United States President-elect Joe Biden and incumbent President Donald Trump held rallies on Monday to garner Democratic and Republican votes, respectively, for the upcoming Georgia Senate election.
Georgia’s Senate runoff, scheduled for Tuesday, places Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue against Democrat challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. The votes in the heavily contested election will determine the tie-breaking majority in the US Senate.
“This is it. It’s a new year, and tomorrow can be a new day for Atlanta, for Georgia and for America,” Biden said at the drive-in rally in Atlanta, the state’s capital.
Georgia, once solidly Republican, was a heavily battled state in the 2020 Presidental Elections. Biden won the state by a thin margin of 12,000 votes. Now the state remains a decisive battle-ground for representation in the Senate.
If the Democratic candidates win the two Republican seats in Georgia, the Senate would have a 50-50 split. This would give Democratic Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote while passing legislations in the chamber. Biden has said that this is necessary in order to pass laws to effectively counter the COVID-19 pandemic.
Following Biden’s rally, Trump also conducted a rally of Republican supporters in Dalton, Georgia, where he urged them to “swamp” the polls by voting Republican.
“The stakes in this election could not be higher,” he told his crowd of supporters.
He also called the Senate elections the “most important elections,” and maintained his position of the presidential election being “rigged.”
“The Democrats are trying to steal the White House, you cannot let them,” Trump said. “You just can’t let them steal the US Senate, you can’t let it happen.”
