in protest if Georgia’s Republican establishment got up to its old shenanigans of fixing elections.But as the counting dragged on, the streets stayed quieter than usual, although coronavirus had already taken its toll on city life. When the results finally began to put Joe Biden in the lead in Georgia, his supporters held off on the celebrations. This was the wrong year to tempt fate.But there was a lot of quiet satisfaction that a state whose most significant role in presidential elections until now was as the home of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, might prove instrumental in the toppling of the US president.“I’m glad I voted. Didn’t last time but we needed rid of that guy. I’m proud of Georgia!” said Martin Williams, on his way to work at a fast food restaurant an otherwise empty city street early Saturday morning.That is a widely held sentiment among Trump’s opponents who sometimes cast his defeat – although a recount was announced on Friday – in terms of a sweet revenge in a state he won by five points in 2016.After trailing for days in the Georgia count, Biden was finally tipped into winning territory by votes from Clayton County, represented in Congress for years by the civil rights titan John Lewis, a fierce critic of Trump who died in July.“I love the idea that Clayton County could put Biden over in GA. That’s John Lewis’ district. He would do one of his trademark happy dances in heaven. Symmetry,” former Senator Claire McCaskill tweeted.Ben Crump, the lawyer who represents the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other African Americans killed by police, tweeted a reference to Lewis’s mantra of causing “good trouble” in the fight for rights. More

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      Georgia announces recount after presidential race too close to call

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      Election officials in Georgia announced a recount on Friday after the presidential race was deemed “too close to call” in that state.
      Joe Biden overtook Donald Trump in Georgia, historically a Republican stronghold, at around 4.30am ET to secure a lead of 1,579 votes.
      Trump and Biden were locked in a tight contest on Friday, with the Democrat edging ahead, to get the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. For Trump, Georgia is a state he must win.
      But with such a razor-thin margin, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, said ballots will undergo a recount.
      “Right now, Georgia remains too close to call. Of approximately 5m votes cast, we’ll have a margin of a few thousand,” he said in a press conference. He added: “With a margin that small, there will be a recount in Georgia.”
      If Biden goes on to win Georgia, it would mark a major victory for the Democrats – and a huge upset for the Republicans – in a state that has been reliably Republican for decades.
      The last time a Democratic presidential nominee won in the state was Bill Clinton in 1992. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Georgia by five percentage points.
      Raffensperger acknowledged that Georgia’s result has “huge implications for the entire country” and officials said the unofficial tally could be completed by the end of the weekend.He added: “The stakes are high and emotions are high on all sides. We will not let those debates distract us from our work. We will get it right, and we will defend the integrity of our elections.”
      Georgia does not run automatic recounts, but candidates can request them if the margin is within 0.5%.
      The announcement of a recount came after a judge dismissed a lawsuit from the Trump campaign over the state’s handling of absentee ballots in Chatham county.
      The Trump campaign has launched a swath of legal cases across the country, which are largely intended as a distraction and are founded on weak legal arguments, experts say.
      Matt Morgan, general counsel for the Trump campaign, said on Friday: “Georgia is headed for a recount, where we are confident we will find ballots improperly harvested, and where President Trump will ultimately prevail.”
      Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, dismissed allegations of fraud, saying: “We’re not seeing any widespread irregularities.”Sterling said that 4,169 ballots, most of which were absentee, were left to be counted from four counties, including Gwinnett county, which includes Atlanta suburbs and in recent years has shifted towards Democrats. The state also has an unknown quantity of military and overseas ballots and an unknown number of provisional ballots to be “cured”.
      Biden’s strength in Georgia is the result of strong turnout among Black voters in the Atlanta suburbs, which have become younger and increasingly diverse.
      The Black Voters Matter Fund, a non-profit that advocates for increasing voter registration and access, hailed the impact of Black voters in Georgia, who they said “saved the election”.
      They said more than a million Black voters cast their ballots early in the state – exceeding 2016 numbers – and reported a “surge” in registration and turnout among young Black voters.
      Co-founders LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright said: “A new south is rising, and Georgia is the beacon … Georgia is at the epicenter of this country right now and we are claiming victory.”
      It is also a product of the work of figures such Stacey Abrams, who since losing the state’s 2018 race for governor has thrown her efforts into Fair Fight, an organization she founded that focuses on combating voter suppression.
      The recount could also have significant implications for the fight for control of the US Senate, with one – possibly two – Senate races heading for a runoff.
      According to electoral research by the Associated Press, there have been at least 31 statewide recounts since 2000, of which three changed the outcome of an election. But in those the initial margins were even slimmer – in the low hundreds rather than thousands.
      Many analysts believe Georgia’s shift to becoming a swing state is almost inevitable – an assessment that is reflected in the energies invested into the state by the Biden campaign.
      In the final weeks before the election, Biden, his running mate Senator Kamala Harris and former president Barack Obama have all paid visits. Trump has also rallied there.
      “Can you believe it? Two days from now, we’re going to win this state again and we’re going to win four more great years in the White House,” Trump told supporters in the Georgia city of Rome on Sunday. More