Daily Beast: “The slogan for the Republican ticket in Georgia’s run-off elections, inescapable in TV ads and billboards and campaign buses around the state, is succinct: ‘Win Georgia, Save America.’ But to many people backing that ticket, the candidates on it—the ones doing the actual saving—aren’t all that important. Some voters don’t even especially like them. ‘I feel alright about them,’ said Jeremy Hillyard of Sens. David Perdue (R-GA) and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), after casting a ballot for them at an early voting location in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs on Wednesday evening. ‘Each side has its flaws,’ Hillyard told The Daily Beast. ‘I’m voting more for gridlock than anything else.’ A fair chunk of electoral politics is based on fear rather than inspiration. That’s certainly been true in the age of Donald Trump, where campaigns have often been defined on foreboding attacks about the opposition. In that vein, Georgia’s run-off elections are no different.”

“Die-hard conservatives showing up to support Perdue and Loeffler have suggested that the candidates themselves are beside the point. At a recent rally outside Atlanta organized by the conservative group FreedomWorks, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), the head of the arch-conservative Freedom Caucus, cautioned that he didn’t mean the senators any disrespect before saying of them: ‘They are merely tools.’ ‘We need them,’ said Biggs, ‘to preserve this country.’ To both sides, the stakes of Georgia’s run-off elections are so monumental as to make any of the candidates involved look small by comparison. Perdue himself has acknowledged this on the campaign trail. ‘It’s bigger than Kelly, it’s bigger than me, it’s even bigger than President Trump,’ the senator said at a Wednesday campaign stop. ‘It’s bigger than all of us.'”