With President Donald Trump touching down in north Georgia today to court white rural voters and President-elect Joe Biden rallying support from a diverse electorate in Atlanta, the high-stakes Senate runoffs are concluding with a test of how much the politics have shifted in a state that no longer resembles its Deep South neighbors.
The runoffs pit Sen. Kelly Loeffler against Democrat Raphael Warnock and Sen. David Perdue against Democrat Jon Ossoff. With the Senate up for grabs, the candidates and outside groups supporting them have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the contests, deluging Georgia with television ads, mail, phone calls and door-knocking efforts.
More than 3 million people cast ballots early.
Should the two challengers win Tuesday and hand Democrats control of the Senate, it will be with the same multiracial and heavily metropolitan support that propelled Biden to victory in Georgia and nationally. And if the Republican incumbents prevail, it will be because they pile up margins in conservative regions, just as Trump did.
Although Georgia still skews slightly to the right of America's political center, it has become politically competitive for the same demographic reasons the country is closely divided: Democrats have become dominant in big cities and suburban areas but they suffer steep losses in the lightly populated regions.
"Georgia is now a reflection of the country," said Keith Mason, a former chief of staff to Zell Miller, the late Democratic governor and U.S. senator from a small town in north Georgia.
Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster raised in Georgia, said the state was most politically similar to another battleground that Biden narrowly carried: Arizona.
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"Both have increasingly large minority populations and are dominated by one large media market," said Hobart. Georgia, he added, is "a purple state now."
OUTLOOK OF CANDIDATES
"I believe that we will win on Tuesday because of the grassroots momentum, the unprecedented movement energy in Georgia right now," Ossoff told CNN. He said "it feels in Georgia like we are on the cusp of a historic victory."
Loeffler, when asked about siding with the growing group of Senate Republicans seeking to contest the Electoral College count, said she was "looking very closely at it." She told Fox News that "I'm fighting for this president because he's fought for us. ... we're going to keep making sure that this is a fair election."
Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, seemed to allude to the runoff in a message delivered Sunday. He told viewers watching remotely because of the pandemic that they are "on the verge of victory" in their lives if they accept that God has already equipped them with the ability to overcome their adversaries.
"When God is with you, you can defeat giants," said Warnock, who ended the service by encouraging Georgians to vote: "I would not be so presumptuous as to tell you who to vote for."
Perdue, who is in quarantine, said he would have joined the challenge of Biden's win if he had been in Washington. "I'm encouraging my colleagues to object. This is something that the American people demand right now," he told Fox News.
Information for this article was contributed by Jeff Amy, Darlene Superville and Kate Brumback of The Associated Press; and by Jonathan Martin and Astead W. Herndon of The New York Times.
