Warnock’s Senate win makes Georgia history
The Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, defeated Senator Kelly Loeffler in yesterday’s special election for an unexpired term for a US Senate seat in Georgia.
Warnock will become the first black senator in Georgia history. It remains too early to call the second race between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican David Perdue, who is seeking a second term after his first term expired Sunday.
As of 2.15am today, local time, Ossoff had a lead of 9527 votes out of nearly 4.4 million counted, or a margin of less than 0.2 percentage points.
There were still some mail ballots and in-person early votes left to be counted statewide, the majority of which are in Democratic-leaning counties.
Control of the US Senate is in the balance.
Warnock, senior pastor of the church where Martin Luther King preached through the height of the Civil Rights movement until his assassination, made history with a surge in black turnout.
To be sure, a narrow win out of 4.4 million votes involves plenty of variables. But black voters were a force in the early vote and on Election Day. Notably, it wasn’t just in metro Atlanta, but also in rural and small-town counties across South Georgia, where black turnout has historically lagged.
That means it was an alliance spanning from the most affluent black residents of Atlanta, including recent transplants to Georgia, to those black Georgia natives who hail from the most economically depressed pockets of the state.
This election cycle a confluence of factors for black voters: 2020 offered the first general election after the disappointment of Stacey Abrams’ narrowly missing out in 2018 on becoming the first black woman governor in US history, and it was the first election after the death of Representative John Lewis, Atlanta’s civil rights icon who once marched alongside King and would publicly joust with President Donald Trump.
Loeffler and her Republican allies used the two-month runoff campaign to hammer Warnock with ads calling him ‘‘dangerous’’ and ‘‘radical.’’
They used snippets of his sermons from Ebenezer Baptist Church to accuse him of ‘‘hate speech’’ and ‘‘racial’’ divisiveness.
But black voters can point to yesterday’s vote count and take credit for that strategy ending in defeat. –