Power Up: Trump, Pence head to Georgia as election fraud claims risk depressing Senate runoff turnout

They’ll rally voters in the Peach State ahead of two Senate runoff races that will decide which party controls the chamber for the next two years. Their approach will be especially critical after pro-Trump attorneys Lin Wood and Sidney Powell urged Georgians not to cast ballots unless state leaders fight to overturn the results of the November presidential election results that clinched the state for Joe Biden. 

People in the White House and on the campaign told me and my colleague Josh Dawsey that there have been discussions on how best to address and rectify those comments that could depress turnout in January. 

• “[Trump] does not like the idea at all of a boycott of the Senate races,” Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), who spoke with the president about the matter, told Josh. “He thinks that’s crazy. He understands it’s better for the country, for him, for his family and for the Republican Party if the Senate stays in Republican hands.”

The president is key to turning out his fervent supporters to vote for Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue (R-Ga.) — especially in a special election where turnout was already expected to be lower. 

• “Democrats are going to be motivated as ever to try to snag these two seats after their election night went bust down ballot,” a GOP strategist told Power Up. “To counter this enthusiasm, Republicans have to be together in this fight. Donald Trump and Mike Pence can do a lot to help amplify the importance of turnout.” 

But Republicans have been concerned that Trump “could do more harm than good by repeating false claims about the voting system, attacking GOP officials and further inflaming a simmering civil war within the state party,” our colleagues Josh, Amy Gardner and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. reported. 

• “We have watched with increasing concern as the debate surrounding the state’s electoral system has made some within our Party consider whether voting in the coming runoff election matters,” a group of 16 former Georgia GOP leaders wrote in a letter released this week. 
• Signs energy is being directed elsewhere: “At rallies for both candidates, Trump receives louder chants than anyone else. Backers often yell, without prompting, ‘Stop the steal!’ — even as other Republican candidates try to focus the crowd,” per Josh, Amy and Cleve.
• “Trump has repeatedly spread baseless claims about voting in the state and attacked Republicans, particularly Gov. Brian Kemp. Some Republicans fear that could depress turnout among suburban voters in places outside Atlanta that support Trump far less — and that cost him the election in the state.”
• Not just political consequences: Gabriel Sterling, a top GOP official in Georgia, blamed Trump after a surge of threats against state and local election officials for “inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence,” our colleagues Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Emma Brown report. 

How much Trump will keep his eye on the Senate prize while in the state remains unclear. “He has shown less interest in keeping a Republican Senate than other GOP leaders have,” our colleagues note. “Advisers say he has been frustrated at how some GOP senators have criticized him, and others have said that Trump this year appeared distracted or disinterested when party leaders tried to involve him in their plans to win Senate races.” 

• Trump will host a rally in the conservative southern Georgia city of Valdosta on Saturday evening to support the two candidates. Yet “Trump has privately complained about Loeffler, particularly that Kemp picked her … without adequately consulting the president, according to multiple advisers. Trump grew annoyed with Perdue, whom he likes and regularly golfs with, after Perdue said in a leaked call that Republicans may face challenging odds in Georgia, aides said. Officials say he wants both to win but is angry that Georgia voted against him.”
• ?: Perdue on Thursday “appeared to tacitly acknowledge [Biden’s] victory,” Amy Gardner reports. “We know what this change of command at the top will mean with our foreign relations,” Perdue said in a video recording she obtained, in which he referred to Trump’s term as the “last administration.” “If we can keep the majority in the Senate, we can at least be a buffer on some of the things that the Biden camp has been talking about in terms of their foreign policy.”
• Loeffler and Perdue, who seek to avoid talking about electoral fraud on the campaign trail, have been under pressure to repeat Trump’s unsubstantiated claims.

Pence, who will appear with both candidates in Savannah this afternoon after a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, is expected to take a more measured approach. Pence, who has declared that he “stands with President Trump” and called for “every legal vote” to be counted, has backed the Trump campaign’s legal battle. But he has not embraced Trump’s rhetoric that the results are fraudulent. 

A former White House official told Power Up that the VP’s two priorities now — leading the coronavirus task force through the first stages of vaccine distribution and helping win both seats in Georgia — do not include dabbling in the president’s legal battle. 

• “He’s the President of the Senate, he knows the Georgia senators well, and he’s always made a priority to help down ballot,” the former official said. “That’s the most efficient and effective use of his time and focus. That’s how he can best help the President.”
• More: “The Vice President doesn’t comment on items when he doesn’t know all the facts and therefore, the election claims are best left to the President and his legal team.” 
• The Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng, Lachlan Markay, and Sam Stein report that Pence has tried to distance himself from “some of the president’s more outlandish claims about a conspiracy to undermine the election and illegally deny him a second term in office,” and he “privately views the Rudy Giuliani-led legal operation to overturn the 2020 election through the mass disenfranchisement of votes as counterproductive and doomed.”
• “And, as a former governor himself, he has been particularly uncomfortable with Trump’s attacks on Republican governors in some of the key battleground states that he lost,” they write.

ANOTHER GRIM DAY: “Almost 213,000 new coronavirus cases were reported on Thursday, the highest of the pandemic. Meanwhile, more than 2,500 fatalities were reported for the third consecutive day — marking the deadliest stretch since the pandemic began,” Antonia Noori Farzan reports.

It is going to get worse: “A new national ensemble forecast — an aggregation of 37 models sent to the CDC — projected that 9,500 to 19,500 people would die of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, in the week encompassing Christmas,” Joel Achenbach and Jose A. Del Real report.

• The new IMHE model is equally shocking: “Christopher Murray’s institute, meanwhile, has been putting the final touches on a new forecast that he said would show an increase from its Nov. 19 projection of 470,000 deaths by March 1.”
• Key quote: “Vaccination is coming too late even if we do a really great job of scale-up. It’s coming too late to do much by March 1, or really by April 1,” Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told our colleagues. Only at that point will the widespread distribution of vaccines begin to crush the virus, he said. 

BIDEN SELECTS SURGEON GENERAL: “The president-elect has selected Vivek H. Murthy, a former U.S. Surgeon General, to help lead the nation’s response to the coronavirus crisis, tapping a veteran of the Obama administration to serve as America’s top doctor as the country suffers from a surging pandemic,” Toluse Olorunnipa and Amy Goldstein report from Wilmington, Del.

• Murthy will have an expanded portfolio: “He is expected to be part of a team of health-care officials charged with tackling the issue Biden has said would be his top priority upon taking office.”

Fauci has also been offered a top role: “Biden told CNN that Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, would serve as a chief medical adviser and help his administration with its coronavirus response plan,” our colleagues write.

• There will also a quasi-covid czar: Jeff Zients will be the White House’s covid-19 coordinator, Politico’s Alice Miranda Ollstein and Tyler Pager report. “Zients’s role is modeled on the one that now-Biden chief of staff Ron Klain played during the Ebola outbreak in 2014, when Klain coordinated the Obama administration’s national response.”

Zients does a little bit of everything:

MASK UP: “Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days. And I think we’ll see a significant reduction,” Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper his planned push to get more Americans to wear masks after he is sworn in. Both Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris sat down with Tapper for their first joint post-election interview.

• Biden urged Congress to pass a bipartisan relief plan: “I think it should be passed, and I think that, in fact, we’re going to need more,” Biden said, calling the bicameral and bipartisan $908 billion relief offer a “good start.”
• Biden says he’ll get vaccinated when Fauci says it’s safe: “People have lost faith in the ability of the vaccine to work. Already the numbers are really staggeringly low, and it matters what the president and vice president do,” he said. Biden added that he would follow former Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton all of whom have pledged to get vaccinated on T.V. as a way to raise awareness.

Some Republicans are calling him, but he won’t say who:

• The president-elect promised not to interfere with the Justice Department: “That’s not the role, it’s not my Justice Department it’s the people’s Justice Department,” Biden said.
• Neither would detail what Harris’s focus will be: “We are full partners in this process. And I will tell you that the President-elect has been, since the first day he asked me to join him on the ticket, been very clear with me that he wants me to be the first and the last in the room,” Harris said. As for her portfolio, Biden offered: “Whatever the most urgent needs is that I’m not able to attend to.”
• You can call him Second Gentleman: Harris said her husband, Doug Emhoff, will be America’s first “second gentleman.” As for Harris, she said, “I’ll call him honey.”

PUSH BUILDS FOR STIMULUS: “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke amid growing momentum for a targeted coronavirus relief deal, illustrating how Congress has snapped into action amid a surge in new cases and deaths,” Jeff Stein, Mike DeBonis and Seung Min Kim report.

• These are their first talks since the election: “They came shortly after a growing number of lawmakers have rallied behind a $908 billion bipartisan spending bill … While some of these lawmakers stopped short of endorsing every part of the proposal, many said the offer was solid enough that it should be used as the basis for negotiations, a sentiment that Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer expressed.”

Key lawmakers seem open to a deal: “Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) signaled their openness to the package, which had been unveiled by a group of moderate Republican and Democratic senators,” our colleagues write.

• Not everyone is on board: “I’m very disappointed that a proposal from some of my colleagues today apparently includes provisions that spends hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out wasteful states,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in a statement.

THE NEW HOUSE COMMITTEE CHAIRS: “House Democrats and Republicans approved their committee chairs and members for the 117th Congress, with Black lawmakers set to helm the Foreign Affairs and Agriculture committees for the first time,” Felicia Sonmez and John Wagner report.

New faces in powerful places: A handful of the House’s most prized gavels changed hands.

• Appropriations Committee: Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) will succeed retiring Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) as chair, who was the first woman ever to lead the panel.
• Foreign Affairs: Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (N.Y.) will succeed Rep. Eliot L. Engel (N.Y.), who lost his primary race earlier this year. Meeks has served in the House since 1998 and his elevation illustrates the clout of the Congressional Black Caucus, who were largely united behind his candidacy.
• Agriculture: Rep. David Scott (Ga.), who first won election in 2002, will take over from Rep. Collin C. Peterson (D-Minn.), who lost reelection last month. Peterson endorsed Scott’s bid to become chairman.
• DCCC: Rep. Sean Maloney (N.Y.) will lead the House Democrats’ campaign arm. He is the first openly gay person to chair the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Republicans taking on new roles: Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) is expected to become the first woman of either party to serve in a top spot on the Energy and Commerce Committee, per Politico’s Melanie Zanona.

• “Other leading committee Republicans who will be new to their posts include Reps. Glenn Thompson (Pa.) for Agriculture; Mike D. Rogers (Ala.) for Armed Services; Jason T. Smith (Mo.) for Budget; Bruce Westerman (Ark.) for Natural Resources; Blaine Luetkemeyer (Mo.) for Small Business; and Mike Bost (Ill.) for Veterans Affairs,” per our colleagues.