Too close to call
Votes still being counted in Georgia runoff races that determine U.S. Senate control
Control of the U.S. Senate hung in the balance Tuesday night as Georgia election officials counted the results of two closely contested runoff races that will determine whether Democrats can enact a sweeping legislative agenda during the first years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
After swapping leads over the course of the night, Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff benefited from late counts in Democratic areas of the state, which gave Warnock a narrow lead over Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler with nearly all precincts reporting. Ossoff was essentially tied with David Perdue, a Republican, whose Senate term lapsed Sunday.
A win by either Democrat would represent a historic upset in a longtime Republican bastion, signaling a clear shift in the political makeup of the state that Biden won nine weeks ago. Warnock would be the first African American Democratic senator from a former Confederate state, and Ossoff, 33, would be the youngest newly elected Democratic senator since Biden in 1973.
At stake was the governing coalition Biden will enjoy in his first years in office. If both Democrats win, they would flip control of the Senate, with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, opening the door for potential passage of legislation Democrats campaigned on over the past two years, including an expansion of federal health care subsidies, a tax
increase on the wealthy and a comprehensive immigration overhaul.
President Donald Trump had supported both Republicans in the race, most recently on Monday, calling Loe±er and Perdue close allies who were essential to holding back Democratic priorities.
But his efforts were complicated by his simultaneous decision to attack Republican officials in the state, his proposal to increase stimulus payments to $2,000, which was opposed by GOP Senate leadership and embraced by Democrats, and his false allegations that the 2020 elections in the state were rigged.
Loe±er and Perdue closed out the campaign warning that unified Democratic control of the House, Senate and presidency would be catastrophic for the nation. Because of possible exposure to the coronavirus, Perdue had to finish the campaign with remote appearances.
“We have to STOP socialism. We have to PROTECT the American Dream,” Loe±er tweeted after polling places opened. “We have to SAVE our country!”
Ossoff and Warnock, who reject the “socialist” label, closed the campaign promising dramatic changes in Washington, including a $1,400 increase to the $600 stimulus checks Congress approved last month, a surge in vaccine distribution, new civil rights legislation and an ambitious jobs and infrastructure bill. The Republican Senate had tabled the larger stimulus checks, holding to the lower level despite pressure from Democrats and President Trump.
“This is history unfolding in Georgia right now,” Ossoff said in a Tuesday morning appearance at a polling site in Atlanta. “Georgia voters have never had more power than you have today. That is the reason the whole world is watching us.”
Republicans have a historical advantage in the traditionally lower-turnout runoffs in the state, and the Democratic Senate candidates ran behind both the victorious Biden and the combined votes of their Republican opponents in the first round of voting in November. They were given another chance because multicandidate fields prevented anyone from breaching the 50 percent threshold.
Both parties immediately repurposed their presidential campaign ground operations and flooded resources into the state, embracing the all-or-nothing stakes of the final two contests of the election season. The four candidates and outside groups spent nearly $500 million on television and radio advertising, with the Republicans attacking their opponents as radical liberals with untested biographies and the Democrats labeling the incumbents as representatives of the status quo who profited from private stock trades after receiving official briefings about COVID-19.
To win their race, Democratic strategists said, they needed to repeat the strong November turnout among Black, Asian and Hispanic voters in the state while maintaining the antiTrump margins they had received in college-educated suburban Atlanta communities. Republicans were counting on winning back some of the White, college-educated vote, with Trump off the ballot, while maintaining the high turnout that Trump had attracted in more rural parts of the state.
That effort has been complicated by the president, who offered passionate endorsements for both Republicans in the runoffs, while pursuing his own sometimes contradictory agenda to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere, prompting concerns among Republican strategists that he would dissuade their voters from casting ballots. He also told Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a call Saturday that if Biden’s win in the state was not overturned, Republicans might stay home from the polls this week.
Trump’s focus on the last election was an animating force for Republicans who traveled to campaign events in the closing weeks, with voters frequently repeating disproved conspiracy theories of a rigged November contest. Concerned the misinformation would reduce turnout, Raffensperger’s office staged a news conference Monday to plead with Georgians to disregard Trump’s false arguments and vote in the runoff elections.
In a final Georgia rally Monday night, Trump showed no sign of giving up on his crusade against state Republicans, whom he blamed for not overturning Biden’s win.
“I’m going to be here in a year and a half, and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state,” Trump said in Dalton, where he endorsed Loe±er and Perdue as the “last line of defense” against Democratic control.