| | |  | BY RENUKA RAYASAM AND TYLER WEYANT | Presented by |  |
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Stickers for voters sit on a table at a Cobb County voting location in Atlanta. | Getty Images | SCATTERED, SMOTHERED, COVERED — The rallies have ended, the ballots have been cast, the tweets on Dominion Voting sent. Tonight — or later this week, when results come out — Georgia’s two Senate runoffs conclude, with control of the Senate on the line. The polls close at 7 p.m. ET. Before you turn on your TV and start scrolling Twitter on your phone, Nightly has the latest on the Peach State showdown. — Some background: Our senior campaigns editor Steve Shepard explains the latest polling as well as early voting figures and where you should be paying attention as results come in. (Steve also tweeted this great thread of POLITICO’s Georgia coverage throughout the election.) — Expectation setting: Tyler Pager and Megan Cassella reveal Bidenworld’s private skepticism of Raphael Warnock’s and Jon Ossoff’s chances. — Postcards from voters: Photographer Jonathan Frydman took a recent tour of the state and found many Georgians don’t feel they have any say in the election. — Your go-to links: The Georgia results page from POLITICO is your spot for the latest numbers from Brunswick to Blairsville. We’ll also have live expert analysis from our newsroom.
| Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out at rrayasam@politico.com and tweyant@politico.com, or on Twitter at @renurayasam and @tweyant.
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| | A message from Salesforce: The most extensive vaccine program in history is upon us. Distributing COVID-19 vaccines to the public fast and at scale can make a difference for hundreds of thousands of lives. That is why Salesforce is helping provide digital vaccine management using data-driven information powered by its trusted Customer 360 platform. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is using Saleforce’s platform to help equitably distribute billions of vaccines to 190 countries. Learn about secure digital vaccine management solutions at Salesforce.com/vaccines. | | | | | DIALING 4-0-4 — Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden held rallies in Georgia on Monday laying out the stakes for the Senate runoffs for their parties. Now that the end is finally here, Renu spoke with Atlanta’s mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms today about what she’s going to be looking for tonight as the results come in. This conversation has been edited. How will you be watching the election returns tonight? I have a few national interviews this evening, so I’ll be at home with all of my TVs on, paying attention. I’ll be going to the secretary of state website trying to get updates in real time. That’s the plan. So like us, you’ll be hitting refresh on the SOS website a lot tonight. I’m certainly gonna be looking at the metro area as a whole, wanting to see how strong the turnout is not just in Fulton and Dekalb Counties, but also Gwinnett County. And we’ve got to watch other urban areas across the state: Richmond County, Chatham County in Savannah. Then looking at those more rural counties. Trump was in Dalton, in Whitfield County yesterday. My 18-year-old actually went to vote today. So I texted him to ask him if there was a line. He’s 18, so of course he’s not responded to me. This is gonna be a nail biter. I think it’s going to be close. What do you think of this idea that Georgia is no longer a Republican state? Georgia is definitely a swing state. Every conversation I’ve had with President-elect Biden going back from the time that I endorsed him in 2019, I stressed that we could take Georgia with the right amount of focus. We’re trending younger. We’re a more diverse state. We could see the trend happening, in the same way as we could see the trend when we went from blue to red a couple of decades ago. There is a group that has specifically focused on turning out African American voters who did not vote in November. A group called Battleground Georgia. As of yesterday, they had turned out maybe 40,000 people who had not voted in November. The Republicans are doing the same thing. We’ve been trending blue for quite some time, but it’s gonna be interesting because Donald Trump brings out people who don’t often come out to vote. Tell me about your conversations with Biden recently. Something that I’ve talked with him about on more than one occasion is the need to address the mental health aspect of this pandemic in our community. The mental health crisis is our next pandemic because we’re seeing anxiety, depression, and we’re seeing it play out in our streets. We’ve got a massive uptick in violent crime and uptick in domestic violence cases. That’s gonna be an immediate need. We just had a great conversation yesterday, a pretty lengthy conversation after he spoke. For me it was a very emotional moment. Just watching him on the stage and seeing that it’s all come down to Georgia. For me, it feels like the longest election cycle ever. It feels even longer and more arduous than when I ran for mayor. As a country, we’re just all ready for the transition to happen.
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| | GET THE BIG PRE-INAUGURATION SCOOPS IN TRANSITION PLAYBOOK: Inauguration Day is quickly approaching. Is the Biden administration ready? Transition Playbook brings you inside the transition and newly forming administration, tracking the latest from Biden world and the transition of power. Written for political insiders, this scoop-filled newsletter breaks big news and analyzes the appointments, people and emerging power centers of the new administration. Track the transition and the first 100 days of the incoming Biden administration. Subscribe today. | | | | | | | THE BIG ASK — This hinge-of-history week kicked off with the leak of audio of Trump asking Georgia’s secretary of state to illicitly reverse the results of an election that he lost. It continued with a rally he used principally to traffic in conspiracy theories while unabashedly pressuring his vice president to side with him instead of facts or the Constitution. Now, on the eve of a no-longer-rote certification of the Electoral College vote, the outgoing president is demanding that Republicans in Congress go on record saying they’re more loyal to him than to the nation’s bedrock principles. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, whose fealty landed him in prison, feels like he’s watching a reprise of his own demise. “I warned them,” Cohen told POLITICO Magazine senior staff writer Michael Kruse . “I warned Mark Meadows at my oversight hearing. I warned the Jim Jordans,” he said, referring to Trump’s current chief of staff and other notably pro-Trump GOP House members whom he name-checked in his congressional testimony less than two years ago. His message: “I know what you’re doing. I know the Trump game plan, because I wrote it, and it didn’t work out for me. And it’s not going to work out for you.” The specifics of this particular moment are without doubt newly alarming — never, needless to say, has he attempted quite so overtly to subvert American democracy and its Constitution — but this also is merely the latest turn to a well-worn page of the old Trump playbook. He is gauging the strength of the devotion to him by demanding others perform ethically suspect, legally murky things that accrue to his immediate benefit while often creating lasting trouble for the doers. What Trump does in the end is to make people choose: Are you for him, or not? In or out. Yes or no. Pick.
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| | | | | Welcome to Bidenology, Nightly’s look at the president-elect and what to expect in his administration. Tonight, as many of us hope to stick to dietary New Year’s resolutions, Daniel Lippman looks in the pantry to see what Biden’s diet is like: “He has very simple tastes in food,” said a former Biden staffer. The president-elect loves spaghetti Bolognese and is a big aficionado of other types of pasta with red sauce, with a person familiar with what he eats calling it a “mainstay.” A current Biden aide said the president-elect also loves chicken parm. “He’s a very big ice cream fan,” said another source. “He’s done a lot of OTR [off-the-record] stops at ice cream parlors,” such as at a Dairy Queen in Iowa, where he turned a Blizzard upside down to show how viscous it was. After Biden accepted the Democratic nomination at the 2020 convention, granddaughter Naomi Biden tweeted a picture of a carton of Breyers chocolate chip ice cream with a note: “Pop, Tonight, you eat from the box. Love, the grandchildren.” His granddaughters told the Democratic convention in a recorded video that “he’s always eating ice cream,” often vanilla with chocolate sprinkles. He’s also a fan of Jeni’s. He likes milkshakes. “He has the taste buds of a 10-year-old kid,” joked a former Biden aide. In that vein, a current Biden aide said that their boss likes cheese and pepperoni pizza. At one point in his Senate career, there was a week to two-week period when Jill Biden made pasta for him every night to see if he ever wanted to change up what he was eating, a Biden source recalled. "She was trying to see if he would get sick of it, but he never tired of having pasta and didn’t say anything," the source said. When Biden was vice president, he ate a chopped salad from the White House mess almost every day for lunch, which was delivered to his office, recalled the person. When on the road, he often ate Jif peanut butter sandwiches. Biden kept a fridge in his White House office where he would store drinks. He often has a Diet Coke with lunch. Like Trump, he doesn’t drink alcohol. One of his favorite drinks these days is orange Gatorade, and it’s in every green room that Biden enters. He told Us Weekly in 2016 that orange Gatorade was his favorite drink, leading to a Biden candle that smells like it . Before the 2020 presidential run, a rider to speaking contracts would require that “bottled water, Coke Zero, regular Coca-Cola, orange Gatorade and black coffee” be stocked in his dressing room, according to the Washington Post. Biden also required that he be served “angel hair pomodoro, a Caprese salad, topped off with raspberry sorbet with biscotti.” That revelation led Eater to write a story headlined: “Joe Biden Just Can’t Get Enough Angel Hair Pasta.” Biden’s favorite foods don’t seem to have changed much over the years. In a Q&A in the former Washington Dossier magazine in 1985, Biden listed “steak and pasta” as his favorite dinner foods, Diet Coke as his drink and fruit as his snack of choice. His “presidential aspirations” were listed as “strong; definitely interested in making a run someday, perhaps as early as 1988.”
| | PARTY LIKE IT’S 2003 — A year ago, California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed an ambitious $222 billion budget that explicitly drew a stark contrast with Trump and positioned himself as a future presidential candidate. This year he’s fighting for political survival, trying to fend off a recall effort that could prematurely end his term. In the early months of the pandemic, Newsom seemed poised to emerge as a governor who led his state through crisis. But rather than cementing his status atop California’s Democratic hierarchy, the virus appears to have chipped away at Newsom’s standing, California Playbook author Carla Marinucci told the Nightly today. More than 27,000 Californians have died from Covid. The virus continues to rapidly spread across the state with no signs of slowing. Hospitals in Los Angeles are turning away ambulances. In addition California has the lowest vaccination rate in the country. The blame doesn’t entirely lie at Newsom’s feet, Carla said. But the governor has lost his authority: Much of the state remains under stay at home orders but no one is really listening to him. His plan for the Covid vaccine has been criticized for getting bogged down in the details without actually distributing any shots. The pandemic has opened Newsom up to critics on the right, such as San Diego’s former mayor Kevin Faulconer, and those on the left who see a chance to make a move, said Carla. The recall effort is gaining momentum and diverting resources from Newsom’s 2022 reelection campaign. “Every day that goes by and people aren’t getting shots in their arms is another day he is closer to the recall,” said Carla.
| | SEKULOW DISSENTS — Trump attorney Jay Sekulow today shot down claims that Vice President Mike Pence has the authority to overturn Biden’s election . “Some have speculated that the vice president could simply say, ‘I’m not going to accept these electors,’ that he has the authority to do that under the Constitution,” Sekulow said during his radio show. “I actually don’t think that’s what the Constitution has in mind.”
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| SPLIT INDECISION — The move to challenge Biden’s presidential win in Congress on Wednesday bucks not only the will of voters but also the wishes of prominent GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, Kyle Cheney reports on how the situation is creating a rift within the Republican Party that could last far beyond Trump’s presidency.
| | | | Nightly asks you: What are you most hopeful about heading into 2021? Send us your answers through our form, and we’ll use select responses in Friday’s edition.
| | DON’T PACK YOUR BAGPIPES — If Trump thought he could escape Biden’s inauguration by playing golf in Scotland, he looks to be sadly mistaken. Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon today warned the outgoing U.S. president that playing golf would not be deemed an “essential” reason for transatlantic travel during the pandemic. Sturgeon told a press conference: “I have no idea what Donald Trump’s travel plans are, you’ll be glad to know. I hope and expect … that the travel plan that he immediately has is to exit the White House. But beyond that I don’t know. “We are not allowing people to come into Scotland without an essential purpose right now. And that would apply to him just as it applies to anybody else,” she added. “Coming to play golf is not what I would consider to be an essential purpose.” STAY TUNED TOMORROW — On Wednesday morning, listen to the newest episode of POLITICO’s Global Translations podcast. Ryan Heath and Luiza Savage explore what solutions exist in the global labor market after Covid’s instability.
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| | A NEW YEAR MEANS A NEW HUDDLE IS HERE: Huddle, our daily congressional must-read, has a new author! Olivia Beavers took the reins this week, and she has the latest news and whispers from the Speakers' Lobby. Don’t miss out, subscribe to our Huddle newsletter, the essential guide to all things Capitol Hill. Subscribe today. | | | | | | | | |
24 The number of GOP senators, thus far, who have said they will vote to certify Biden’s election as president, according to a series of interviews and statements. |
| | | ON THE MOVE — Tyler emails us: I am writing to you from my new apartment, one I moved into quite early this morning, gambling successfully that I would have enough time to work on an Election Day once I was finished. Over the summer, I helped one of my best friends move. He was in my small bubble, and in small groups, our bubble helped as we could. Boy, I thought, moving in a pandemic must be hard. I decided to one up him: Moving across D.C. during a pandemic … on the day of the Georgia primary … as thousands of protesters come to Washington. And you thought fitting that armoire in the minivan was hard. My initial thought in picking this time of year to move? It is the New Year, and required a fairly large new start. I jumped into the 2020-was-bad-2021-has-to-be-grand boat with both feet. But 2020’s energy bled into my bright optimism. I strained to hear movers through their masks as they asked me where sofas should go. I checked D.C. government Twitter accounts occasionally to monitor closed roads. I placed hand sanitizers around my new apartment as though I were running a Bath & Body Works store. My hope for a fresh start was dashed on a series of reminders that the past isn’t over yet. I suspect my next move won’t be as infected with its place in history, or its literal potential for infection. So I am deferring the hope I had for this new year’s move to my next one. Oh, and to my close friends reading this? I am deferring you lending a hand to that move, too.
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| | A message from Salesforce: There are many challenges while delivering vaccines to fight the global COVID-19 pandemic, and technology will play a critical role in helping governments and healthcare organizations distribute billions of doses worldwide. Distributing COVID-19 vaccines to the public fast and at scale will make a difference for hundreds of thousands of lives. That is why public health officials around the world are turning to Salesforce to help securely manage their vaccine distribution programs. Salesforce is proud to help provide premier digital vaccine management solutions, which use data-driven information powered by its trusted Customer 360 platform. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is relying on Salesforce’s cloud-based services to manage information that will help equitably distribute billions of vaccines to 190 countries. With Salesforce, public health providers have a trusted partner for administering vaccine programs. Learn about secure digital vaccine management solutions at Salesforce.com/vaccines. | | | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | |
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