: Georgia Senate runoff has international interest, and implications

The Australian camera crew parked their car next door to the Cobb County Democratic Party headquarters office in Marietta, Ga., a northern Atlanta suburb that flipped to blue in November, and started setting up their camera and boom microphones.

The Australian Broadcasting Corp. sent their North American correspondent, Kathryn Diss, and her team to Georgia to report on this week’s Senate runoff election. The implications of this election will have a major impact on not only national politics, but international politics as well.

“What happens in the United States is important to us in Australia,” said Diss on Sunday. “I think it’s the first test case of the Trump presidency, whether or not his support case exists, or what control it may still have.”

The Georgia Senate runoff between Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler, a business executive and owner of the Atlanta Dream WNBA franchise, and David Perdue, the former CEO of Dollar General, Inc., and Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff, a documentary filmmaker, and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, will be settled on Tuesday.

The implications this Senate race has for the incoming Biden-Harris administration cannot be overstated. The Senate currently stands at a 50-48 divide in favor of Republicans, and a sweep by the two Democratic candidates would give the parties a tie — with soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote as the president of the chamber. 

Cobb County, which voted for Biden, Ossoff and Warnock by large margins in November, was historically a Republican county, but flipped to favor Democrats this election season. The county is a perfect example of what Diss and many others from overseas are analyzing, to see if the results were a onetime, anti-Trump fluke or the signal of a new direction for Georgia, and other longtime Republican bastions across the U.S.

“Will the Trump effect play true, or will Democrats continue their win with Biden?” asked Diss. “Control of the Senate is up for grabs.” 

Essence Johnson, vice chair of the Cobb County Democratic Party, said the foreign media attention, which includes news crews from South Korea and the Netherlands, shouldn’t be a surprise. “Other countries’ infrastructure, exports, imports and logistics are dependent on this election,” she said. “The United States had worked hard to build those foreign allegiances that the current administration has worked to destroy, so this election is so pivotal to so many countries. A lot of damage has been done, a lot of trust has been broken.” 

Outside the party headquarters, an Australian cameraman hurried to make his way around the area where canvassers and volunteers were coming to pick up more campaign literature and yard signs, filming vignettes for a later broadcast in a country that’s 16 hours ahead of the Eastern U.S. The election results in Georgia will make the nightly news on a network that Diss described as “the Australian version of the BBC.”  

“All eyes on Georgia, who would have thought?” said Jacquelyn Bettadapur, chair of the Cobb County Democratic Party, who was interviewed for the Australian news segment.

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January 04, 2021 at 01:47PM

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