It is rare that a political party gets handed gifts in the closing weeks of an election as nice as the ones Donald Trump has handed Democrats to close out the Georgia senate runoff elections. Not only are Georgia’s dual senate runoffs unprecedented in that two senate races will be decided on the same runoff ballot, together these races will determine party control of the senate for the next two years at a time where roughly half of the Republican House Caucus and a dozen GOP senators have split off into what Steve Schmidt aptly calls the party’s authoritarian faction.

Disturbingly, we’re opening 2021 with roughly half of the Republican Party openly advocating for, and actively working to impose, an end of democracy in America and the imposition of a one-party state with Donald Trump at its helm.

As astounding a sentence as that is for me to write and for you to read, it’s not a hyperbolic overstatement of the sort deployed casually over the past two decades by Republicans in right-wing media to bump ratings and win elections. With 16 days between us and Joe Biden’s inauguration, the only thing standing between us and a full-blown constitutional crisis is that key Republicans at both the national and state level of influence are, for now, holding the line.

Should those lines fall and the whole of the Republican Party become pro-authoritarian, the parchment protections Americans are relying on to transition the powers of the presidency to the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden, will then be tested in ways frankly not even Hollywood script writers have ever deigned to imagine. Fortunately, senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as well as a host of Republican state officials seems to understand how just consequential a moment this is for American democracy. and along with other Republican senators like Tom Cotton, John Thune, and Lisa Murkowski, have pledged to join with Democrats to approve the Electoral College on Wednesday. The Democratic Party’s majority in the House of Representatives ensures that chamber’s certification.

Nothing underscores better that McConnell’s control over his senate caucus is faltering than the fact that his junior senator from Missouri, just two years into his first term, felt emboldened enough to no-show his leader’s caucus call even though he was the guest of honor.

Like their fellow Republicans, both Loeffler and Perdue understand that allegations of electoral fraud in Georgia, and everywhere else for that matter, are completely contrived fabrications, some literally made up out of thin air on the stump, of the Trump campaign- propaganda created to sow permanent doubt about the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s presidency and to deflect attention away from the cold, hard fact that the mighty Donald Trump had lost to “Sleepy Joe,” a man who the campaign had painted as a secret, wheelchair-bound dementia patient on his last legs who wouldn’t survive the first year of his first term.

To get electorally crushed by such a frail, helpless and hapless person is humiliating to say the least. You can hear this in Trump’s voice, like in the secretly recorded audio of his attempt to bribe and extort Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into committing election fraud on his behalf in order to steal the Georgia election from Joe Biden (the irony of him committing massive fraud to “prove” fake fraud is, of course, completely lost on Trump world).

So, it is perhaps because of the attention needed to fuel Trump world’s full court press into an authoritarian coup that he was allowed to blunder, stridently so, into one of the stupidest campaign gaffes of all time.

On December 22nd seemingly out of the blue, Trump threatened to veto Congress’ hard-fought and months-long compromise bill on COVID bill because the bill only contained $600 individual stimulus checks- the exact amount his own negotiator, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had negotiated for on his behalf. The veto threat came out of left field, but more importantly, it completely screwed one person in particular, Mitch McConnell, who instantly went from hero to zero and was suddenly exposed as the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.

McConnell was lodged between Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic Party majority in the House and President Trump, who had suddenly realized the value of playing populist’s hero as it relates to stirring up public sentiment on his behalf for his efforts to subvert democracy. The timing could not be worse for Republicans in terms of the senate runoff races. Trump’s called the $600 stimulus a disgrace, setting Democrats up not only with an upper hand to reopen negotiations, but also to frame the Georgia races in clear economic terms for voters: vote for Democrats and get paid. Keep Republicans in power and continue to get short changed.

President Trump had given Democrats the perfect issue to use to illustrate why party control matters. And because of the ideological rigidity of his senate caucus, who were just now (predictably) rediscovering their deep devotion to fiscal austerity after 4 years of wild spending under Trump, there was not a damn thing McConnell could do about it.

Generally, it’s hard to out-maneuver McConnell, and Democrats would do well to never let their dislike of the Senate Majority Leader blind them to his considerable talents, especially in terms of strategic planning. But Trump’s madness has no method. You can’t strategically plan around Donald Trump because he is wholly undisciplined and prone to undercutting your carefully laid plans at any moment (my particular favorite Trumpism is his tendency to unveil their evil plans out-loud during freewheeling press conferences because he’s so excited about them, he can’t stop himself from telling us what they have planned).

But a gift horse must still be saddled up and ridden. Having an increasingly terrifying Republican Party who is holding the nation’s promised $2,000 stimulus checks hostage is an impressive campaign arsenal to close out your campaign on. But only if you use it!

When polls open at 7am on Election Day one of two scenarios will unfold. We will see what we saw in the fall where the long lines of early voting set up smooth flows on Election Day, robust voting traffic with few issues and none of the congestion that marked the state’s June primary. Or we might see robust activity. Turnout that like what we’ve seen in early voting days and that clearly indicates record setting runoff participation and enthusiasm.

One thing is clear, the Republican Party is generally the party that dominates Election day voting, and this has been exacerbated by Donald Trump’s months-long campaign against the voting system’s integrity which has pushed Republican voters increasingly towards Election Day voting.

For their part, Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock have worked to frame their races as a collective undertaking, acknowledging the broader implications than their one seat and the various policies they will advocate for and vote on during their senate tenure. Right out of the gate- it was not clear that Democrats understood these seats would best be marketed as a pair. Winning one is not enough as it leaves Democrats a seat shy of the majority in the senate. The initial messaging for both campaigns was a continuation of their fall campaigns- policy-focused and singular. Conversely, the GOP launched the Loeffler and Perdue campaigns as a pair working in tandem, branded as a unity ticket created to make a firewall against potential “Marxist” and “communist” ideas allegedly advanced by Democrats.

But within a couple of weeks, the messaging for Democrats was revised to better market the races collectively, and in a nationalized, “stakes framed” context that urges voters to see the seats through the lens of the senate majority and the Democratic Party’s effort to potentially give President-elect Joe Biden a governing trifecta (although it should be noted, a legislative filibuster would remain a major hurdle to any Biden agenda). The past two months on the stump, Ossoff in particular has described the runoff as a contest in which a young Jewish son of an immigrant and a Black, senior pastor at Dr. King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church” are running together as “brothers from another mother” to flip the senate to Democrats and voters, it seems, have responded.

Democrats have been assisted mightily in this effort by Trump in two critical ways. First, his effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, to execute a coup in plain site has been deeply unsettling and has likely made Americans wary of Republican-control of the Senate. Certainly, this is a message that would seem ripe to be exploited given the amount of reliance the country has right now on Mitch McConnell, who appears to be the safeguard between the country and an increasingly radical Republican Party.

In addition, Trump’s surprise veto threat of the months delayed COVID relief bill over the size of the individual stimulus checks which his own negotiator Treasury Secretary Mnuchin negotiated on his behalf handed Democrats one of the clearest contrast issues in the history politics. Two things were clear from the first moment that Trump’s video veto threat aired. First, there was no way in hell McConnell could pass a $2,000 stimulus bill because of his own caucus. Second, there was no way that President Trump was serious about helping McConnell do it. Instead of announcing his plans to stay in Washington, rolling up his sleeves, and imploring Congress to do the same, Trump boarded Air Force One and took off to the Winter White House in Florida for four days of golf.

For days, people were not even really sure if he meant his veto threat seriously, or if it was some kind of weird mood swing that might have passed through his system over Christmas holiday. Then, suddenly on Sunday the tweets started, and all illusions were stripped away. McConnell was going to have to navigate COVID relief without Trump’s $2,000 “ask” and then get through these senate runoffs with his own majority on the line having failed to deliver and with few options to deflect the blame.

Still, given the outcome of the 2020 general election in November, the Senate Majority Leader had reasons to be hopeful. The Trump Era, especially the last year and the COVID time period, have produced several significant issues for the senate’s majority that should have triggered democratic accountability in the 2020 cycle including an impeachment acquittal in a “trial” where additional evidence was banned but not needed anyway because the evidence of guilt was already overwhelming. and at the time close to 350,000 COVID deaths.

Yet, Election Day 2020 saw most of his endangered caucus survive their challenges. Only those senators facing the surge turnout electorates in realigning states (Colorado and Arizona) went on to lose. All the races in which “persuasion” was required Democrats had fallen short, most particularly senate long-timer Susan Collins in Maine, who had done much to undermine her reputation as a moderate “maverick” who bucked her party when it really mattered.

Although Collins had broken with Republicans to vote yes on allowing witnesses at Trump’s impeachment trial in the senate (you really should take a second to appreciate the absurdity of the witness vote), she had ignored a pile of incontrovertible evidence of Trump’s guilt and stood Mitt Romney up at the altar, making him the lone Republican vote to convict Trump on his impeachment charges.

Collins had also voted yes on the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, not only angering women who believed the allegations of sexual assault made against him by Christine Blasey Ford during his confirmation hearings, but also because of Judge Kavanaugh’s strident position on limiting access to abortion and receptivity to overturning Roe v. Wade, something Collins, an exceedingly rare pro-choice Republican, had previously claimed was a litmus test for her on judicial appointments.

Yet, come Election Day 2020 Susan Collins sailed to easy victory because Maine’s election returns produced something analysts, including yours truly, thought was unlikely to happen in the current political environment: ticket splitters. As I explained prior to the election, because Joe Biden was likely to carry Maine’s statewide popular vote, the only way that Susan Collins could retain her seat was for some Biden voters (these would largely be Independents) to “split” their tickets and vote for the Republican, Collins, on their ballot.

This meant that to defeat her, her Democratic challenger, Sara Gideon, needed only to disqualify Collins in the eyes of these potential voters to prevent them from being willing to party split their ballots. And the best way to do that? Equate Susan Collins with Donald Trump, a electioneering technique that is standard fare for decades now for Republican campaigns but remains a frustratingly rare tactic for Democrats for some reason. So, this strategy was not invoked. Instead, Democrats uniformly ran an “issue” or policy-based campaign against Collins, largely ignoring Trump and failing to paint Collins as inseparable from Trump.

Why do I mention this missed opportunity in Maine, and specifically point out that the opportunity was missed due to messaging failure? I do so because the results of tomorrow’s elections in Georgia will ultimately come down to turnout of each party’s coalition. It is music to my ears to hear analysts speaking of these elections that way- having these runoffs understand that ultimately we’ll be looking at a Democratic night or a Republican one by virtue of which party is best able to motivate their coalition to the polls (keeping in mind, party coalitions include partisans, but also independents that lean towards a party, or what are called independent “leaners” who, at rates approaching 90% will vote for their “lean-to” party as I showed in the 2020 general election with this large n size survey data.

Data from Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group “Nationscape” 2020 Data: July 1 ReleaseAlthough the Democratic candidates have positioned their candidacies together and framed them as determining control of the senate, they should exploit the powerful political assets Trump has handed to them and close their campaigns on the message of what Democratic Party senate control can bring to Georgians. Imminently, that is $2K individual stimulus checks and a safeguard against an increasingly pro-authoritarian Republican Party.

It is the perfect way to both personalize and personify what party control the 117th Congress means for Americans. If Mitch McConnell continues to “rule the roost” voters will continue to look at Washington for help that never comes. But, if Democrats and Independents show up in big numbers on Tuesday, January 5th and cast ballots for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, they can flip control of the senate to Democrats and final break the log jam on Congress addressing America’s policy needs.

And if Democrats were able to drive strong Election Day turnout, the early vote in Georgia tells us a clear story. That story is that for the first time in decades, Democrats have a chance, a real chance of controlling not just one, but two of that Deep South state’s senate seats.

What Stacey Abrams and her fellow organizers, the Democratic Party of Georgia, and the Ossoff and Warnock campaigns have done in terms of early vote performance heading into Election Day is the necessary, but not sufficient, building blocks of a Democratic victory for both races.

But and this is a BIG but, Election Day voting is the Republican Party’s schtick. The RNC’s voter turnout apparatus is state of the art and rarely fails to deliver turnout on the Right that does not hit their marks. The RNC, not the Trump campaign, powered Trump’s 2016 victory and his still impressive 2020 loss. I have no doubt the GOP’s negative partisanship powered fear campaign will produce very strong Republican turnout and will be very surprised if that turnout is anything but allegiant to the two Republican nominees regardless of how large the rally crowds have been at the Loeffler is One of THEM rallies. What I am unsure of is whether it will be enough to erase the clear advantage Democrats have built up in the early vote, vis a vis the Democrat’s own Election Day vote performance.

What we do know about the electorate’s demographic composition, which informs its partisan composition and thus gives us a relatively good sense of the vote choice breakdown, is that this early vote electorate, an impressive nearly 3 million strong, has a modeled party ID advantage for Democrats of about .3pt according to analysis conducted by Tom Bonier of Target Smart, the leading data analytics and voter targeting company for Democrats. This modeled Democratic Party performance is notable because at the same point in 2020’s general election, Republicans held a 5pt party advantage.

The advantage for Democrats is fueled by explosive turnout among Black voters and young voters. In fact, turnout is robust across the entire Democratic coalition, which is the same conditions that occurred in Georgia in the fall, where turnout for every element of the party’s coalition increased sharply, but comparatively ended up dwarfed by a massive surge in turnout among college-educated white voters in the suburbs of Atlanta.

This was not surprising because although Black and other non-white voters received a substantially increased investment in Georgia in 2020, investment in non-white voter turnout still lags considerably in your standard Democratic campaign compared to spending on things such as television ads. It should be noted that along with Georgia, greater emphasis on turnout for non-white voters was also placed in the presidential campaigns in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. Tasked with returning the states to the Blue Wall, the Democratic Party state chairs in those critical swing states consulted with Abrams and Fair Fight prior to the election and invested their own money into turnout via in-person voter outreach work. This was especially necessary because of the suspension of in-person voter outreach work by the Biden campaign and the DCCC/DSCC, which these chairs understood might compromise Democratic voters turnout, regardless of how medically prudent they might be.

I believe that work on turnout of low propensity Democratic voters in these key states for the Electoral College for the presidential race may partially explain the divergent results in 2020 where we saw the presidential outcome perform as predicted by forecasts, including my own, and once voter files are updated with the 2020 data, will be able to examine this further. In congressional races, there was little to no “replacement” in-person GOTV like we saw at the presidential level, where in addition to the state party’s also saw lots of activity at the grassroots level.

Investment in voter turnout overall, and non-white voter turnout specifically still lags considerably in your standard Democratic campaign. Thus, college-educated voters in the suburbs who are naturally the most likely to vote also receive a disproportionate amount of the voter contact from campaigns because it is these voters that are seen as the “persuadable” segment of the electorate.

Additionally promising for Democrats is that nearly 113,000 new voters have joined the ranks of voters for the Georgia senate runoffs- promising enough in and of itself, but once you consider who these voters are, Democrats should feel optimistic because additional Target Smart analysis finds that 22% of them are under the age of 25 (that age bracket only makes up 12% of the electorate) and 40% of them are Black (while Black voters make up 32% of registered voters).

There is a clear enthusiasm advantage, regionally, for metro Atlanta and areas of the state dominated by Democrats, who are very active on the ground in field after seeing suspension of “door knocking” potentially play a role in suppressing turnout in the fall cycle and partially leading to loss House seats in a cycle where I, and every other forecaster, expected them to gain seats. The question is, will this hold over to Election Day?

In their typical playbook, Republicans are bringing Trump into Georgia to stump on Monday in North Georgia- the ex-burbs of Atlanta and an area locals call the North Georgia Mountains, an key area for Republicans. These areas have underperformed their fall 2020 turnout thus far and have the GOP worried. Democrats also appear to be adjusting conceptually to “turnout’ elections. As hard as it is to believe, Democrats haven’t always been keen to bring in big name Democrats to juice turnout.

Even as late as the 2018 midterms, when Donald Trump stumped in virtually every senate race for the party’s candidates, Obama was only used sparingly, in places where he was clearly popular, avoiding races like Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota where Democratic incumbents faced dealigning electorates. Long time readers of my work will know that I urged Virginia Democrats to bring in key national Democrats, particularly Stacey Abrams and President Obama and the First Lady to key districts in the 2019 Virginia state legislative elections to no avail, although they did not need those districts (which they ultimately did lose) to flip control of the state’s senate).

Instead, and even before the pandemic came along to complicate things (I’m with Joe Scarborough, those car rallies, with the incessant car horn honking is probably never going to grow on me), Democrats have leaned more towards things like robocalls of the type Michelle Obama recently recorded for Reverend Warnock or ads like the musical ad released by President Obama and John Legend erroneously fearing that bringing in Democrats increases Republican turnout (it doesn’t, Republican turnout is high regardless, and not stimulating Democratic turnout ends up hurting Democrats).

But recently, Democrats seem to be adjusting to the polarized era. President Obama hit the stump with Jon Ossoff, holding a socially distanced event with the candidate in December and to close the campaign out, both President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris returned to Georgia to stump for the senate candidates. By happenstance, Georgia voters have been vested with what amounts to “super votes” in these Tuesday runoffs. If Democrats are successful and pick up both of these seats, their decision to show up and vote for two Democratic senators may end up having more impact on American policy than nearly any other vote in our nation’s history.

Its important to keep in mind that Georgia’s flip to Biden in November, and its potential flip to Democrats in the Senate here, is completely dependent on the infrastructure and investments for voter registration and turnout that have been put in place by Stacey Abrams and her group Fair Fight, which she created in the wake of her close loss to Brian Kemp in the state’s 2018 gubernatorial election. Abrams’ work, in conjunction with a host of other voter advocacy groups such as The New Georgia Project, Black Votes Matter,Color of Change, Voto Latino have fundamentally altered politics in the state. Abrams’ close brush with victory in 2018, along with Biden’s 12,000 vote win in 2020 reminds us that whatever the outcome on Tuesday is, it is likely to be razor close, which will be a sharp departure from the norm for these runoffs- which have been typically one-sided shellacking’s in favor of the Republican Party.

Whether its recognition of that fact, realization, after Biden’s win that winning is actually possible in the state, or the endless turbulence being caused by President Trump as he throws everything and the kitchen sink at his effort to not be ousted from power come January 20th, the early vote data, explorable in detail at the Georgia Votes website, provides a solid foundation for Democrats to launch a closing drive from. But the fact remains, they cannot win these seats without an Election Day rally. Donald Trump has given them two key messages to rally around.

Both mobilizing and persuasive in nature, both the Ossoff and Warnock campaigns need to make it clear to voters that party control of government matters and Georgia voters have it within their control, their personal power, to settle that question for the whole country on Tuesday. Given the choice, most people would prefer $2,000 and the continuation of democracy.

It is up to Democrats to ensure that voters realize that is what they’re voting on in Georgia on Tuesday. The message matters and that is a message Democrats will win.