Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and former congresswoman Gabby Giffords joined Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff at a rally in Madison County Saturday to urge Democrats to ensure Donald Trump doesn’t win a second term as president.
“I do not want him a mile from the White House,” Kelly said. “Maybe that’s not fair. He can stand outside the fence and look through the bars.”
Kelly, a retired Navy pilot and former astronaut, said Trump has a “complete lack of regard and respect for service members and veterans.” He repeated oft-told stories about Trump calling fallen Marines “losers” and “suckers,” refusing to visit a World War I cemetery in the rain “because he was afraid his hair would get messed up,” and saying that the late Sen. John McCain—whose seat Kelly now holds— “was not a hero because he was captured” in the Vietnam War.
Ossoff referenced the 2020 phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger pressuring him to “find” 11,780 votes—the exact number he lost by—and raised the specter of Trump doing the same thing this year. “We are going to have to get out the vote like we have never done it before,” he said. “We can’t leave it close.”
The Georgia senator also defended the Biden/Harris administration’s record, citing the bipartisan infrastructure package and funding for clean water, broadband internet, manufacturing incentives and veterans’ health care.
If Trump is elected, Kelly said he will “shred our alliances” in Europe, pass more tax cuts for billionaires and further chip away at women’s reproductive rights. “On the other side, we have an experienced prosecutor [Vice President Kamala Harris] who’s been fighting for veterans since her days as attorney general,” he said.
Kelly did not specifically address the mass shooting at nearby Apalachee High School earlier this month, but he did note that gunshot wounds are the No. 1 killer of children in the U.S. “It’s shameful that we are like this,” he said. “We’ve got to fix it.”
Giffords, Kelly’s wife, was shot in the head in 2011 during a mass shooting at a constituent event near Tucson, AZ that left six people dead and 19 injured, forcing her to resign from Congress during a years-long recovery.
“We are at a crossroads,” Giffords said in a brief speech. “We can let the shooting continue, or we can act. We can protect our families, our future. We can vote. We can be on the right side of history.”
Both Ossoff and Kelly were first elected in 2020, a year in which Georgia and Arizona flipped blue for the first time in decades. Polls show a dead heat between Harris and Trump in the two critical swing states.
The rally, held at a park in the small town of Comer about 15 miles northeast of Athens, drew hundreds of people despite sweltering weather. Tim Denson, president of the Athens-Clarke County Democratic Committee, estimated that close to 1,000 people came and went over the course of three hours.
Denson said the rally was held in Comer, rather than the Democratic stronghold of Athens, because county parties in the 10th Congressional District are rotating events around the district in an effort to build up the party in rural areas. Madison County voted 56% for Trump in 2020. “Long-term, we can’t win in Athens alone,” Denson said.
The Harris/Walz campaign has been trying to cut into Trump’s margins in rural areas. For example, they took a two-day bus tour of South Georgia—an area Democratic presidential candidates rarely visit—in late August.
Other Democratic candidates at the rally included Western Circuit District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, 10th Congressional District candidate Lexy Doherty, and candidates for state legislature Gareth Fenley, Conolus Scott, Andrew Ferguson and Eric Gisler.
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