Georgia U.S. Senate races still too close to call

Control of the U.S. Senate hung in the balance Tuesday as Georgians rushed to the polls to decide a pair of runoffs that will shape President-elect Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.

The contests were too close to call Tuesday evening, though Democrat Raphael Warnock staked a lead over U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler with troves of votes in left-leaning counties still to be counted. In nail-biting fashion, Jon Ossoff was also deadlocked with U.S. Sen. David Perdue.

The twin cliffhangers carried monumental stakes that attracted record-setting spending, legions of volunteers and unprecedented political attention.

As midnight neared, the twin races were razor-tight. But hundreds of thousands of ballots were still outstanding, particularly in Democratic strongholds in populous metro Atlanta and in Savannah.

The races ended the way they started, with a concerted appeal to each party’s most loyal supporters. On Monday, Biden visited Atlanta to promise Democratic victories would restore “hope and decency and honor” to Washington, while President Donald Trump called on supporters at an evening rally in Dalton to “swamp” the polls.

Up for grabs is control of the Senate, where Republicans have a 50-48 edge. Democrats would need to sweep both the elections to gain control of the chamber, with Kamala Harris possessing the tie-breaking vote once she becomes vice president.

At Monday night’s rally, Trump called the runoff election “a biggie.”

Voters on Tuesday – both Republicans and Democrats – offered similar sentiments.

“The only way you can make change is to get out and vote,” said Samara Robertson of Acworth.

“As a Black woman, I felt like I needed to vote,” Robetson said at the North Cobb Senior Center, where she cast her ballot for Ossoff and Warnock.

Patricia Margerson of Kennesaw, who voted for Loeffler and Perdue at the Ben Robertson Community Center, saw long-term consequences in the election’s outcome.

“The wrong vote could change our country and our way of life,” she said.

Margerson also said, “It looks like a close election and they need all our votes.”

None of the four candidates in Tuesday’s election received the necessary majority of the vote in November. That triggered the runoff, an allout political contest between dueling Republicans and Democrats who have effectively run as joint tickets over the past nine weeks.

The race was rocked over the weekend by Trump’s extraordinary demand to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to reverse his November election defeat in Georgia. Democrats framed the recording as a brazen attempt to undermine democracy, while the

GOP campaigns sought to minimize it.

Though the recording was an unexpected bombshell, Trump’s influence has shaped the race from the outset. The two Republicans have aggressively appealed to the president’s die-hard devotees, backing his push for $2,000 stimulus checks and echoing his debunked claims of widespread voting fraud.

And on the eve of the election, both Republicans announced they supported the doomed effort by some Senate Republicans to challenge the Electoral College results in Congress on Wednesday. Loeffler was greeted with cheers – and chants of “fight for Trump” – when she announced the decision at the Dalton rally with the president.

Ossoff and Warnock have framed their campaign around an image of a post-trump America where Democrats can push measures promising to boost funding to fight the pandemic, expand health care access and adopt a sweeping voting rights measure.

They were bombarded by attacks from the two Republican incumbents and their allies, who aimed their appeals at the party’s most conservative factions by describing the Democrats as “radical liberals” and warning that only GOP control of the Senate could “save America” from socialism.

The Republicans have also had to face down tough attacks, including numerous ads accusing the incumbents of profiting from the coronavirus pandemic through stock transactions made on their behalf. Both say that federal investigators have reviewed their stock deals and cleared them of any wrongdoing.

Different dynamics shaped each of the Senate races.

Loeffler, a former financial executive, was picked by Gov. Brian Kemp to fill the seat U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson exited last year for health reasons, and she survived a tough challenge from Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Collins in November’s special election of 21 candidates to gain a spot in the runoff.

Her opponent is Warnock, the pastor of Atlanta’s iconic Ebenezer Baptist Church and a first-time candidate who was recruited by Democratic leaders in Atlanta and Washington to run in the race. He’s cast himself as a moral voice, saying the Senate is in dire need of a pastor.

The other contest features Perdue, a former Fortune 500 chief executive who emerged from a crowded field in 2014 to win his first term.