Nov. 28 (UPI) — Some conservatives have urged President Donald Trump to drop fraud claims lacking evidence ahead of Georgia run-offs to determine U.S. Senate control.
“You’re seeing many Republicans now speaking out and saying ‘If we undermine faith in our election system, if we tell people that perhaps their votes didn’t count, we going to suppress our own vote,” said Brian Robinson, a Georgia Republican strategist.
Trump claimed without evidence on Thanksgiving that he was “robbed” with “fraud all over the place,” and called Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “an enemy of the people.”
Some Trump supporters have called for a boycott from voting in the Georgia runoffs on January 5, alleging the two GOP candidates, incumbent Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, do not support Trump enough and may be complicit in voter fraud, Politico reported.
Still, on Friday, Trump urged people in a tweet, to “get out and help David and Kelly, two GREAT people.”
Republican strategist and CNN contributor Alice Stewart said that Republicans maintaining Senate control will be key to blocking liberal policies like the Green New Deal against climate change and maintaining the conservative majority on the Supreme Court by preventing court packing.
“I think every legal and legitimate vote should be counted, but at this stage of the game, to claim there’s widespread voter fraud, this claim that there is an election hoax — we need to see some evidence,” Stewart said. “Otherwise, he needs to drop it and move on, because it’s not helpful to the process.”
Republican donor Dan Eberhart similarly said that Republicans should challenge Trump’s claims of fraud, so it doesn’t detract from focus on the Georgia runoffs.
“The party and the Republicans need to be focused on making (Senate Majority Leader) Mitch McConnell stronger right now, which is winning these two seats in Georgia, and then we need to be focused on winning the next election, taking the house back in 2022, and they can’t do that if Trump has frozen everything,” Eberhart told CNN.
Trump’s claims of fraud in the state are baseless, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who said after statewide results were certified last week, the “numbers don’t lie.”
The Georgia Republican incumbent senators have asked Raffensperger to resign, repeating Trump’s refrain of “illegal votes,” without evidence.
Biden has a projected total of 306 electoral votes compared to Trump’s 232 electoral votes, with the win in Georgia, which turned the Peach State blue for the first time in decades.
The last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state was Bill Clinton in 1992.
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