Trump hands Georgia to the Democrats

Just after 11 p.m. on Tuesday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer was doing his level best to convince viewers that the fate of the universe hung on the next couple of hours.

The two Republican candidates in Georgia's run-off election for the United States Senate both had substantial leads, with 90 per cent of the votes in, but there was still a big block due from DeKalb County, an Atlanta suburb with a large Black population. The network had switched to a panel of analysts who were trying hard to sound interesting when Blitzer broke in.

“All of a sudden,” he announced, “look at how close it is!”

Democrat Raphael Warnock had taken the lead over Republican Kelly Loeffler, while incumbent Sen. David Perdue's margin over his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff, had shrunk from 115,000 to just 9,000.

“Wow,” observed Blitzer's sidekick, John King. “It was DeKalb County!”

Perhaps it's too much to hope that, hunkered down in the White House licking his wounds, President Donald Trump's eyes popped right out of his head. “Son of a b…! They did it again!” Picturing such a comical scene might be a bit much, but we're talking about a U.S. election here, so it's not altogether beyond possibility.

A great deal rests on the outcome of the races in Georgia, and we've had plenty of evidence since the November presidential election to appreciate how far Republicans are willing to go when they sense that their political power is threatened.

As of dawn both Warnock and Ossoff looked to have triumphed, but poor, embattled Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, still smarting from an hour-long Trump harangue on Saturday, warned Wednesday morning that thousands of ballots remained to be counted, meaning the circus could remain in town until Friday. Plenty of time for conspiracy buffs to rev up their outrage.

Given the attention dedicated to Tuesday's outcome, you'd think Georgia had never elected a Democratic senator before. But the truth is that for more than a century, they did nothing but. From 1873 until 1981, senators from Georgia were an unbroken line of Southern Democrats, the result of an inglorious deal in which Democrats conceded the contentious 1876 presidential race to Republicans, in return for an end to Reconstruction and the withdrawal of troops from the South.

That opened the way for a century of segregation and the repression of Black civil rights. The North may have won the Civil War, but after 1876, it conceded the peace to the Confederates. African-Americans retained the right to vote, but 100 years of segregationist state governments worked ceaselessly to prevent them from using it — and with great success.

Following the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s, white people began shifting their support to the Republicans, who took on the job of keeping Black people from rising too high. That's why Tuesday's result is so historic with a capital H. November's presidential vote was about deposing a delusional president; Tuesday in Georgia was a momentous shift in the long, torturous record of race relations in the U.S.

President-elect Joe Biden has made no bones about the debt he owes Black voters for his victory. That Biden captured Georgia so rankled Trump that he's devoted much of his effort to overturning the vote to that state alone. He's blamed everyone from Raffensperger to Gov. Brian Kemp — both Republicans — to a supposed army of dead voters for a loss he refuses to accept.

Trump threw all his disruptive powers into supporting Loeffler and Perdue, who, in return, pledged themselves to all things Trump. Loeffler bragged of her unblemished record of agreeing with the president and said she was “more conservative than Attila the Hun.” That Trump's coattails failed them may do much to undermine fears of his ability to continue pulling the party's strings.

It may just be an accident, but an engaging one nonetheless, that Loeffler, whose marriage to a man whose company owns the New York Stock Exchange made her the richest person in the Senate, lost to a pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King preached, and where his funeral was held. Rev. Warnock is now the first Black senator ever elected in Georgia.

Much of the credit for mobilizing Georgia's Democrats has been given to Stacey Abrams, a former state politician who came within a hair of defeating Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial race, even though Kemp, as secretary of state at the time, oversaw the very election in which he was running.

Abrams has spent 15 years organizing and registering minority voters and was mentioned as a possible running mate for Biden. It's already taken for granted that she'll challenge Kemp again in 2022, which could make her the first Black and the first woman to hold that job. It's yet another irony of the bizarro world of Trumpian logic that the president's brutal assaults on Kemp could help Abrams defeat him.

It's entirely possible that Trump will also get credit, in a backward sort of way, for making success possible for Abrams, Ossoff and Warnock and for the long, snaking lines of voters who withstood ongoing efforts to dissuade them from casting a ballot. African-Americans have been getting shot, clubbed and hung from trees for a long time, but something about the record of police shootings over the past four years — and the conspicuous lack of concern it generated from the Trump White House — triggered a new and more determined response.

That response, if the results hold, would give Democrats control of the Senate and hand Biden both houses of Congress. Panicked Republicans are already warning of a socialist takeover and a president beholden to extremist elements of his party's left wing. Trump's greatest fans herald his powers as a disrupter. As Wednesday's appalling assault on the U.S. Capitol shows, the trouble with disruption is you don't know where it will end.