Democrats Raise $280K Overnight for Georgia Senate Runoffs: AOC

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) questions Postmaster General Louis DeJoy during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on slowdowns at the Postal Service ahead of the November elections on Capitol Hill in Washington on Aug. 24, 2020. (Tom Williams/AFP via Getty Images)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) announced Thursday that overnight, more than $280,000 in Democratic funding for grassroots organizations working to elect Democratic senators in the Georgia runoffs was raised.

The money was raised to back Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who are aiming to unseat Georgia’s GOP senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. Should Democrats take the seats, they would have a 50-50 tie in the Senate.

“Update: Holy cow - we surged to $280k for the GA grassroots last night! That’s some #EmbraceTheBase ENERGY right there. Keep going!” Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman to ever serve as a member of Congress, said in a statement on Twitter.

She suggested she believes the sum reflects the amount of Democratic support Georgia has.

A hand recount was announced for the state on Nov. 11 by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. At the time of this publication, Democratic candidate Joe Biden led President Donald Trump by about 14,000 votes.

The recount effort is headed by Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.).

Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) speaks to media while other impeachment defense team advisors look on, at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 27, 2020. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

“Every illegal vote suppresses a legal vote, and we don’t want to see that happen,” Collins said during the call.

He said if the Biden campaign is concerned with transparency, it should join the effort and noted that the opposing campaign will be represented in the recount.

In addition to the recount, the campaign is also pursuing inquiries into allegations that some people were denied their right to vote, that ballots were illegally harvested, and that signatures on mail-in ballot packages were not properly matched with the signatures election authorities have on record.

The Epoch Times has not called the presidential election for either Trump or Biden, pending the outcome of legal challenges, as the Electoral College has the final say.

On Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez suggested that she will be prioritizing wins for Ossoff and Warnock. In total, contributors have donated well-over a quarter-million dollars, she said in an update Thursday.

“I’m going to be spending my next couple of months doing everything that I can to extend help and offer support to the work of fantastic leaders … to make sure that we don’t have a Republican Senate majority, that we win these races in Georgia, that we secure a Democratic Senate majority,” she told CNN.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and the campaigns of Perdue and Loeffler, meanwhile, have raised a total of $32 million in less than a week in the run-up to state runoffs.

Petr Svab contributed to this report.