Kelly Loeffler, the Republican US senator from Georgia who has embraced a follower of the toxic rightwing conspiracy theory QAnon in a desperate bid to hang on to her seat, will square off with her Trump-supporting rival and the leading Democratic candidate in their first debate on Monday.
The virtual debate, staged through separate video links to ensure safety amid the pandemic, will be a chance for voters to get to grips with one of the most volatile and chaotic races in the nation. Some 20 candidates are standing in a race which, as a special election, had no primary.
Loeffler, who was appointed to the seat in January following the resignation of Johnny Isakson, is having to fend off a fierce challenge from Doug Collins, an avidly Trump-supporting congressman. The pair have been scrambling over each other in a rapid dash to the right, trying to outdo the other in their radical conservative credentials.
Last week Loeffler appeared at a press conference with Marjorie Taylor Greene, to accept the latter’s endorsement.
Greene, who has no Democratic opponent in a staunchly conservative House district in north-west Georgia, has made racist statements and was an early adopter of QAnon, a virulent conspiracy theory which claims a cabal of Democrats and billionaires is running a paedophile and human trafficking ring and which the FBI has warned is a domestic terrorism threat.
From 2017 Greene was an active proponent of QAnon, publicly praising its anonymous originator as a patriot who “very much loves his country” and is “on the same page as us”. More recently she claimed to have moved away from the movement, telling Fox News she was not a QAnon candidate.
At last week’s event, Loeffler tried to bat away the controversy, telling reporters: “No one in Georgia cares about the QAnon business.”
The Democratic candidate for the Senate seat, by contrast, has successfully united his party. Raphael Warnock is the senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King preached for eight years.
Recent polls put Warnock at around 31%, Loeffler at 23% and Collins at 22%. Under special election rules, the race will go into a January run-off between the top two should none of the candidates secure at least 50% of the vote.
Most observers expect a head-to-head between Warnock and the winner of Loeffler and Collins’s bitter fight on the right.
QAnon’s fantasies have caused considerable difficulties for Republicans in the 2020 election cycle. Last week Trump declined to denounce the conspiracy theory, praising it for being “strongly against paedophilia”.
On Sunday, the chair of the Republican national committee, Ronna McDaniel, similarly sidestepped questions on QAnon during an appearance on ABC News. Asked if she would condemn it, she replied: “ I knew you were going to ask me that question. I knew it because it’s something the voters are not even thinking about. It’s a fringe group. It’s not part of our party.”
The Loeffler battle is one of two US Senate races in Georgia that goes to the polls on 3 November. In the second contest, the incumbent Republican David Perdue is in an exceptionally tight fight against the Democrat Jon Ossoff.
Perdue did himself no favors on Friday when he took the stage at a Trump rally in Macon and mangled Kamala Harris’s name. The widely criticized move sparked a flood of almost $2m into Ossoff’s already swollen campaign coffers.
Perdue’s insulting jab also earned a riposte from Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband. He said: “Let me help what’s-his-face pronounce this: M-V-P. If he can’t remember her name, how about Madam Vice-President?”
