Two Democrats are bidding to flip two Republican Senate seats in Georgia on Tuesday in a race that will decide which party controls the upper chamber.
Meet the four candidates at the center of the must-win contests.
Kelly Loeffler
Loeffler, 50, is an incumbent Republican US senator for Georgia, defending the seat she has occupied since 6 January 2020, when she was appointed to replace Johnny Isakson, who resigned for health reasons.
Loeffler is swathed in controversy for allying herself with a congressional follower of the rightwing conspiracy theory QAnon while professing ignorance of it; voicing opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement; and being obliged to disavow a picture of her posing with a former Ku Klux Klan member.
Originally from Illinois, Loeffler is the richest politician on Capitol Hill, Forbes estimates, with her and her husband’s business interests worth at least $800m, including stakes in a company that owns the New York Stock Exchange and co-ownership of Atlanta’s women’s basketball team.
Raphael Warnock
The voting rights and affordable healthcare advocate and native Georgian, from Savannah, is the Democratic challenger to Loeffler on Tuesday, having forced the runoff after a close November election.
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Warnock, 51, has not held elected political office. Since 2005, he has been the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist church, where Martin Luther King Jr grew up as a member of the congregation and later preached.
Warnock is known for campaigning against the death penalty and for pro-choice reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ equality, police reform, tackling the climate crisis and taking strong action to address economic inequalities.
He has not escaped controversy. A difficult divorce and a row about his conduct during a police investigation of a church camp have generated headlines.
Warnock’s campaign has been boosted by endorsements from Democratic luminaries including Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter and several members of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, the team Loeffler co-owns.
If Warnock wins the runoff, he will become Georgia’s first Black US senator.
David Perdue
The Georgia Republican’s term as a US senator technically expired on 3 January and the seat will stay vacant until Perdue is either re-elected or replaced by his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff.
Perdue, 71, is a native Georgian, from Macon, and has served in the Senate since 2015, after he defeated the Democratic senator Michelle Nunn in 2014.
He entered office after a long career as a management consultant and corporate executive, including stints working in Asia and positions at the top of companies including Reebok and Dollar General.
Like Loeffler, Perdue has echoed Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud in Georgia in November, challenging Joe Biden’s victory in the state.
Perdue has remained a prolific stock trader while in Congress and has been repeatedly accused of conflicts of interest and insider trading in his mix of political and financial interests.
He is known for supporting hardline immigration policies, opposing same-sex marriage and denying climate change, and he has been accused of prejudice in his style of campaigning.
Jon Ossoff
Ossoff, the Democratic challenger for Perdue’s senate seat, is less than half the Republican’s age, at 33.
He first ran for Congress in 2017 in a traditionally Republican district and ultimately lost in a runoff to Republican Karen Handel. This prompted criticism from some on the left that the Democratic party had chosen a candidate who was too moderate, despite support for him from Stacey Abrams, Bernie Sanders and John Lewis.
Ossoff is a native Georgian, from Atlanta, and his career so far has focused on leading a firm specializing in investigative documentary film-making.
Since October, Ossoff has raised more than $100m for his campaign, the most richly funded Senate campaign in history.
Ossoff called Perdue a coward after he refused to show up to debate him in December.
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