Georgia's record turnout in 2020 brought a sudden end to Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff's repeated complaints that voter suppression would hurt his chances.
In interview after interview during the 2020 campaign, Ossoff bemoaned voter suppression in Republican-run Georgia. Since forcing a runoff with Sen. David Perdue (R., Ga.) last week, though, he has not mentioned the subject in a series of national interviews with MSNBC, CNN, and ABC's The View, according to a review of transcripts.
About five million votes were cast in Georgia in 2020, easily breaking the former state record. Although Democrat Joe Biden appears likely to win the state over President Donald Trump, Ossoff is about 87,000 votes behind Perdue.
While he has been quiet in his interviews this week, Ossoff did tweet Wednesday that voter suppression should be a "federal crime" and requested donations to his campaign.
Ossoff's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The previous record for state voter turnout was in 2016, at 4.1 million, in the middle of then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp's tenure. Kemp was elected governor in 2018 over Democrat Stacey Abrams in what Ossoff and other Democrats regard as an illegitimate election. Abrams never conceded and blamed her defeat on voter suppression, despite the state's automatic voter registration policy and record-shattering midterm turnout that year.
Kemp was also blamed for precinct closings outside his purview and for enforcing voter roll laws passed by the Democratic-controlled Georgia legislature in the 1990s.