GOP places focus anywhere but Atlanta in Georgia runoffs
ATLANTA – Vice President Mike Pence has seemingly been holding rallies everywhere in Georgia lately. President Donald Trump rounded out the map with a Dec. 5 rally in Valdosta in south Georgia. A win by either Perdue or Loeffler would keep the Senate majority in the hands of Republicans. “A drop of 10% or 15% in places like Valdosta,” he added, could make “swing voters in Gwinnett County” moot. In November, Perdue pushed his margins across many of the north Georgia counties to 80%.
Stacey Abrams credited for boosting Democrats in Georgia
Abrams, the onetime candidate for Georgia governor who has become perhaps the nation's leading voice on voting rights, is being credited for paving those inroads. “There’s a lot of work that’s gone into this, but Stacey really is the architect of what’s been built in Georgia,” said Dubose Porter, the former Georgia Democratic Party chairman and an Abrams mentor. The 2018 campaign marked a notable shift in Georgia Democrats’ overall approach. They’d do it by reshaping the electorate, by exciting the expanding universe of potentially Democratic voters: the youngest native white Georgians; whites from beyond Georgia; Black voters who cast ballots sporadically; Black voters moving to Georgia from other regions; and a growing Latino and Asian-American population. “We’ll take on Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Fair Fight, Stacey Abrams and all of them.”Trump himself was an accelerating variable in Georgia’s shift, pushing some white suburbanites toward Democrats.