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      'I just want 11,780 votes': Trump pressed Georgia to overturn Biden victory

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      In an hour-long phone call on Saturday, Donald Trump pressed Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to overturn Joe Biden’s victory there in the election the president refuses to concede.The Washington Post obtained a tape of the “extraordinary hour-long call”, which Trump acknowledged on Twitter.Amid widespread outrage including calls for a second impeachment, Bob Bauer, a senior Biden adviser, said: “We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place.”The Post published the full call.“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”Raffensperger is a Republican who has become a bête noire among Trump supporters for repeatedly saying Biden’s win in his state was fair. In one of a number of parries, he said: “Well, Mr President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”He also insisted: “There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”Trump’s contempt for democracy is laid bare. Once again. On tapeTrump did not win Georgia, which went Democratic for the first time since 1992. Its result has been certified. Attempts to pressure Republicans in other battleground states have failed, as have the vast majority of challenges to results in court.Despite promised objections from at least 12 Republican senators and a majority of the House GOP, Biden’s electoral college victory will be ratified by Congress on Wednesday. The Democrat will be inaugurated as the 46th president on 20 January. Trump will then leave the White House – where he remained, tweeting angrily, all weekend.Edward B Foley, an Ohio State law professor, told the Post the call was “‘inappropriate and contemptible’ and should prompt moral outrage”. Trump’s behaviour was “already tripping the emergency meter,” he added. “So we were at 12 on a scale of one to 10, and now we’re at 15.”In an email to the Guardian, University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said: “The conduct that the press has reported might place Trump in legal jeopardy after Biden is inaugurated.“For example, if the justice department or US attorneys believe that Trump violated federal law or if local prosecutors in states, such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump may have engaged in similar behaviour with state or local election officials, believe that Trump violated state election laws, the federal or state prosecutors could file suit against Trump.”Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, went further, calling for Trump to be impeached a second time, even though he has little more than two weeks left in office.“The president of the United States has been caught on tape trying to rig a presidential election,” Bookbinder said. “This is a low point in American history and unquestionably impeachable conduct. It is incontrovertible and devastating.“When the Senate acquitted President Trump for abusing his powers to try to get himself re-elected [in February 2020, regarding approaches to Ukraine for dirt on Biden], we worried that he would grow more brazen in his attempts to wrongly and illegally keep himself in power. He has … Congress must act immediately.”From Congress, in a tweet, Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee, said: “Trump’s contempt for democracy is laid bare. Once again. On tape.”The lead prosecutor at Trump’s Senate impeachment trial last year added: “Pressuring an election official to ‘find’ the votes so he can win is potentially criminal, and another flagrant abuse of power by a corrupt man who would be a despot, if we allowed him. We will not.”Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat widely expected to be elected House speaker for a fourth term, set out her strategy for the election certification in a memo to colleagues.“Over the years,” she wrote, “we have experienced many challenges in the House, but no situation matches the Trump presidency and the Trump disrespect for the will of the people.”Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois, tweeted: “This is absolutely appalling. To every member of Congress considering objecting to the election results, you cannot – in light of this – do so with a clean conscience.”Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying, ‘These guys are dumber than a rock’White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer, were also on the call, during which Trump ran through a laundry list of debunked claims regarding supposed electoral fraud and called Raffensperger a “child”, “either dishonest or incompetent” and a “schmuck”.Characteristically, Trump also threatened legal action.“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” he said. “You know, that’s a criminal offence. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan [Germany], your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”Referring to runoffs on Tuesday that will decide control of the Senate, Trump said Georgia had “a big election coming up and because of what you’ve done to the president – you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam.“Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote, and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative, because they hate what you did to the president. OK? They hate it. And they’re going to vote. And you would be respected, really respected, if this can be straightened out before the election.”Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, seeking to beat Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, have ranged themselves behind Trump. But Georgia Republicans fear his attacks could suppress his own party’s turnout as Democrats work to boost their own.Early voting has reached unprecedented levels and on Sunday, former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams told ABC’s This Week: “What we’re so excited about is that we haven’t stopped reaching those voters. Millions of contacts have been made, thousands of new registrations have been held. We know that at least 100,000 people who did not vote in the general election are now voting in this election.”Trump told Raffensperger: “Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying, ‘These guys are dumber than a rock.’”Trump also said he knew the call wasn’t “going anywhere”. Raffensperger ended the conversation.On Twitter on Sunday, Trump said Raffensperger “was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”Twitter duly applied a standard disclaimer: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”Raffensperger also responded: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true.” More

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      'Traitors and patriots': Republican push to keep Trump in power seems doomed

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      All 12 Republican senators who have pledged not to ratify the electoral college results on Wednesday, and thereby refuse to confirm Joe Biden’s resounding victory over Donald Trump in the presidential election, declined to defend their move on television, a CNN host said on Sunday.
      “It all recalls what Ulysses S Grant once wrote in 1861,” Jake Tapper said on State of the Union, before quoting a letter the union general wrote at the outset of a civil war he won before becoming president himself: ‘There are [but] two parties now: traitors and patriots.’
      “How would you describe the parties today?” Tapper asked.
      The attempt to overturn Trump’s defeat seems doomed, a piece of political theatre mounted by party grandees eager to court supporters loyal to the president before, in some cases, mounting their own runs for the White House.
      Nonetheless on Saturday Ted Cruz of Texas and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin led 11 senators and senators-elect in calling for “an emergency 10-day audit” of results in states where the president claims electoral fraud, despite failing to provide evidence and repeatedly losing in court.
      The senators followed Josh Hawley of Missouri – like Cruz thought likely to run for president in 2024 – in pledging to object to the electoral college result. A majority of House Republicans are also expected to object, after staging a Saturday call with Trump to plan their own moves.
      Democrats control the House and senior Senate Republicans are opposed to the attempt to disenfranchise millions – many of them African Americans in swing states – seemingly guaranteeing the attempt will fail. Nonetheless, Vice-President Mike Pence, who will preside over the ratification, welcomed the move by Cruz and others.
      A spokesman for Biden, Michael Gwin, said: “This stunt won’t change the fact that President-elect Biden will be sworn in on 20 January, and these baseless claims have already been examined and dismissed by Trump’s own attorney general, dozens of courts, and election officials from both parties.”
      Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee now a senator from Utah, said: “The egregious ploy to reject electors may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our democratic republic.
      “…More Americans participated in this election than ever before, and they made their choice. President Trump’s lawyers made their case before scores of courts; in every instance, they failed.
      “…Adding to this ill-conceived endeavour by some in Congress is the president’s call for his supporters to come to the Capitol on the day when this matter is to be debated and decided. This has the predictable potential to lead to disruption, and worse.”
      Encouraged by Trump, far-right groups including the Proud Boys are expected to gather in Washington on Wednesday. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump's strategy: overturn result, cheat democracy | Editorial

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      This week, Donald Trump will undermine democracy in the US by supporting the claim that Democrat Joe Biden did not fairly win last November’s presidential election. A peaceful handover of power in a democracy requires losing candidates and their followers to admit defeat. But Mr Trump has manufactured a controversy purely to maintain power and to overturn a legitimate election.US courts have repeatedly thrown out Mr Trump’s evidence-free cases. This has not stopped the president’s accomplices in Congress. They, backed by Mr Trump’s vice-president, on Wednesday plan to challenge Mr Biden’s win to force a debate and votes in Congress. Some scholars point to a historical precedent as offering a slim, perhaps vanishing, chance that the nightmare will continue. Mr Trump will not let an opportunity pass to relitigate an election he lost.For the good of America, he must fail. The alternative is ultimately the collapse of political norms and civil strife. A classic demagogue, Mr Trump is signalling to his supporters that they, like him, should refuse to respect the election’s outcome and reject Mr Biden’s presidency. There is a well-grounded fear that protests could erupt, some of them armed. Mr Trump might call out the national guard or send federal agents to deal with demonstrations. This chaos, Mr Trump no doubt hopes, will pave the way for an autocratic takeover.Mr Trump is a sore loser who cannot stand that he was beaten in a fair election. He should move on but sees no reason why he should yield. After all, Mr Trump has not been punished for his transgressions against tradition, decency and the law. Instead, he has been rewarded. He thinks he can get away with almost anything. The Republican party has only itself to blame for incubating Trumpism, a parasitical ideology that threatens to take over the host.Mr Trump has thrown open the door to the argument of power rather than the power of argument in US electoral politics. With the help of social media, the president has polarised the electorate, building a “counter Republic” online, in which anger and fear are motivating emotions. In this world, the US apparently is being engulfed by socialism and liberal values. Mr Trump sells his chimerical fight as a necessary one, even if it cheats democracy itself. This has allowed him to frame the undoing of a presidential election as just an extension of other anti-democratic Republican tactics – such as gerrymandering and voter suppression – to constrain political opponents.Politicians in the US need to give up on the fantasy of a Trump second term. Questioning the integrity of the presidential election without proof of wrongdoing threatens the idea of liberal democracy. It leaves the US distracted by canards when its real problems are painfully obvious. No one outside of Trump’s orbit thinks that Washington DC ought to play host to rival inaugurations on 20 January. Mr Trump is not embracing chaos to express dissent. He is seeking to bring down the system that defeated him. More

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      ‘This is a referendum’: US Senate on a knife-edge as Georgia runoffs loom

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      “Georgia, Georgia,” sings musician John Legend, before Barack Obama’s narration takes over. “When the moment came to reject fear and division and send a message for change, Georgia stepped up,” says the former US president, referring to Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the state. “Now, America is counting on you again.”This is a glossy campaign ad for Jon Ossoff, one of two Democratic candidates challenging two Republican incumbents in the final election of 2020 – actually taking place on the first Tuesday of 2021. With November’s vote for Georgia’s two Senate seats proving inconclusive, the runoffs will not only decide the state’s direction but could strike a blow to Biden’s presidency before it has even begun.At stake is the balance of power in the 100-member US Senate. If Republicans win one or both of the Georgia seats, they will retain a slim majority and can block Biden’s legislative goals and judicial nominees. If Democrats prevail in both seats, however, there will be a 50/50 split in the chamber, giving Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, the tie-breaking vote.Harris will campaign in Savannah on Sunday and Biden will join the Democratic candidates in Atlanta on Monday, while the president will rally with the Republicans in Dalton on the same day.Once again, two radically different visions of the nation will collide. Republicans Kelly Loeffler, 50, and David Perdue, 71, have embraced the president’s “Make America Great Again” agenda so tightly that defeats for both would be a stark repudiation of his legacy.Trump is already smarting from a narrow defeat by Biden in the presidential election in Georgia, making him the first Republican to lose it since George HW Bush in 1992. It was the most concrete proof yet that a southern state that fought for slavery during the American civil war and was dominated by Republicans for decades is now among the most competitive political battlegrounds in the country.“We’ve heard for years that Georgia is changing, Georgia is changing, and it finally changed and it was a brilliant moment,” said Carter Crenshaw, a Republican who founded a group called GOP for Joe to support the Democratic nominee. “As a lifelong Georgian, it’s funny or almost ironic that a state in the solid Republican south is about to determine the future of the country. As Joe Biden said in the election, this is a referendum about the soul of our nation.”Such is the national resonance of the contests that record amounts of money are poured in. Ossoff, the 33-year-old chief executive of a company that makes investigative TV documentaries, became the best-funded Senate candidate ever after raising $106.7m between mid-October and mid-December.His opponent, Perdue, trailed with $68m and suffered a further setback on Thursday, announcing that he will quarantine for an unspecified period after being exposed to someone infected with coronavirus. In the other runoff, Democrat the Rev Raphael Warnock, 51, raised $103.3m over the two-month period, while his opponent, Loeffler – among the wealthiest and least experienced members of Congress – had a haul of nearly $64m.About 3m people have already cast their votes early, in person or by absentee ballot, way higher than the last statewide runoff in 2018. Democrats are depending on voters of colour, young people and college-educated white people to turn out in urban and suburban areas, particularly in and around Atlanta. These include disaffected Republicans like Crenshaw.“Part of the reason I made the decision to vote for Ossoff and Warnock was I have seen first-hand how Donald Trump has been so destructive to the party and overall trust in our elections,” he said. “It’s hard when the two Republicans have gone along pretty much consistently and regularly with every conspiracy theory that he and his supporters have come up with.”Crenshaw, a pharmacy technician and student, added: “It wasn’t just a vote against Donald Trump. It was also the recognition that character still does matter and the character of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff is at this point miles ahead of what Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have exhibited in the last several months.”But the likely deciding factor will be African American turnout. Democratic activist Stacey Abrams, who lost a race for Georgia governor in 2018, has done much to mobilise the party’s base and fight voter suppression in a state with a long history of racial segregation. The runoffs have led to court battles over the state’s removal of nearly 200,000 people from voter registration rolls, and a Republican effort to curb the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots.As of last Tuesday African American turnout was 31% of the total vote so far, higher than its 27% share in November, according to Cliff Albright, cofounder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter. “You’ve still got some people thinking that what happened in Georgia for the presidential was just a fluke and that’s actually part of the reason why Black voters are so intent on showing up in such numbers right now,” he said.“Trump and his supporters are reminding us of the same issues, the same racism, the same voter suppression that had us so energised in the general election, and that energy is spilling over into the runoffs.”Republican infighting over Trump’s baseless allegations of election fraud could cause some of the president’s base to stay at home in protest. Brian Kemp, the state governor, has confirmed Biden’s victory but Loeffler refuses to acknowledge the Democrat as president-elect, bragging that she has a “100% Trump voting record” and is “more conservative than Attila the Hun”.Her challenger, Warnock, is an African American pastor at the Atlanta church where the civil rights leader Martin Luther King often preached. Albright observed: “Sadly enough, many of the issues that King was trying to address are the same issues today. He was talking about racism and capitalism and military exploitation and here we are facing those same three evils.”The Democratic duo accuse their Republican rivals of abusing their office for self-enrichment and neglecting Georgians’ plight in the Covid-19 pandemic. Republicans are appealing to diehard Trump supporters in small towns and rural areas with lurid messaging that portrays the Democrats as radical socialists hellbent on defunding the police and destroying the American dream.Ann Jones, a farmer from Flowery Branch, said of Ossoff and Warnock: “They don’t give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. I think their agenda leads you way far from agriculture and way far from common sense. Both of them are virtually unknown. What is socialism? We jump right over into communism. They’re way far off the map.”Jones plans to vote for Loeffler and Perdue and would back Trump again if he is the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. “I don’t have a problem with him. I mean, do I want him to live in my house? Probably not. But he’s done a good job for the country and he’s done a whole lot for agriculture and you can’t throw any rocks at that.”Opinion polls suggest both races could go either way. John Zogby, a pollster and author, said two Republican wins on Tuesday night would deal a “horrible blow” to Biden’s presidency. Conversely, a Democratic sweep would diminish Trump’s credit for recent Republican gains in Congress and weaken his grip on the party as he teases another bid for the White House.“Here’s a guy we know is making every indication that he wants to run again and so this could potentially stop him in his tracks,” Zogby added. “It also would be part of his legacy, not only losing the election but losing the Senate. Kind of a capstone.” More

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      Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi homes vandalised in Covid protests

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      The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, decried what he called a “radical tantrum” on Saturday after his home in Kentucky was vandalised with messages apparently protesting against his refusal to increase Covid aid payments from $600 to $2,000.
      The attack followed a similar one on the home of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker, in San Francisco.
      Democrats under Pelosi supported the move to increase payments but McConnell blocked it, despite its origin in a demand from Donald Trump.

      According to local media reports, on Saturday morning the majority leader’s home in Louisville was spray-painted with slogans including “Weres [sic] my money?” and “Mitch kills the poor”.
      Police reported minor damage. It was not immediately known if McConnell and his wife, the transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, were home at the time.
      In California, Pelosi’s home was graced by a pig’s head, red paint and messages including “cancel rent” and “We want everything”.
      In a statement on Saturday, McConnell said: “I’ve spent my career fighting for the first amendment [which protects free speech] and defending peaceful protest. I appreciate every Kentuckian who has engaged in the democratic process whether they agree with me or not.
      “This is different. Vandalism and the politics of fear have no place in our society. My wife and I have never been intimidated by this toxic playbook. We just hope our neighbours in Louisville aren’t too inconvenienced by this radical tantrum.”
      The state Republican party demanded Democrats denounce the vandalism. In a tweet, Democratic governor Andy Beshear called the vandalism “unacceptable”.
      “While the first amendment protects our freedom of speech,” he wrote, “vandalism is reprehensible and never acceptable for any reason.”
      Protesters both against McConnell and for Trump in his attempts to hold on to power – which McConnell has opposed – gathered outside the majority leader’s home.
      “We all know that Trump supporters and what everyone wants to call Black Lives Matter has their differences,” one protester said, in footage broadcast on social media.
      “But collectively we are here because Mitch is a bitch and he owes the American people money … we are here together to protest because the government, the system, has been ripping us all off in many different ways.” More

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      Ted Cruz and other Republican senators oppose certifying election results

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      Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and nine other Republican US senators or senators-elect said on Saturday they will reject presidential electors from states where Donald Trump has contested his defeat by Joe Biden, “unless and until [an] emergency 10-day audit” of such results is completed.
      The move is largely symbolic and unlikely to overturn the presidential election. Nonetheless, it adds to a sense of deepening crisis affecting US democracy.
      Trump has refused to concede, though Biden won more than 7m more votes nationally and took the electoral college by 306-232, a margin Trump called a landslide when he won it over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
      The Trump campaign has lost the vast majority of more than 50 lawsuits it has mounted in battleground states, alleging electoral fraud, and before the supreme court.
      On Friday, a federal judge dismissed a suit lodged by a House Republican which attempted to give the vice-president, Mike Pence, who will preside over the certification of the electoral college result on Wednesday, the power to overturn it.
      Nonetheless, the senators and senators-elect who issued a statement on Saturday followed Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri in committing to challenging the result.
      Objections are also expected from a majority of House Republicans. Objections must be debated and voted on but as Democrats control the House and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and other senior Republicans have voiced opposition, the attempt to disenfranchise a majority of Americans seems doomed to fail.
      On Saturday, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said she would vote to certify the results, writing: “The oath I took at my swearing-in was to support and defend the constitution of the United States, and that is exactly what I will do.”
      But Cruz and Johnson were joined by Senators James Lankford (Oklahoma), Steve Daines (Montana), John Kennedy (Louisiana), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Mike Braun (Indiana). Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Roger Marshall (Kansas), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee) and Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) also signed on.
      “The election of 2020,” they said, “like the election of 2016, was hard fought and, in many swing states, narrowly decided. The 2020 election, however, featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.”
      No hard evidence for such claims has been presented. Federal officials including former attorney general William Barr and Christopher Krebs, a cyber security chief fired by Trump, have said the election was secure.
      Regardless, the senators said Congress “should immediately appoint an electoral commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed, individual states would evaluate the commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.”
      The senators made reference to the contested election of 1876, which ended in the appointment of such a commission.
      “We should follow that precedent,” they said.
      Most well-informed observers would suggest otherwise, given that process put an end to post-civil war Reconstruction and led to the institution of racist Jim Crow laws across the formerly slave-owning south.
      In August, the Pulitzer-winning historian Eric Foner told the Guardian: “The election of 1876 would not have been disputed at all if there hadn’t been massive violence in the south to prevent black people from voting and voter suppression like we have today. Now, voter suppression is mostly legal.”
      Presciently, given baseless claims that voting under a pandemic was abused by Democrats, he added: “Today, I can certainly see the Trump people challenging these mail-in ballots: ‘They’re all fraudulent, they shouldn’t be counted.’ Challenging people’s voting.”
      Cruz, like Hawley, is prominent among Republicans expected to run for president in 2024, and thus eager to appeal to supporters loyal to Trump. On Saturday, Christine Pelosi, daughter of House speaker Nancy Pelosi and a member of the Democratic National Committee, referred to the bitter 2016 primary when she tweeted: “Ted Cruz is defending Trump’s assaults on democracy with more energy than he defended his own family against Trump’s assaults on his wife and father.”
      The Democratic strategist Max Burns wrote: “The exact same Senate GOP that refused to allow a single witness during President Trump’s impeachment trial now wants to … call a bunch of witnesses to ‘investigate’ Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.”
      Biden did not immediately comment. In Congress, the Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal branded the statement “pathetic”, “un-American” and “an attack on our democracy”. Amy Klobuchar, from Minnesota, said Biden “will be inaugurated on 20 January, and no publicity stunt will change that”. More

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      Biden seeks term-defining wins in Georgia runoffs Trump called 'illegal'

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      Campaigning continued in Georgia on Saturday in two Senate runoff elections which will define much of Joe Biden’s first term in office.Regardless of Donald Trump’s bizarre New Year’s Day decision to call the runoffs “illegal and invalid”, the contests on Tuesday will decide control of the Senate and therefore how far Biden can reach on issues such as the pandemic, healthcare, taxation, energy and the environment.Democrats Jon Ossoff and the Rev Raphael Warnock must win to split the chamber 50/50. Kamala Harris, the vice-president-elect, would then act as tiebreaker as president of the Senate. Responding to that threat, Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have placed themselves squarely behind Trump, making hugely exaggerated claims about the dangers their opponents supposedly pose.In Perdue’s and Loeffler’s telling, a Democratic Senate would “rubber stamp” a “socialist agenda”, from “ending private insurance” and “expanding the supreme court” to adopting a Green New Deal that would raise taxes by thousands each year.Besides misrepresenting the policy preferences of Biden and most Democratic senators, that characterization ignores the reality of a Senate in which centrist Democrats and Republicans are set for a key role.At one campaign stop this week, Ossoff said Perdue’s “ridiculous” attacks “blow my mind”. He also scoffed at the claim that his ideas, aligned closely with Biden, amount to a leftist lunge. But he agreed with his opponent on how much Georgia matters.“We have too much good work to do,” Ossoff said, “to be mired in gridlock and obstruction for the next few years.”Ossoff also made headlines this week with his response to a Fox News reporter about Loeffler’s claims that her opponent, Warnock – pastor of a church formerly led by Martin Luther King Jr – is “dangerous” and “radical”.“Here’s the bottom line,” Ossoff said. “Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a klansman. Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a klansman and so she is stooping to these vicious personal attacks to distract from the fact that she’s been campaigning with a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.”The claim was misleading: Loeffler was pictured with a former member of the Klan but did not campaign with him. Loeffler responded by calling Ossoff “a pathological liar” and “a trust-fund socialist whose only job has been working for the Chinese Communist party in recent years”, a reference to payments to Ossoff’s media company from a Hong Kong conglomerate.Perdue entered quarantine this week after exposure to Covid-19. He and Loeffler must also contend with a deepening Republican split over Trump’s refusal to concede defeat in the presidential election.Trump has spread unfounded assertions of voter fraud and blasted Georgia Republicans including the governor, Brian Kemp, who have defended the elections process, attacks which led to his Friday night tweet about the legality of the runoffs. As Perdue and Loeffler have backed up Trump’s claims, some Republicans have expressed concern it could discourage loyalists from voting. Others are worried the GOP candidates have turned off moderates repelled by Trump.“No Republican is really happy with the situation we find ourselves in,” said Chip Lake, a longtime Georgia Republican consultant. “But sometimes when you play poker, you have to play the hand you’re dealt, and for us that starts with the president.”Trump will visit Georgia for a final rally with Loeffler on Monday evening, hours before polls open. It is unclear whether Perdue will attend.Democrats are fine with their opponents’ decision to run as Trump Republicans and use exaggerated attacks.“We talk about something like expanding Medicaid. We talk about expanding Pell grants” for low-income college students, Ossoff said at a recent stop in Marietta, north of Atlanta. “David Perdue denounces those things as socialism?”Ossoff noted Perdue’s claims that a Democratic Senate would abolish private health insurance. Ossoff and Warnock in fact back Biden’s proposal to add a federal insurance plan to private insurance exchanges.“I just want people to have the choice,” Ossoff said.Biden beat Trump by about 12,000 votes out of 5m in Georgia, making him the first Democrat to carry the state since 1992. His record vote total for a Democrat in the state was fueled by racially and ethnically diversifying metropolitan areas but also shifts in key Atlanta suburbs where white voters have historically leaned Republican.Yet Perdue landed within a few thousand votes of Trump’s total and led Ossoff by about 88,000. Republican turnout also surged in small towns and rural areas and Democrats disappointed down-ballot, failing to make expected gains.“We’ve won this race once already,” Perdue has said. His advisers think they can corral the narrow slice of swing voters by warning against handing Democrats control of the House, Senate and White House.Biden sold himself as a uniter and a seasoned legislative broker. But even a Democratic-held Senate would not give him everything he wants, as rules still require 60 votes to advance most major legislation. Biden must win over Republicans.A Democratic Senate would, however, clear a path for nominees to key posts, especially on the federal judiciary, and bring control of committees and floor action. A Senate led by current majority leader Mitch McConnell almost certainly would deny major legislative victories, as it did in Barack Obama’s tenure.Biden will travel to Atlanta on Monday to campaign with Ossoff and Warnock. Harris will campaign on Sunday in Savannah. In his last visit, Biden called Perdue and Loeffler “roadblocks” and urged Georgians “to vote for two United States senators who know how to say the word ‘yes’ and not just ‘no’.” More

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      Republican plan to challenge election signals ‘cult of Trump’ will live on in Biden era

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      Maverick super-loyalists to Donald Trump are set to make an audacious spectacle in Washington next week by voting against the formal counting of electoral college votes certifying Joe Biden’s victory.While the tactic by outliers won’t be enough to stop Biden becoming the 46th president, it will serve to disrupt Congress, bolster Trump and establish an acidic tone to political co-operation with the incoming Democratic administration.Two Republican members of the House of Representatives are reported to have told CNN, without releasing their names, that they expect around 140 GOP colleagues to vote against a procedural certification vote in a joint session of Congress on 6 January. The strategy speaks to the continuing stranglehold the outgoing president maintains over a significant faction of the party, political observers said on Friday.Peter Wehner, vice-president at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative thinktank, and speech writer for three Republican presidents, called the prospect of many Republican lawmakers voting against certification “a disturbing sign”.“It’s an indication that this is a secession-from-reality caucus,” Wehner told the Guardian.“It’s illiberal, anti-democratic, pernicious and widespread in the Republican party. It’s not just a closing act for the Trump-era but an opening act for the post-Trump era. It’s virtue-signaling to the base that after Trump leaves, these people still consider themselves to be Trump acolytes and part of the cult of Trump.”Democratic consultants concurred.“This is still the Trump party,” said strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “They may see this as an act of survival, and may not even believe in the reality of what they’re doing. What they do believe in is getting re-elected in [midterm elections in] 2022. If we had a president who was prepared to leave quietly, this would not be a discussion.”The looming spectacle comes despite the failure of Trump’s legal team to win any of at least 40 lawsuits involving allegations of voter fraud in November, an election officials called the most secure in American history.On Wednesday, Trump ally and Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley announced he would object to certifying the electoral votes during the joint session on 6 January .In an essay published Wednesday in the conservative commentary magazine The Blaze, editor Mark Levin backed up Hawley, claiming that states failed to follow their own election laws.But in a conference call on Thursday, Senate majority leader and Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell reportedly said that his 6 January vote certifying Biden’s victory will be “the most consequential I have ever cast”.McConnell has told senators not to join any attempt to delegitimize the electoral votes, believing that the effort could cause Republicans to lose two Senate seats being contested in the run-offs in Georgia on 5 January.Wehner believes McConnell opposes Hawley’s effort because it forces Republicans to go on record and potentially threatens his control of the Senate. “If they go on the record against what Hawley is doing it’s going to inflame the Republican base; if they agree it with it, it’s so transparently ludicrous that it’s going to hurt some Republicans in more moderate states,” Wehner said.In a blistering open letter on Wednesday, Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse also opposed Hawley, warning that “all the clever arguments and rhetorical gymnastics in the world won’t change the fact that this January 6th effort is designed to disenfranchise millions of Americans simply because they voted for someone in a different party”.“We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage,” Sasse wrote. “But they’re wrong … adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.”According to Jim Sleeper, retiring professor of political science at Yale University, the House Republicans’ rebel plan aspires to assist the kind of McConnell-led obstructionism he practiced against the Obama administration.“Beyond January 20, we’re looking at a Republican party that is gearing up to make sure – assuming Democrats don’t win control of the Senate – that McConnell will be able to repeat his act of stymying almost everything that Democrats could hope to do.”Any effort to block certification goes along in tandem to suppress voting, Sleeper believes, that springs from organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).He said it was part of a larger operation to restrict mechanisms that an open, democratic process make possible.“It’s part of a creeping coup d’etat that we’ve seen Trump going along with in his own loopy-minded way,” he said. More