California Dems Preparing To Descend on Georgia for Senate Races, Prompt Pushback from Officials
California Democrats are looking to do anything they can to help two Democratic Senate candidates win their runoff elections in January, including moving and traveling to the “Peach State.”
“I just can’t sit home and raise money,” Joseph Killian, 38, a project manager for a tech company, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
“When you look at some of these races where (we donated and) we didn’t win, this is our chance to hopefully go there and fix that. We want to be there and help.”
Democrats like Killian have been asking political organizers how they can travel to Georgia and volunteer for Democratic Jon Ossof and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who are looking to unseat Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
The two Senate races will be decided in a runoff election on Jan. 5 after neither candidate won a majority of the votes in November.
Georgia’s runoff elections will decide the balance of power in the incoming Senate, Fox News reported.
The current balance of power is 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats, according to The New York Times. Democrats need to win both of the runoff elections to make it 50-50 Senate and presumptive Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would be the tie-breaking vote.
“This is going to be a turnout election,” Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
“There is a small sliver of the electorate who might be persuadable. But this is mostly about whoever gets the most people to the polls wins.”
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A majority of the money raised for the two Democratic candidates has come from outside the state, according to campaign finance data from Open Secrets.
Over 83 percent of Ossof’s campaign funds have come from outside Georgia.
Now, Californian Democrats are stepping up even more to try to swing the election in their favor.
Flip the West, an organization that “works to unseat Republicans,” has already filled over 7,500 phone bank shifts to make calls in Georgia, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Over 16,000 volunteers have also signed up to send postcards to Georgia voters reminding them to request absentee ballots.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang even announced that he and his wife, Evelyn, are moving to Georgia to help Ossof and Warnock win.
We will be getting organized – but in the meantime if you have a room available in Georgia for volunteers post it here. ?? We are going to fight it out in GA. Much more to come!
— Andrew Yang??? (@AndrewYang) November 8, 2020
Georgia’s voting system manager cautioned people who are trying to travel to Georgia to cast votes, saying that it would violate state law.
“In order to have the ability to register to vote in Georgia, you have to be a Georgia resident, which means you have to believe you’re staying in Georgia,” Gabriel Sterling said during a news conference, according to the Georgia Recorder.
A notice was sent out “reminding the public of the state’s residency requirements and that anyone thinking of temporarily moving to Georgia just to cast a ballot could face up to 10 years in prison and a maximum $100,000 fine.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
