It’s the end of two months of suspense. Tuesday, January 5 will take place the second round of the two senatorial elections in Georgia, decisive for the control of power in Washington. If the House of Representatives is already in the hands of the Democrats – Nancy Pelosi was also re-elected president – the Senate is still in the balance, the two camps facing each other with 48 seats each.
The change of the last two seats in Georgia, currently occupied by Republicans, could therefore offer a majority in Congress to Joe Biden, two weeks before his inauguration for the White House. The stakes are such that the campaign has drained millions of dollars, mostly from political action committees outside the state.
In this state, Republican David Perdue won 49.7% of the vote in the first round, on November 3, against Jon Ossoff (47.9%). For the second seat, Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler won 25.9% of the vote against Democrat Raphael Warnock (32.9%). It was to try to win the decision that Joe Biden and Donald Trump came to campaign there on Monday.
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Jon Ossoff, ideal son-in-law and “future JFK”?
At 33, Jon Ossoff looks like a young man in a hurry for politics and pursues an ambitious goal: he wants to debunk David Perdue, the current Republican senator, in a traditionally conservative state. If successful, he would become the youngest senator of the past forty years.
Mr. Ossoff appeared on radar in 2017, when he ran in a by-election to the House of Representatives, weeks after Donald Trump won. He lost by a hair to Republican Karen Handel, but managed to provoke an electoral surge among Democrats in Georgia. Despite his defeat, this campaign allowed him to build a network to establish his candidacy for the 2020 senatorial election.
At 16, he contacted John Lewis, Luther King’s former traveling companion
With his appearance of an ideal son-in-law, Jon Ossoff is a young man who is not afraid of anything. At 16, he contacted John Lewis, elected Democrat in the House of Representatives, figure of the civil rights movement in the United States, traveling companion of Martin Luther King (“MLK”). He obtains a volunteer position within his team. A student in Georgetown, he was 19 when John Lewis recommended him to Hank Johnson, Georgia’s elected Democrat in the United States House of Representatives. Of his protégé, John Lewis said, in 2017:
“I have met all the presidents since President Kennedy. And I’m telling you, President Kennedy was young, smart, and talented. John Ossoff is young, intelligent and talented. “
In 2013, Mr. Ossoff is 26 years old and changes his path: he invests $ 250,000 of his inheritance in Insight TWI, a small audiovisual company based in London that has produced documentaries for the BBC, particularly on war crimes. of the Islamic State in Iraq.
But Donald Trump’s election brings him back to politics. Defender of corruption, in Washington and elsewhere, he does not hesitate to call his opponent“Crook”.
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David Perdue, a fortune made on relocations
After winning the Democratic primary in 2020, Jon Ossoff will face incumbent Senator David Perdue, a 71-year-old entrepreneur who came to politics late and cousin of Sonny Perdue, former governor of Georgia (2003-2011) and secretary of the agriculture of the Trump administration since 2017.
After ten years in business consulting in the 1970s, particularly in Asia, David Perdue joined the sports equipment manufacturer Reebok in 1998, then became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) three years later. In 2003, he became CEO of the large distribution company Dollar General, whose network he extended after a stint at the head of a struggling textile company, but which went bankrupt after his departure.
In 2014, during his first campaign for election to the Senate, he highlighted his experience as a business leader in Asia and elsewhere, but in 2020, as Donald Trump continued to ride his slogan “America First”, he avoids referring to it. His campaign mostly boiled down to an avoidance tactic: he refused to participate in the public debate opposing him to Jon Ossoff on television.
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Raphael Warnock, a combat preacher
At 51, Raphael Warnock, the other Democratic candidate who challenges outgoing Republican senator Kelly Loeffler, is a son of preachers who found his religious vocation very early on. Like Martin Luther King, he attended Morehouse College in Atlanta: he entered Pentecostal, like his parents, and left Baptist, like “MLK.”
Seminarist in New York, he met his mentor, the Reverend James Cone, father of black liberation theology. In the early years of his priesthood, he served in Harlem and Baltimore before settling in Atlanta in 2005 and taking charge of Ebenezer Church.
Rather on the left wing of the Democratic Party, like “MLK”, he has been arrested several times
For him, as for Martin Luther King, the Church must be involved in politics. While Jon Ossoff, with whom he campaigns, embodies the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, he is more on the left wing. He supports the right to abortion and same-sex marriage in a black Church that is not necessarily acquired there and, like Luther King, he has been arrested several times, notably in Atlanta, in 2014, when he was campaigning against it. Republicans’ refusal to extend social coverage, and in 2017, in Washington, during a demonstration against proposed budget cuts in social services. He was also one of the faces of the New Georgia Project, the movement created by Stacey Abrams, to encourage black populations to register and vote.
He supported the words of the controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright, with whom Barack Obama had distanced himself in 2008, and does not hesitate to criticize police brutality. So many arguments that his Republican opponents use against him. Republican Senator Marco Rubio has thus relayed on his Twitter account a video of Warnock, launching, in 2011, to the faithful, whom they cannot serve “God and money”, or “God and the army”, while his opponent, Kelly Loeffler, called him “Radical liberal”.
New NRSC ad 🚨 Phony @ReverendWarnock puts on a good act, but in body cam footage, his then-wife said he has a ques… https://t.co/yscKeoDfOz
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Wall Street Senator, shock Trumpist
At 50, with one year in the Senate, Kelly Loeffler owes her seat to the health problems of Johnny Isakson; in December 2019, Governor Brian Kemp appointed her to replace the senator, who had Parkinson’s disease. Originally from Bloomington, Illinois, where her family runs a soybean farm, she is the extremely wealthy wife of New York Stock Exchange President Jeffrey Sprecher, and has notably found herself under fire from critics, in March, in a case of suspected insider trading.
Originally close to Mitt Romney – who until recently was displayed in the background of his phone -, she aligned herself with the positions of Donald Trump and no longer hesitates to present her opponent as a “Marxist sympathizer”. She ended up alienating the members of the Dreams of Atlanta, a women’s basketball team that she has owned since 2011. In August, the girls did not hesitate to post a photo of themselves on social networks. sporting a t-shirt “Vote Warnock”.
📺 WATCH There’s radical. There’s an activist. Then there’s @ReverendWarnock. #gapol #gasen https://t.co/f9mQF76xHP
