(CNN)Georgia Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan said Sunday that the “mountains of misinformation” about the election that President Donald Trump is spreading, most recently in his remarks at a rally in the state Saturday night, could hurt GOP chances in upcoming Senate runoff races.
While campaigning for Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in Valdosta, Georgia, Trump issued a litany of grievances about the election he lost to Joe Biden. Trump also lambasted Republican Gov. Brian Kemp hours after he pressured Kemp to convene a special election and convince state legislators to overturn the President-elect’s win in the state.
“I worry that this continuous you know fanning of the flames around misinformation puts us in a negative position with regards to the January 5 runoff,” Duncan told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.” “The mountains of misinformation are not helping the process, they’re only hurting it. And Jake, I worry we are handing off a playbook to the Democrats for January 5 and certainly I can’t think of a worse playbook to hand off over the last four or five weeks to the Democrats.”
Despite the pummeling from their party leader, Georgia GOP election officials have pushed back against Trump’s claims of fraud in the state.
Biden won Georgia by more than 12,000 votes, becoming the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the Peach State in nearly three decades. Kemp certified the results of Biden’s victory on November 20, following a statewide audit, which included a hand-count of the nearly 5 million ballots cast in the election.
At the Georgia rally, the President spent the majority of the early portion of his remarks falsely claiming he won the election, taking shots at Kemp and saying the Senate runoffs will be rigged.
As CNN previously reported, Republicans had been concerned that Trump could depress voter turnout among his base in the state’s crucial runoffs if he continued to rail against Georgia’s election system and attack Kemp — exactly what Trump did at the Saturday night rally.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
