» Democrats Jon Ossoff, left, and Raphael Warnock win Georgia’s Senate runoffs.
ATLANTA — Democrats captured control of the U.S. Senate on Wednesday with two historic victories in Georgia’s runoff elections, assuring slim majorities in both chambers of Congress for President-elect Joe Biden and delivering an emphatic, final rebuke to President Donald Trump in his last days in office.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock defeated Sen. Kelly Loeffler, becoming the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from the South.
And Jon Ossoff, the 33-year-old head of a video production company who never has held public office, defeated David Perdue, who recently completed his first full term as senator.
The twin victories were overshadowed in Washington when supporters of Trump stormed the Capitol.
The police were forced to evacuate members of Congress as chaos and clashes erupted on the steps and rioters broke through into Capitol itself, with some entering the Senate chambers and offices in the building.
By midafternoon, protesters had gathered at Georgia’s Capitol, prompting the evacuation of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and some of his staff members.
Raffensperger had come under fire from Trump supporters for certifying the results of Georgia’s election, delivering Georgia’s 16 electoral votes to Biden.
The results of the Georgia Senate races will reshape the balance of power in government.
Although the Democrats will have the thinnest of advantages in the House and the Senate, where Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will break any 50-50 tie, they will control the committees as well as the legislation and nominations brought to the floor. That advantage will pave the way for at least some elements of Biden’s agenda.
“For the first time in six years, Democrats will operate amajority in the United States Senate — and that will be very good for the American people,” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who will become the new majority leader, said at a celebratory news conference in the Capitol.
Trump put his diminished political capital on the line with an election-eve appearance in northwest Georgia. And Perdue and Loeffler unwaveringly embraced the president throughout the runoff races even as he refused to acknowledge Biden’s victory and brazenly demanded that Georgia state officials overturn his loss in the state.
In the weeks leading to Tuesday’s elections, GOP officials in Georgia and Washington had worried that Republican voters wouldn’t turn out to support Perdue and Loeffler, persuaded by the president’s claims of fraud that their votes wouldn’t amount to much in a compromised system.
A top state election official, Gabriel Sterling, blamed Trump for the Republicans’ defeat, accusing the president of sparking “a civil war within a GOP that needed to be united to get through a tough fight like this.”
Sterling, a former Republican political operative who worked on President George H.W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 1992, added before Ossoff was declared the winner in his race that the president had spent more time attacking Republican officials in Georgia “than he did Raphael Warnock and, probably, Senator-to-be Ossoff.”
The criticism from Republican quarters extended to Capitol Hill.
“It turns out that telling the voters that the election was rigged is not a great way to turn out your voters,” Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah said.
The political fallout from Trump’s tenure is now clear: His single term in the White House will conclude with Republicans’ having lost the presidency, the House and the Senate on his watch.
With 98 percent of the vote counted late Wednesday afternoon, Warnock led Loeffler by about 62,000 votes, and Ossoff was ahead by about 25,000 votes.
Warnock said Wednesday morning that he was honored to be elected and that he “can’t wait toget to the U.S. Senate to address the concerns of ordinary people.”