Political analyst Matt Towery’s last poll released before Tuesday’s two U.S. Senate races in Georgia show both contests to be in a dead heat, but says the reluctance of Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler to feature Donald Trump in their television ads could be a problem going into their elections tonight.

The InsiderAdvantage survey of 500 Georgia likely voters released on Monday shows that among GOP voters, 68% said that they thought that Senators Perdue and Loeffler have been very supportive of the president since the November presidential election, while 18% said that they had been “somewhat” supportive. Another 4% said that they had not been supportive of all of the president (the survey has a 4.4% margin of error).  

“That should be concerning to the Republicans because Trump is very popular in the areas where they need their vote to come out on this Election Day,” Towery told Spectrum Bay News 9 on Tuesday from his home in St. Petersburg. “They’re losing in the early votes substantially in Georgia, so they needed Trump desperately in order to get their vote out,” he said, referring to the president’s Monday night campaign appearance in northwest Georgia.

The special elections in Georgia are the final chapter of the 2020 congressional cycle, and the political world has been focusing like a laser beam on it. If Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock could knock off their GOP opponents, the Democrats would control the U.S. Senate and all three branches of the federal government over the next two years.

The race between Republican Sen. David Perdue and Ossoff is the most expensive Senate contest ever, with the candidates and outside groups spending nearly $470 million through Monday, according to Open Secrets. The special election between Republican Sen. Kelly Loefller and Rev. Raphael Warnock has cost nearly $363 million, making it the second most expensive race.

“On TV, every thirty-minute segment is filled with back-to-back Republican and Democratic ads,” says Plant City Democrat CL Townsend, who has been in Savannah, Georgia since December 18 working to help cure vote-by-mail and provisional ballots. He’s seen an onslaught of TV ads for the four different campaigns, but rarely if ever has seen Trump in any of the GOP-backed commercials.

“No, I don’t think I’ve seen anything related to Trump,” he says. “His presence has been very low I would say.”

Towery says outside of the metro Atlanta area, Donald Trump “is a religion” in terms of his popularity in Georgia. And he says that the decisions by both the Loeffler and Perdue campaigns not to feature the president in any television commercials “may prove to be fatal.”

Pinellas County Republican and Spectrum Bay News 9 political analyst Berny Jacques spent four days in the Atlanta suburbs last week working on direct voter contact efforts. He says that like many Republicans, he was concerned that President Trump’s non-stop bashing of the presidential election results in Georgia in November would tamp down GOP enthusiasm. But he says that, in his experience, that wasn’t the case.

“Certainly, folks are still bitter and upset about how the results went down in the presidential race. But this is not damaging the resolve,” he says. “I really saw people really motivated to stop the radical left from winning those two Senate seats.”

More than three million early votes have been cast in the special elections, which concluded late last week. Jacques said that several voters he spoke with weren’t aware that was the case.

“One woman in particular said I’ll vote Monday, and we had to really emphasize that Tuesday is when voting day is,” he said.

Towery says that he doesn’t expect the races to take form until around midnight on Election Day, saying that many large metro counties in and around Atlanta have historically been slow in getting their votes in.

“You’ll see Republicans jump out to a huge advantage to begin with because the rural areas will come in first, and then just like the presidential race, you’ll begin to see those metro Atlanta members begin to winnow that margin down,” he says.