Georgia officials began counting the final votes of the nation’s turbulent 2020 election season.
Election officials cite short lines after record early turnout
ATLANTA — Georgia officials began counting the final votes of the nation’s turbulent 2020 election season Tuesday night as polls closed in two critical races that will determine control of the U.S. Senate and, in turn, the fate of President-elect Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.
The two Senate runoff elections are leftovers from the November general election, when none of the candidates hit the 50% threshold.
Democrats needed to win both races to seize the Senate majority — and, with it, control of the new Congress when Biden takes office in two weeks.
While voting was strong in some spots, state election officials reported light turnout early in the day, including across the deeply conservative region where President Donald Trump held a rally Monday night to encourage GOP voters to turn out in force.
Wait times at polling sites were “almost nonexistent,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
In one contest, Republican Kelly Loeffler, 50, a former businesswoman who was appointed to the Senate less than a year ago by the state’s governor, faced Democrat Raphael Warnock, 51, who serves as the senior pastor of the Atlanta church where Martin Luther King Jr. grew
up and preached.
The other election pitted former business executive David Perdue, 71, a Republican who held his Senate seat until his term expired Sunday, against Democrat Jon Ossoff, a former congressional aide and journalist. At 33, Ossoff would be the Senate’s youngest member.
The importance for the runoffs transformed Georgia, once a solidly Republican state, into one of the nation’s premier battlegrounds during the final days of Trump’s presidency.
Biden and Trump campaigned for their candidates in person on the eve of the election, although some Republicans fear Trump may have confused voters by continuing to make wild claims of voter fraud as he
tries to undermine Biden’s victory.
Trump attacked Raffensperger repeatedly this week and raised the prospect on Twitter that some ballots might not be counted even as votes were being cast Tuesday.
There was no evidence of wrongdoing.
In Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, Kari Callaghan, 37, said she voted “all Democrat” on Tuesday.
“I’ve always been Republican, but I’ve been pretty disgusted by Trump and just the way the Republicans are working and especially the news this weekend about everything happening in Georgia,” she said. “I feel like for the Republican candidates to still stand there with Trump and campaign with Trump feels pretty rotten.
This isn’t the conservative values that I grew up with.”
But Will James, 56, said he voted “straight GOP.”
He said he was concerned by Perdue and Loeffler’s recent support of Trump’s challenges of the presidential election results in Georgia, “but it didn’t really change the reasons I voted.”
“I don’t want either party to have a referendum basically,” he said.
Even before Tuesday, Georgia had shattered its turnout record for a runoff with more than 3 million votes by mail or during in-person advance voting in December. The state’s previous record was 2.1 million in a 2008 Senate runoff.
The early turnout was expected to benefit Democrats, as it helped Biden in November become the
first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since 1992. Republicans were counting on a big turnout Tuesday to make up for the Democrats’ perceived early vote advantage.
“GEORGIA! Get out and VOTE. ...” Trump wrote Tuesday in one of several tweets encouraging his loyalists to vote for the Republican candidates on the ballot.
If Republicans win either seat, Biden would be the first incoming president in more than a century to enter the Oval Office facing a divided Congress. In that case, he would have little shot for swift votes on his most ambitious plans to expand government-backed health care coverage, address racial inequality and combat climate change.
A Republican-controlled Senate also would create a rougher path for Biden’s Cabinet picks and judicial nominees.
This week’s elections mark the formal finale to the turbulent 2020 election season more than two months after the rest of the nation finished voting. The results also will help demonstrate whether the political coalition that fueled Biden’s victory was an anti-Trump anomaly or part of a new landscape.
Biden won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes by about 12,000 votes out of 5 million cast in November.
Democrats counted on driving a huge turnout of African Americans, young voters, college-educated Georgians and women, all groups that helped Biden win the state. Republicans, meanwhile, have been focused on energizing their own base of white men and voters beyond the core of metro Atlanta.
In downtown Atlanta, Henry Dave Chambliss, 67, voted for the Republicans. He said he wanted Republicans to keep Senate control to ensure the Biden administration doesn’t slide “all the way to the left.”
Beverly McDaniel cast her ballot Tuesday at a gymnasium in Atlanta. She voted for both Democrats, saying she believes they would do better dealing with the hardships wrought by the coronavirus.
“Our kids are not fully, fully in school like they’re supposed to be and people don’t have jobs,” said McDaniel, a medical field worker. She said the virus “is taking over where we should have the government taking over instead.”