Republicans on the run in Georgia with two Senate seats within Democratic reach - CNN

Republicans now fear that the state's two Senate seats are in danger of flipping, amid changing demographics, party infighting and President Donald Trump's unpopularity during the coronavirus pandemic.

In the final days of the campaign, Perdue is acting like a candidate on the run.

Kamala Harris' first name at a Trump rally, which his campaign said was a simple mispronunciation, even though they have served in the Senate together for three years.

Perdue has warned for months that the state is up for grabs.

Intraparty fights

Republicans in Georgia are facing a perfect storm that puts the White House and its two GOP-held Senate seats at risk.

The other Senate race in Georgia, featuring an intraparty feud between appointed Sen.

Loeffler and Collins have tried to outdo each other in touting their ties to Trump in a state where he is less popular than he was four years ago.

Some Republicans in Washington predicted Collins' entry into the race would hurt the party.

In private conversations earlier this year, top Senate Republicans warned the White House about the risks of a contested race for Loeffler's seat.

But White House officials made clear that convincing Trump to help clear the field would fall on deaf ears because the President thought he would resoundingly win the state, which he believed would help down-ticket Georgia Republicans, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

But Republicans in these Georgia Senate races are now all neck and neck with their Democratic opponents, who outraised them in the last financial quarter.

Republicans have had to spend heavily on the two Senate races -- over $100 million -- compared to over $69 million from Democrats, according to Kantar's Campaign Media Analysis Group.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has spent more in Georgia than in any other state.

"Obviously the situation is complicated by having two Republicans in the race," Senate Majority Whip John Thune told CNN.

But that's not the way it worked out."

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has accused Collins of putting his personal ambition ahead of preserving a seat central to the Senate majority.

She recently announced the support of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a conservative House candidate who promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory and made a string of bigoted comments, but whom Trump has called a "future Republican star." Loeffler has even taken on her own WNBA team, the Atlanta Dream, over the players' support of Black Lives Matter.

"I don't go back and forth with him on his response, I think he said what he believes, and I think we're seeing that actually played out in America."

View Trump and Biden head-to-head polling

Collins, who led the Republican defense of Trump during the House impeachment, has forced Loeffler at this late stage of the campaign to continue focusing on the party's base voters rather than those in the middle.

Loeffler has retorted that she has been endorsed by a number of prominent anti-abortion groups and "will always defend innocent life."

In her speech in Buford, Georgia, Loeffler repeatedly criticized Collins, trying to tie him to Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, calling him "one of the most liberal Republicans in the US House of Representatives." The event was held indoors with roughly 70 people -- many of whom were maskless -- and in defiance of state rules prohibiting gatherings of more than 50 people.

Collins, who has criss-crossed the state and held gatherings with pockets of voters, has been unsparing in his criticism of Loeffler, characterizing her as a fake conservative.

Georgia has a record 7.6 million registered voters, a million more than it had in 2016 and about 1.6 million more than in 2014, when Perdue first ran for the Senate, according to Georgia's Secretary of State office.