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      Trump is trying to thwart democracy itself. But the problem is deeper than one man | David Daley

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      Democracy rots slowly. Sometimes its decay is perfectly legal, helped along by legislatures and embraced by the courts. It happens when elected officials deliberately tilt the game to their own advantage.On Sunday, the Washington Post published smoking-gun audio of Donald Trump pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to reverse the election outcome and declare Trump the winner, or face potential legal consequences. Even some Republicans have recognized that the bright line between democracy and authoritarianism had been breached.That line, however, has been melting for quite some time. It did not begin with Trump’s presidency. And it will not end when he leaves the White House. The rot runs deep inside a Republican party that has not only lost faith in democracy but bet its future on rule-rigging and minority rule. The party has subverted free and fair elections for years, in ways so ordinary that they’ve been accepted as politics as usual for far too long.Republican gerrymandering – the manipulation of electoral constituencies in favor of one party – in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin has locked in Republican control of state legislatures even when their candidates win hundreds of thousands fewer votes statewide. When Democratic governors won in Wisconsin and North Carolina, Republican-led legislatures stripped power from them in extraordinary lame-duck sessions.Republicans drew themselves similarly friendly maps for Congress and state legislatures in Texas, Ohio and Florida. Then these gerrymandered legislatures – with the blessing of a US supreme court that has gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act – have tried to make it harder for Democrats and minorities to cast their ballots, by using surgically targeted voter ID bills, shuttering voting precincts, or eliminating days of early voting.Then, when large majorities of citizens, from both parties, come together to make voting fairer for everyone, these legislatures often run right over them.When Floridians, for example, overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights to former felons in a 2018 constitutional amendment backed by almost two-thirds of voters, it was hailed as the largest expansion of the franchise since the passage of the voting rights act. An estimated 1.4 million citizens who served their time won back their voice in civic affairs.In any functioning representative democracy, that resounding vote should have been the last word. However, this is Florida where, in 2011, Republicans ignored a state constitutional amendment that banned partisan gerrymandering and locked themselves into such advantageous districts that the will of the people hardly matters at all.And so the Florida legislature not only replaced the voters’ judgement with its own, but turned the amendment on its head. If voters sought to end restrictions designed after the civil war to limit black voting power, the legislature substituted another reminder of those days: a poll tax. Republican legislators insisted that formerly incarcerated people pay all fines and fees related to their sentence – often amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars – before reinfranchisement.This is the time bomb that threatens American democracy. The threat only grows more urgent.As suppressors of the vote well know, poll taxes are extraordinarily effective. Last fall, ProPublica, the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times cross-referenced the voting rolls with a list of those released from prison over the past 23 years, and found just over 31,000 of those 1.4 million former inmates had been able to register to vote. Trump carried this perennial swing state by just 370,000 votes.This is the time bomb that threatens American democracy. The threat only grows more urgent. Republicans’ gerrymandering strategy, known as Redmap, was executed in 2010. The supreme court undid the voting rights act in the Shelby county case in 2013. These efforts came long before Trump descended a Trump Tower escalator and announced his campaign. They may even grow more virulent after Trump leaves, as 2024 presidential hopefuls such as Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, decide that doubling down on “fraud” claims is the best path to claiming the Trump vote, and as red state legislatures use those false fraud assertions to justify new voting restrictions.These efforts are already underway. In Pennsylvania, the new legislature hasn’t even been sworn in yet – but lawmakers are already seeking co-sponsors for a restrictive new voter ID bill, as well as a repeal of no-excuse absentee voting that was expanded due to Covid-19.And that’s not the only chicanery. In 2018, the Pennsylvania state supreme court struck down a congressional map so gerrymandered that Republicans consistently won 13 of the state’s 18 US House seats even when they won fewer statewide votes. Now, on the verge of the next redistricting cycle, Republicans’ gerrymandered state legislative majorities are looking to take revenge – by gerrymandering the courts, essentially creating judicial districts that can then be gerrymandered by the already gerrymandered legislature. Minority rule begets more minority rule.Texas, already one of the most restrictive states in the nation for voting, is readying a raft of new measures. In Georgia, Republican senators have indicated their support for an end to drop boxes as well as no-excuse absentee voting. A movement is also underway to require voter ID for mail-in voting. Many Republicans, meanwhile, frustrated that Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has stood up for the integrity of Biden’s win of the state, have sought to make his position one appointed by the legislature rather than elected by the people.The practice of state legislatures ignoring the will of their own voters is not limited to Florida. Several states worked to make it harder for voters to reform their government via direct democracy. Others brazenly undid the citizens’ efforts and ignored their will. In Missouri, where more than 60% of voters voted for an independent redistricting amendment, Republican lawmakers pushed, and won, a 2020 amendment that masqueraded as campaign finance reform but actually unwound the redistricting effort. Utah’s Republican legislature also worked to undermine an advisory commission that voters enacted in that conservative state in 2018. The conservative political establishments in Arkansas and North Dakota used the courts to knock qualified initiatives off the 2020 ballot that would have opened up the closed primaries that make it easier for them to maintain power.Arizona’s independent redistricting commission remains, but Republicans there stacked the appellate court personnel commission, which vets applications and selects the five finalists for its nonpartisan chair. Their selections include a lobbyist and a gun store owner whose shop hosted a Trump rally and a shooting event for the president last fall.So, yes, Trump will leave the White House in less than three weeks. Democracy teetered but held. Some Republicans played important roles in making that happen, and their bravery should be noted. But Trump did not unleash this anti-democratic fever inside the Republican party. It’s worth noting that two of the other people on that brazen audio obtained by the Post were veteran Republican election lawyer Cleta Mitchell – heard teaching Republican state legislators how to gerrymander and duck legal discovery in leaked audio from a 2019 Alec conference – and Mark Meadows, the Trump chief of staff who first won office – running as a birther who would send Obama “back to Kenya” – from one of those gerrymandered congressional districts in 2012.Trump was created, in part, by the preceding years of gerrymandering and voter suppression that put the most extreme voices in control. They’re not going anywhere. They remain in power. They have not been chastened. There will be a next time. Our democracy may not be so lucky. More

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      Top US business leaders call on Congress to certify election results

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      Some of America’s top business leaders called on Congress to certify the electoral results for the president-elect, Joe Biden, in a letter Monday, arguing that “attempts to thwart or delay this process run counter to the essential tenets of our democracy”.
      The letter, signed by executives at American Express, Goldman Sachs, JetBlue, Microsoft, Pfizer and others, marks the US business community’s most public effort to date to push back against Donald Trump’s continuing attempts to overturn the election result.
      Organized by the business advocacy group Partnership for New York City, the letter states: “The incoming Biden administration faces the urgent tasks of defeating Covid-19 and restoring the livelihoods of millions of Americans who have lost jobs and businesses during the pandemic.
      “Our duly elected leaders deserve the respect and bipartisan support of all Americans at a moment when we are dealing with the worst health and economic crises in modern history. There should be no further delay in the orderly transfer of power.”
      Many leaders in the business community initially embraced the Trump administration and Trump established a high powered jobs panel to revitalize the US economy. But many of those leaders quit after his apparent support for white supremacists after a fatal rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
      Among the signatories of Monday’s letter is Jonathan Gray, the chief operating officer of Blackstone, the private equity group run by Stephen Schwarzman, one of Trump’s biggest backers. More

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      'We tortured families': The lingering damage of Trump's separation policy

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      The US government’s policy of separating migrant families at the border has continued to wreak havoc and inflict suffering in the final months of Donald Trump’s presidency, with parents still missing, reunifications blocked and reunited families struggling to pick up the pieces of their lives.
      Righting the wrongs of Trump’s globally condemned separations policy is one of the most urgent and challenging tasks that lies ahead for the incoming administration. Civil rights groups that have been fighting for years to reunite thousands of families are now pushing for a bold and speedy response from Joe Biden – one that reunifies victims, grants them protection in the US, and provides restitution.
      “We tortured these families, we took their children,” said Carol Anne Donohoe, the managing attorney with Al Otro Lado, a group that has been working to reunite deported parents with their children. “Some parents and children haven’t seen each other in over three years. It’s an abomination, and we need immediate action … and accountability to ensure this never happens again.”
      A critical step, advocates say, will be a full accounting of the scope of family separations, and recognition by the government of the enduring consequences.
      The cruelty and chaos of ‘zero tolerance’
      In April 2018, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute all unauthorized crossings at the border, making no exception for asylum seekers or people with children. As a result, US immigration officials forcibly separated children from their parents and guardians, filing thousands of criminal cases against migrants who had fled violence to seek asylum in America. The parents were detained while their children were taken and treated as “unaccompanied minors”, placed in jails and shelters for migrant youth.
      “It just felt like chaos,” recalled Roberto Lopez, the community outreach coordinator with the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), who was working in south Texas courtrooms where hundreds of separated parents faced criminal charges in an assembly line. “It was a mass prosecution … There was just so much pain. Many times they were asking, ‘Do you know where my kid is? When will I see them?’ And we had to tell them again and again, ‘We don’t know.’” More

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      Trump's Republicans have dumped Lincoln – they're the Confederacy now | Lloyd Green

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      On Wednesday, the Republicans’ transition to the party of the Confederacy will be complete. A day after Georgia’s runoff elections, at least a dozen lawmakers in the Senate and more than half of the party’s House membership will seek to overturn the results of the 2020 election and disenfranchise the majority of US voters. A coup attempt in all but name, this is how democracy dies.Sadly, a statement issued on Saturday by seven sitting senators and four senators-elect dispelled any doubts about the nexus between the end of the US civil war, more than 150 years ago, and Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to cling to power. Predictably, America’s racial divide again stands front and center.After regurgitating for the umpteenth time unproven and unsubstantiated charges of electoral fraud, the senators invoked the election of 1876. Back then, the Democrats contested the outcome, conceding after the Republicans agreed to halt Reconstruction.As framed by Ted Cruz and his posse, “the most direct precedent” for their actions “arose in 1877, following serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race”. In their telling, “elections in three states” were “alleged to have been conducted illegally”. Left unsaid is that after the end of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the toxic legacy of “separate but equal” followed.To these Republicans the right to vote is only for some of the people, some of the timeTo quote Mississippi’s William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Senators from states that were part of the Confederacy, or territory where slaveholding was legal, provide the ballast for Cruz’s demands. At least one senator each from Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas is on board.Apparently, Trump’s defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, formerly vice-president to the first black man in the White House, and Kamala Harris, a black woman, is too much for too many to bear. Said differently, to these Republicans the right to vote is only for some of the people, some of the time – those people being this president’s supporters.Trump’s equivocation over Charlottesville, his debate shoutout to the Proud Boys and his worship of dead Confederate generals are of the same piece. The vestiges of an older and crueler social order are to be maintained, at all costs.Likewise, the reluctance of Trump appointees to the federal judiciary to affirm the validity of Brown v Board of Education, the supreme court ruling that said school segregation was unconstitutional, is a feature not a bug.As for the Declaration of Independence’s pronouncement that “All men are created equal”, and the constitution’s guaranty of equal protection under law, they are inconveniences to be discarded when confronted by dislocating demographics.“Stand back and stand by,” indeed.Since the civil war, there has always been a southern party, frequently echoing strains of the old, slave-owning south. Practically, that has meant hostility towards civil rights coupled with wariness towards modernity.To be sure, southern did not automatically equal neo-Confederate, but the distinction could easily get lost. And to be sure, the Democrats were initially the party of the south. During debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Republicans gave Lyndon Johnson the votes he needed. Not anymore.Cruz and Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who kicked off the attempt to deny the electoral college result, are the products of places like Harvard, Stanford and Yale. John C Calhoun, the seventh vice-president, argued in favor of slavery and the right of states to secede. He went to Yale too. Joseph Goebbels had a doctorate from Heidelberg. An elite degree does not confer wisdom automatically.For the record, Cruz also clerked for a supreme court chief justice, William Rehnquist. Hawley did so for John Roberts.On Sunday, as the new Congress was being sworn in, a recording emerged of Trump unsuccessfully browbeating Georgia’s secretary of state into finding “11,780 votes, which is one more than we have”. From the sound of things, Trump’s fear of prosecutors and creditors, waiting for him to leave the White House, takes precedence over electoral integrity.Back in May, after Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, predicted 240,000 deaths from Covid, and as armed protests to public health measures grew, an administration insider conveyed that Trump’s America was becoming a “bit” like the “late” Weimar Republic. Eight months later, the death toll is past 350,000 and climbing unabated.Come nightfall on 6 January, the party of Abraham Lincoln will be no more. Instead, the specters of Jim Crow and autocracy will flicker. Messrs Trump, Cruz and Hawley can take a collective bow. 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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      Healthcare to the electoral college: seven ways 2020 left America exposed | Robert Reich

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      If America learns nothing else from these dark times, here are seven lessons it should take from 2020:1 Workers keep America going, not billionairesAmerican workers have been forced to put their lives on the line to provide essential services even as their employers failed to provide adequate protective gear, hazard pay, or notice of when Covid had infected their workplaces. Meanwhile, America’s 651 billionaires – whose net worth has grown by more than $1tn since the start of the pandemic – retreated to their mansions, yachts and estates.Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, sheltered in his 165,000-acre west Texas ranch while Amazon warehouse workers toiled in close proximity, often without adequate masks, gloves or sanitizers. The company offered but soon scrapped a $2 an hour hazard pay increase, even as Bezos’ wealth jumped by a staggering $70bn since March, putting his estimated net worth at roughly $186bn as the year came to an end.2 Systemic racism is killing Black and Latino AmericansBlack and Latino Americans account for almost 40% of coronavirus deaths so far, despite comprising less than a quarter of the population. As they’ve borne the brunt of this pandemic, they’ve been forced to fight for their humanity in another regard: taking to the streets to protest decades of unjust police killings, only to be met with more police violence.Among Native American communities, the coronavirus figures are even more horrifying. The Navajo Nation has had a higher per-capita infection rate than any state but cannot adequately care for the sick, thanks to years of federal underfunding and neglect of its healthcare system.Decades of segregated housing, pollution, lack of access to medical care, and poverty have left communities of color vulnerable to the worst of this virus, and the worst of America.3 If we can afford to bail out corporations and Wall Street, we sure as hell can afford to help peopleThe Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, continues to insist the nation cannot “afford” $2,000 survival checks for every American. But the latest relief legislation doled out more than $220bn to powerful business interests that could have been used for struggling working families.Another way of looking at it: the total cost of providing those $2,000 checks ($465bn) would be less than half the amount America’s 651 billionaires added to their wealth during the pandemic ($1tn).4 Healthcare must be made a rightEven before this crisis struck, an estimated 28 million Americans lacked health insurance. An additional 15 million lost employer-provided coverage because they lost their jobs. Without insurance, a hospital stay to treat Covid-19 cost as much as $73,000. Remember this the next time you hear pundits saying Medicare for All is too radical.5 Our social safety nets are woefully brokenNo other advanced nation was as unprepared for the pandemic as was the US. Our unemployment insurance system is more than 80 years old, designed for a different America. We’re one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t provide all workers some form of paid sick leave.Other industrialized nations kept unemployment rates low by guaranteeing paychecks. Americans who filed for unemployment benefits often got nothing, or received them weeks or months late. Under new legislation they get just $300 a week of extra benefits to tide them over.6 The electoral college must be abolishedJoe Biden won 7m more votes than Trump. But his winning margin in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin totaled just 45,000. Had Trump won those three states, he would have gained 37 electoral votes, tying Biden in the electoral college. This would have pushed the election to the House of Representatives, with each state delegation getting one vote. Even though Democrats have a majority in the House, more state delegations have Republican majorities. Trump would have been re-elected.The gap between the popular and electoral college vote continues to widen. The electoral college is an increasingly dangerous anachronism.7 Government mattersFor decades, conservatives have told us government is the problem and we should let the free market run its course. Rubbish. The coronavirus has shown yet again that the unfettered free market won’t save us. After 40 years of Reaganism, it’s never been clearer: government is in fact necessary to protect the public.It’s tragic that it took a pandemic, near-record unemployment, millions taking to the streets and a near-calamitous election for many to grasp how broken, racist and backwards our system really is. Biggest lesson of all: it must be fixed. 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