Exclusive: David Perdue Offers to Buy Bernie Sanders, Other Socialists Plane Tickets to Georgia to Back Jon Ossoff in Runoff
Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) is offering to buy his socialist colleague, Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats, and other congressional socialists plane tickets so they can campaign with Democrat Jon Ossoff ahead of the January 5 runoff in Georgia.
Perdue also offered to buy a plane ticket for socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who like Sanders supports Ossoff, to campaign for the Georgia Democrat.
“Jon Ossoff is eager to put his socialist supporters like AOC and Bernie on liberal cable news shows, but he won’t have them come down and campaign for him in Georgia,” Perdue told Breitbart News exclusively on Saturday. “Is he worried they’ll expose him for the radical trust fund socialist that he really is? I’ve been proud to hit the trail with conservative leaders like Vice President Pence and our president, Donald Trump. Ossoff should be willing to do the same with his top supporters. If his campaign won’t buy plane tickets for Bernie and AOC, we would be happy to buy their tickets.”
Perdue’s statement comes after Sanders appeared on MSNBC on Saturday morning hyping Ossoff and the other Democrat Senate candidate, Rev. Raphael Warnock. Warnock will face Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) in the other runoff on January 5.
“We’re all working as hard as we can to make sure that the two Democratic candidates win in Georgia,” Sanders said on MSNBC on Saturday. “Those two elections will clearly have a profound impact on everybody in our country”:
Socialist Bernie Sanders, AOC, and radical left-wing groups like BLM PAC are all in for Warnock and Ossoff so they can turn America into a socialist country. We cannot allow that to happen. pic.twitter.com/NeQyRnYQU1
— GAGOP (@GaRepublicans) December 5, 2020
Ossoff has similarly publicly embraced Sanders and his radical socialist agenda, per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which described the Georgia Democrat’s “embrace” of Sanders as a “shift for Georgia Democrats.”
“I welcome his support,” Ossoff said of Sanders during a recent CNN interview. “His advocacy for ensuring that health care is a human right in this country, for putting the interests of working families over corporate interests is welcome, is necessary, is appreciated. And so is his support.”
While Ossoff is welcoming of Sanders’ support, which Sanders continues pushing forward publicly as recently as this weekend, Sanders has not yet made a campaign trip to Georgia to appear with Ossoff and Warnock yet. Neither has Ocasio-Cortez, who has also been publicly supportive of the Georgia Democrat candidates.
Republicans pounced on the Sanders comments on Saturday to link Ossoff and Warnock to the radical socialist from Vermont as much as possible.
“Socialism is on the ballot on January 5 in the form of Jon Ossoff and radical Raphael Warnock, and Georgians must reject them and their radical socialist agenda,” Georgia GOP spokeswoman Abigail Sigler said in response. “Socialist Bernie Sanders, AOC, and radical left-wing groups like BLM PAC are all in for Warnock and Ossoff so they can turn America into a socialist country. We cannot allow that to happen. We must send David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler back to the Senate to fight for the America we know and love.”
Perdue’s spokesman, John Burke, had a similarly aggressive message.
“Bernie Sanders can’t contain his excitement at the thought of Jon Ossoff joining him in the United States Senate, and the admiration is clearly mutual,” Burke said.”He knows Ossoff would give him a clear pathway to destroying our healthcare system, ramming socialist schemes through Congress, and taxing our middle class into poverty. Georgia can’t let Bernie Sanders’ favorite candidate win in January.”
While Ossoff and Warnock have shied away from appearing publicly on the campaign trail with radicals such as Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez—even though they wink and nod their support for each other back and forth in the press from a distance—Perdue and Loeffler have embraced with open arms the boldest conservative leaders in the GOP.
President Donald Trump, for instance, is campaigning with them on Saturday in Valdosta, Georgia, the president’s first major public appearance since the election on November 3. Vice President Mike Pence made his second trip to Georgia on Friday to back the Senate GOP candidates with a rally in Savannah.
Republicans will definitely have at least 50 seats in the U.S. Senate next year, while Democrats will have at least 48 seats. If Democrats take these two runoff seats in Georgia, that means the Senate would split 50-50—and whoever is Vice President of the United States would be the tie-breaking vote. As it stands right now, despite Trump’s challenges to the election results, former Vice President Joe Biden—the Democrat candidate for president—leads in enough places to win, and Trump has not as of yet successfully overturned any of the states in which he is challenging the results. In the scenario where Biden wins, if the Senate is 50-50, that would mean Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), would be the tie-breaking vote in the Senate and throw the majority in the upper chamber of Congress to the Democrats. That would mean Democrats would control the floor of the Senate and all of the committees.
