U.S. senate and biden’s agenda at stake in tight Georgia run-offs.
Democrats hope for wins to shift power balance
ATLANTA • Democrats and Republicans were neckand- neck in two critical U. S. Senate races on Tuesday as votes were counted in Georgia contests that will decide whether President- elect Joe Biden enjoys control of Congress or faces stiff opposition to his reform plans.
The leads swung back and forth late into the night.
With about 95 per cent of the expected vote in, Republican incumbent David Perdue held a slight edge on Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff, a documentary filmmaker.
Democrat Reverend Raphael Warnock, a pastor at a historic Black church in Atlanta, held a slight lead over Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler.
An Edison exit poll of more than 5,200 voters found half had voted for President Donald Trump in November and half for Biden. The voters were also evenly split on whether Democrats or Republicans should control the Senate.
The survey included both early voters and voters who cast ballots on Tuesday.
Democrats must win both contests in Georgia to take control of the Senate. A double Democratic win would create a 50- 50 split in the Senate and give Vice President- elect Kamala Harris the tiebreaking vote after she and Biden take office on Jan. 20. The party already has a narrow majority in the House of Representatives.
If Republicans hold onto the Senate, they would effectively wield veto power over Biden’s political and judicial appointees as well as many of his legislative initiatives in areas such as economic relief, climate change, health care and criminal justice.
Both Democratic candidates were running slightly ahead of Biden in the first 32 counties where 95 per cent or more of the likely vote had been counted. Most of those counties are small and lean Republican.
Ossoff was doing 0.3 percentage point better in those counties than Biden did. Warnock was doing about 0.5 percentage point better than Biden did.
The outcome may remain in doubt for days if the margins are razor- thin.
Both Biden and Trump campaigned in the state on Monday, underscoring the stakes.
No Democrat has won a U. S. Senate race in Georgia in 20 years, but opinion surveys show both races as exceedingly close. The head- to- head run- off elections, a quirk of state law, became necessary when no candidate in either race exceeded 50 per cent of the vote in November.
Biden’s narrow statewide win in the Nov. 3 election — the first for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992 — has given the party reason for optimism in a state dominated by Republicans for decades.
More than 3 million Georgians voted early by mail or in person, shattering the record for runoff elections even before Election Day arrived. The two races drew nearly half a billion dollars in advertising spending since Nov. 3, a staggering total that fuelled a tsunami of television commercials.
In Smyrna, about 26 kilometres northwest of Atlanta, Terry Deuel said he voted Republican to ensure a check on Democratic power.
“The Democrats are going to raise taxes,” the 58- year- old handyman said. “And Biden wants to give everyone free money — $ 2,000 each or something like that for COVID stimulus? Where are we going to get the money?”
Ann Henderson, 46, cast ballots at the same location for Ossoff and Warnock, saying she wanted to break Washington’s gridlock by delivering the Senate to Democrats.
“It’s the social issues — civil rights, racial equality, voting rights, pandemic response,” she said. “If we take it, maybe we can get something done for a change.”
The campaign’s final days were overshadowed by Trump’s continued efforts to subvert the presidential election results.
On Saturday, Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, on a phone call to “find” enough votes to reverse Biden’s victory, falsely claiming massive fraud.
Trump’s efforts to undo his loss — with some Republicans planning to object to the certification of Biden’s win when Congress meets on Wednesday to formally count the presidential vote — have caused a split in his party and condemnation from critics who accuse him of undermining democracy.
At Monday’s ral ly in Georgia, Trump again declared the November vote “rigged,” an assertion some Republicans worried would dissuade his supporters from voting on Tuesday. His attacks appear to have undermined public confidence in the electoral system. Edison’s exit poll found more than seven in 10 were very or somewhat confident their votes would be counted accurately, down from 85 per cent who said the same in a Nov. 3 exit poll.
Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, told CNN that — in his opinion — Republican losses would fall on Trump.
“When you tell people your vote doesn’t count, it’s been stolen, and people start to believe that, and then you go to the two senators and tell them to ask the secretary of state to resign and trigger a civil war inside the Republican Party … all of that stems from his decision-making,” he said.