Georgia’s Senatorial Races Become Battleground for LGBTQ Equality

Georgia has very quickly become ground zero in the battle to protect LGBTQ equality and, once again, to stave off attempts to undermine American democracy.

“January 5th is now a critically, critically, critically important date,” said Fred Smith, a Georgia activist and member of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ LGBTQ Advisory Board. He was speaking with other Georgia LGBTQ leaders to Project Q Atlanta just days after the November 3 presidential election and key Senate races around the country.

As the dust settles around most of the U.S. Senate races, the partisan makeup of the next session stands at 50 to 48. The two runoff races in Georgia give Democrats their only chance of taking control of the Senate (When there is a 50-50 split in the Senate, the tie is broken by the incumbent Vice President who, next year, will be Democrat Kamala Harris).

According to Smith, “Biden’s hands will absolutely be tied across the board on every issue, including LGBTQ issues” if Republicans win both of the seats from Georgia.

Lucas Acosta, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), said his group “will be making some announcements in the coming days on Georgia, but I can say we will be heavily involved.”

HRC has been heavily involved in Georgia since last year, when it partnered with Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight organization to combat voter suppression in Georgia. HRC promised a six-figure contribution to Fair Fight, saying that while voter suppression efforts are primarily aimed at people of color, “it has also harmed LGBTQ Americans.”

Smith, who is also a law professor at Emory University, said the outcome of the two Georgia runoff elections will control not

Warnock photo via WikiCommons; Ossoff photo via Facebook Georgia’s two important runoff races have two Democratic contenders to vote for in the upcoming January 5th election, Raphael Warnock (l), and Jon Ossoff (r).

only the types of judges Biden will be able to appoint, but “whether he’ll get to appoint judges at all … [as well as] the type of people he’ll be able to appoint to his cabinet and pro-equality legislation.”

These two runoff races are the result of none of the four major-party candidates for U.S. Senate in Georgia getting at least 50 percent of the vote during the November 3 election. Therefore, the top two vote-getters in both races now square off on January 5.

One race pits incumbent Republican David Perdue against Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff. The other pits incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler against Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock.

Warnock garnered 340,000 more votes than Loeffler on November 3, but a second Republican in the race took away 979,000 votes from Loeffler. Warnock can hope to pick up the 459,000 votes siphoned away by two other Democrats in the November 3 race, but it’s clear, the race is going to be tough.

Democrat Ossoff received 88,000 fewer votes that his Republican opponent Perdue, but

there was one other candidate on the ballot: a Libertarian, who won 115,000 votes.

Fivethirtyeight.com, the data analysis website founded and run by openly gay statistical guru Nate Silver, said “Things aren’t looking so rosy for Democrats now.” It calls a Democratic sweep of both Georgia seats “unlikely.”

Georgia’s electoral votes have still not been called for either the Democrat or the Republican in the presidential race. Even though Georgia has voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1992, Biden leads Trump by over 12,000 votes as of Tuesday morning.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr sent out a memo Monday to direct all U.S. attorneys to investigate any “substantial allegations” of voter fraud anywhere in the country before states certify their election results.

Georgia’s Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan told various news outlets today that his office has been monitoring for “any systemic examples of fraud or voter disenfranchisement” in the state and “have not had any credible examples.”