Georgia Republicans privately wonder if anti-Trump suburbanites will help them in the Senate runoffs

One of the reasons frequently offered for why Senate Republicans are humoring President Trump's baseless election fraud claims and refusal to concede his loss to President-elect Joe Biden is that they need his voters to turn out for twin Jan. 5 special Senate elections in Georgia. And in fact, the two GOP incumbents in the races, Sen. David Perdue (R) and Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R), are strongly embracing Trump's election conspiracy theories, going so far as to attack Georgia's Republican secretary of state.

But privately, Loeffler and Perdue say Trump is a double-edged sword, The Washington Post reports, citing a Nov. 10 phone call with donors and GOP operative Karl Rove, who is raising money for the joint election effort. Perdue said he and Loeffler need to turn out the Trump-GOP base again but also win over "people that may have voted for Biden but now may come back and vote for us because there was an anti-Trump vote in Georgia," the Post recounts. "And we think some of those people, particularly in the suburbs, may come back to us. And I'm hopeful of that."

In fact, Biden won Georgia thanks to huge gains in the Atlanta suburbs that offset a decline in the Black share of the electorate, Nate Cohn explains at The New York Times, noting that while Black turnout was up, it was overtaken by a larger spike in non-Black votes.

All four runoff candidates — Perdue, Loeffler, and Democrats Jon Ossoff and Rev. Rafael Warnock — "are seeking to nationalize the contests and focus their messaging on the impact that victories could have for each side," notably which party controls the Senate, the Post reports. "Perdue's delicate approach — standing with Trump, but also privately acknowledging that the president's time in power could be waning and that he carries possible political liabilities" — contrasted Ossoff's strategy, evident in a Biden-embracing ad he released Tuesday.

"Look, the only way to beat this virus is to give our new president the chance to succeed," Ossoff says in the ad. "But David Perdue says he'll do everything in his power to make sure Joe Biden fails, just like he tried to do with President Obama."

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