This report was written by Andrew Perez.
The message from Georgia is clear: People want help from Congress.
Democrats appear to have won both Georgia senate runoff races on Tuesday and secured full control of Congress — and they owe their likely victories to mass frustration with the way that lawmakers have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to CNN exit polls, 54 percent of Georgia voters said the pandemic has caused them financial hardship, with 15 percent of respondents saying it has caused them severe financial hardship.
More than 70 percent of Georgia voters said that Congress is doing too little to help the financial situations of individual Americans and small businesses, according to a Fox News Voter Analysis survey conducted during the week before the election. More than half of voters said Congress is doing too much to help large corporations.
Both Democratic senate candidates, Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, centered their campaigns around a push for $2,000 survival checks from Washington — an idea backed by progressives like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as well as Republican President Donald Trump.
President-elect Joe Biden got on board with the measure too, telling Georgia voters on Monday that electing Ossoff and Warnock “will put an end to the block in Washington on that $2,000 stimulus check, that money that will go out the door immediately to people who are in real trouble.”
The Fox survey found that 62 percent of Georgia voters say they support changing the health care system so that any American can buy into a government-run health care plan if they want to — an idea commonly known as a public health insurance option. Those results are consistent with Fox’s survey of Georgia voters before the November election.
More than half of voters, 56 percent, said they were concerned about allegations that incumbent Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler had both engaged in insider trading, according to the Fox survey.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
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