Democrats Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock must navigate an obstacle course to convert voting figures so they can join the U.S. Senate on Jan. 5 and Jewish Georgians wary of “apartheid” phrasing could help swing their elections.
Both candidates will square off against conservative Republicans in runoff elections that day. If both win, Democrats will control the Senate with 50 votes for each party with tie votes to be broken by Vice President Kamala Harris after she takes office on Jan. 20.
Warnock has the tougher task. He received 31 percent of the vote on Nov. 3 with most of the remainder split between two prominent Republicans whose combined total ran up a 636,000-vote margin above Warnock’s numbers.
The liberal Jewish community could understandably distrust Warnock because he signed a statement last year that compared Israel to “apartheid South Africa.”
Ossoff has a 91,000-vote difference to turn around in his race against incumbent Sen. David Perdue and, as a Jewish liberal, he has not endorsed “apartheid” terminology.
This election year reflects alterations in the Jewish vote, which does not usually drive elections but contributes to the outcome and can swing an election in a close race. As Jewish populations in Georgia and Arizona grow significantly, those states have been trending Democratic. The Jewish population centers in Atlanta and Phoenix have each been estimated as high as 120,000, which is half the amount of established Jewish communities in Philadelphia Boston, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
The Jewish vote is apparently making a mark in Georgia and Arizona, where President-elect Joe Biden is leading in the vote count against President Trump in both states. In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Martha McSally. In two years, that state’s two Republican senators were replaced by Democrats. Is it now Georgia’s turn?
Ossoff and Warnock – with the president-elect’s help, perhaps – do not seem to need advice that they must quell fears that a Democratic-controlled Senate will be an accomplice to a socialist society, violent protests, or “defunders” of police operations. Not to mention fears that Democrats will be Israel’s new enemy.
Warnock, who is African-American, repeated during an interview on MSNBC Wednesday that he has no intention of defunding police despite opponent Kelly Loeffler’s charges otherwise. He produced chuckles when he said she keeps raising the issue, and maybe that is her objective. He then added that Loeffler is attempting “to defund health care.”
President Trump won 41 percent of the Jewish vote in Florida, an unusual proportion likely in response to ongoing Israel-bashing by Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
Warnock is already striving to make certain that local Jews are convinced that he supports Israel, two years after taking a somewhat hostile stance against the Jewish state. Loeffler on Monday accused Warnock of “a long history of anti-Israel extremism,” according to The Forward.
Warnock, senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, delivered a sermon criticizing Israel shortly after the Trump administration opened the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem in May 2018.
“You have to look at those Palestinian sisters and brothers, who are struggling for their human dignity and they have a right to self-determination, they have a right to breathe free,” he said, as quoted by Jewish Insider. “We saw the government of Israel shoot down unarmed Palestinian sisters and brothers like birds of prey.
“And I don’t care who does it, it is wrong to shoot down God’s children like they don’t matter at all,” he continued. “And it’s no more anti-Semitic for me to say that than it is anti-White for me to say that Black lives matter. Palestinian lives matter.”
The following year, he signed the petition containing the word “apartheid” in relation to Israel.
Jewish Insider reported that Warnock provided it on Monday with an editorial expressing a more reasonable stance. “I understand the many threats that face Israel and as a U.S. senator I will work to ensure Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon,” he wrote. “I believe it (settlement expansion) is a threat to the prospect of a two-state solution, which I believe is the only path to enduring peace.”
He wrote of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, “I recognize the First Amendment right to protest is an American value we must protect. But I strongly oppose the BDS movement and its anti-Semitic underpinnings, including its supporters’ refusal to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.”
Both Jewish Democrats and Republicans are taking opposing positions on Warnock, but many Jews there could well vote for him because they believe he supports Israel. My educated guess is that there could be a segment of Georgian Jews who have sufficient doubts about his stance on Israel to vote against him. Otherwise, they would support him. In a close race, such a batch of voters could doom Warnock’s candidacy. Even if Ossoff wins, that would leave Republicans with a 51-49 majority.
Perdue and Loeffler gave Ossoff and Warnock an unexpected break on Monday when they demanded the resignation of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who is also a Republican. “The secretary of state has failed to deliver honest and transparent elections,” the senators wrote in a statement, according to The New York Times.
Their accusation was free of any evidence.
Raffensperger called their claims “laughable,” and some conservatives are afraid that such claims may deter Republicans from turning out on Jan. 5. “Trump is gonna cost the GOP the Senate,” conservative commentator Erick Erickson of Georgia wrote on Twitter, the Times reported. “His supporters are internalizing that the election in Georgia was stolen so why bother even trying.”
Maybe Purdue and Loeffler are angry because Raffensperger did “deliver honest and transparent elections.” In 2018, Gov. Brian Kemp was secretary of state at the same time he was running for governor. Democrats criticized Kemp for what the Times said were described as “widespread voter suppression tactics.”
The incumbent Republican senators may be asking themselves about the first round of elections: Where’s a widespread voter suppression tactic when you really need one?
Republished from San Diego Jewish World