Our friend Allan Keiter over at 270toWin, the election tracking site, passes on an interesting note: There's a slim chance that Georgia could clinch the Democratic presidential nomination for Joe Biden with its much-delayed presidential primary on Tuesday.
The current Associated Press count puts Biden 19 delegates shy of the 1,991 needed to officially clinch. There are more than two dozen delegates to be allocated from this past Tuesday's primaries and seven more available in this Saturday's contest in the Virgin Islands.
Biden is highly likely to get more than 19 of those remaining delegates before Georgia’s contest. But if they aren’t awarded by Tuesday at 7 p.m., Keiter writes, it will be Georgia that officially puts Biden over the top when the polls close.
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Early voting for Georgia's June 9 primary ends today, and turnout has already surpassed the 1 million mark. By party: 51.2% of ballots cast have been Republican; 46.% percent have been Democratic, according to georgiavotes.com.
Visit the AJC's elections page for the latest on voting and our series of profiles and candidate guides.
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You could see it coming a mile away. When U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Gainesville, greeted his old colleague Stacey Abrams at a House hearing earlier this week, he called her a "fabulous attorney." And his Senate opponent quickly blasted him for the praise.
As we've mentioned before, Collins and Abrams have a long friendship dating to their days in the Georgia House. In a string of Tweets intended to prove that the two are BFFs, U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, or whoever is in charge of her Twitter account, cited a 2013 piece we wrote on Abrams' side-career as a romance novelist. It included this paragraph:
Her last book to hit the shelves is called "Reckless" (HarperCollins). Characters include a certain fellow named Doug Collins. "He appears briefly as a young lawyer who annoys the main character, but is loveable," Abrams said.
Collins supporters fired back with reminders of a picture of Abrams and Loeffler at a WNBA game.
"Stacey. Was. Your. LAWYER," said the campaign in a tweet. "I've been fighting her liberal agenda for years - you hired her, had a campaign rally for her, and honored her in 2014 as an 'inspiring woman.'"
Then Abrams' campaign waded into the conversation.
“When two Republican Senate candidates are arguing over which one of them is besties with Leader Abrams, you know that both are out-of-touch with Georgians and neither has solutions to pull this country out of a health and economic crisis,” Abrams spokesman Seth Bringman offered.
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Stacey Abrams, by the way, had an op-ed piece in the New York Times on the need to vote – however inadequate the idea sounds. Her final lines:
Protest to demand attention to the wrenching pain of systemic injustice. Vote because we deserve leaders who see us, who hear us and who are willing to act on our demands.
Voting will not save us from harm, but silence will surely damn us all.
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Attorneys for two former rookie Minneapolis police officers on Thursday rejected accusations that their clients aided and abetted the killing of George Floyd, casting blame instead on their senior officer. An interesting tidbit from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
Defense attorneys said [Alexander] Kueng, 26, of Plymouth was working his third shift ever as a full-time officer and [Thomas K.] Lane, 37, of St. Paul was working his fourth day as a full-time officer on the day they encountered Floyd.
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The Republican State Leadership Committee has circled and underlined the race against House Minority Leader Bob Trammell.
The group on Friday endorsed Republican David Jenkins, a retired U.S. Army captain, and said it has spent more than $20,000 to flip the Democratic-held seat.
Keep a close eye on the race. While Democrats flipped a swath of seats across metro Atlanta’s suburbs, they need to hold the dwindling number of rural districts they control to maintain any hope of recapturing control of the House.
And Trammell’s Luthersville-based district is perhaps the GOP’s top bet for a flip. President Donald Trump carried it four years ago, and as leader of the House’s Democratic caucus, Trammell makes an inviting target.
“Democrat Leader Bob Trammell has spent his career working to steer Georgia in the wrong direction by embracing policies that destroy jobs and raise taxes, and now Georgia Republicans have a candidate who’s finally going to send Bob packing,” said Austin Chambers, the group’s president.
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In endorsement news:
-- The Brady PAC, the sister organization to the nation’s oldest gun violence prevention advocacy, is backing Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux’s congressional bid for the Seventh District. The group says it’s also investing financially to ensure that Bourdeaux is the nominee in the competitive north Atlanta district.
-- Former Georgia congressman Paul Broun reports that Steve Moore, the conservative economist and adviser to President Donal Trump, has endorsed his bid for the open Ninth District congressional seat.
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It's looking more and more like at least some of the Republican National Convention will remain in Charlotte. The Charlotte Observer reported that RNC's executive committee has decided that "official business" meetings requiring delegate votes will not be relocated from North Carolina.
That still frees up President Donald Trump to select another city, maybe Atlanta, to host his acceptance speech. He is looking for a friendly city or state that won't restrict his wishes to pack out an arena and disregard many of the social distancing recommendations that North Carolina officials said they will impose.
