Published 3:15 pm Monday, January 4, 2021
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Senate candidates in Georgia are made their closing arguments Monday at rallies on the eve of Tuesday’s runoff elections.
The dual runoff will determine not only who will represent the Peach State in the U.S. Senate but which party will control the chamber.
The runoffs are happening because in two Georgia races, neither candidate received more than 50% of the vote in the Nov. 3 election.
The race results will determine whether Republicans maintain their hold on the Senate or whether Democrats control both chambers of the Capitol and the White House.
Several farm groups have told the Capital Press that whichever party ends up holding the Senate will have tremendous sway in agricultural policies.
“Everything comes down to Georgia,” Gail Greenman, national affairs director at the Oregon Farm Bureau, told the Capital Press in the leadup to the elections.
GOP incumbent David Perdue, 71, is facing off against Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff. Perdue worked in business leadership in the private sector, leading brands like Reebok, a sporting goods company, PillowTex, a textile company and Dollar General.
Since 2015, Perdue has served as a senator. He is a critic of progressive environmental policies and was among the 22 senators who urged President Trump to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017. Perdue is also known for voting for tax cuts and pressing for a balanced budget. He is the first cousin of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.
Ossoff, 33, Perdue’s Democratic challenger, is a politician and documentary film producer. In contrast to Perdue, Ossoff supports the Paris Agreement, although, as a more moderate Democrat, he opposes the Green New Deal, a far-left environmental proposal.
Ossoff has said little publicly on policies relating to agriculture.
Kelly Loeffler, 50, also a Republican incumbent and a Senate Agriculture Committee member, is up against Democrat Raphael Warnock. Loeffler was raised on her family’s fourth-generation soybean farm before growing a startup into a Fortune 500 company. In the 2020 Georgia Federal Candidate Questionnaire, Loeffler said she grew up working in the fields.
Loeffler is a proponent of the Farm Bill, which she calls “the single most important piece of agricultural legislation recently considered in Congress.” She has praised President Trump’s trade policies with China and Japan and said she plans to help U.S. farmers secure the “fair and legal American workforce they need to succeed.”
Loeffler is up against the Rev. Raphael Warnock, 51, a pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
In the agricultural sector, Warnock has said his priorities are rebuilding rural communities, encouraging more young people to pursue farming and combating climate change through agricultural policies.
Some farm groups say Warnock’s environmental and economic political stances could hurt agriculture — and more crucially, could give more power to Biden’s party as a whole.
As of Jan. 2, advertising spending in the two races has soared past $450 million, reflecting the stakes in one of the most unusual special elections in American history.
