Georgia Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff have raised huge sums of money in their fight to unseat incumbent Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. Between October 15 and December 16, Warnock raised over $103 million, while Ossoff raised a total of $106.8 million, with both candidates ending up well ahead of the fundraising record that fellow Democrat Jaime Harrison set earlier this year. In the third quarter of 2020, Harrison raised $57 million in his campaign against incumbent Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, which at the time was the largest single-quarter fundraising total ever for a single U.S. Senate candidate.
In Georgia, Warnock and Ossoff both far surpassed the fundraising totals of their Republican counterparts, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. Loeffler raised almost $64 million, while Perdue garnered slightly more than $68 million. Both Democrats and both Republicans passed Harrison’s previous record single-quarter fundraising total, highlighting the stark level of national attention on the ongoing Georgia Senate races. If Democrats win both races, then the party will control the chamber, because the party break-down will be 50-50, but Kamala Harris will be tasked with breaking ties in her imminent role of vice president.
According to his campaign, Ossoff garnered contributions from a whopping 1.4 million individual donors across the two-month timeframe covered by the new filings with the Federal Election Commission, and, in a similar show of grassroots support, more than half of the Warnock campaign’s reported contributions from individuals were $200 or less. Meanwhile, Ossoff’s campaign has spent a whopping more than $100 million on ad buys and future reservations, passing Warnock’s level of $88 million spent on advertising. Critically, Ossoff had about $17.5 million in cash on-hand at the time of his campaign’s recent federal filings, while Warnock had over $20 million. Loeffler had about the same level of available cash as Warnock, but Perdue, who Ossoff is challenging, sat a little behind, at $16 million of available spending cash.
The Georgia Senate races have already featured in-person campaign stops from high-profile individuals including President-elect Joe Biden and outgoing President Donald Trump. Election Day for the Senate races is on January 5, the day before Congress is scheduled to meet and certify the electoral college vote totals. Desperate Trump supporters have floated the possibility of Vice President Mike Pence throwing out Biden electoral votes while presiding over those proceedings, but there’s no mechanism by which he could actually disqualify electoral votes on his own, Forbes explains.
