So Much Rests on Georgia

A get-out-the-vote operation fresh off an exhausting win now faces another monumental uphill battle.

if everything goes as I expect it will, my day on January 5, 2021, will look something like this: wake up, brush my teeth, get dressed, drive a few blocks to the church where they set up the food pantry in the parking lot on Wednesdays, grab a paperback and maybe a folding chair out of the trunk, and get in line to vote. I’ll wait in line for a long time—too

long, if my past experience is any indication. This is by design. My neighborhood is 97 percent Black. When Black people vote in big numbers in Georgia, it’s usually bad news for the people who run things, so they do whatever they can to make sure we don’t.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the fate of the United States—and, in a lot of ways, the world—rests on what happens in voter precincts across Georgia less than a week after we say good riddance to 2020. On that day, Georgians will decide the partisan makeup of the U.S. Senate. If Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock both defeat Republican incumbents in their runoff elections, the Senate will have 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, with Vice-President Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote. This would be good. But if even one of them loses, things will get really ugly, really fast. Republicans will keep control of the Senate, with current majority leader and practiced obstructionist Mitch McConnell in the driver’s seat. The implications for a Biden White House and any progressive change it hopes to accomplish could not be more dire: A Democratic defeat in either of these races is likely the difference between a productive Biden presidency and one so ineffectual that the 2022 midterms—and the 2024 election—are poised to be Republican bloodbaths.

This outcome, the ugly one, is probable. Republican voters typically turn out at higher rates in special elections and runoffs than their counterparts to the left, and Democrats won’t have Trump on the ballot to motivate their base. Even if this weren’t the case, Senator David Perdue came so close to netting over 50 percent of the vote this month that it’s hard to imagine him not pulling off a bigger margin as the only conservative on the ballot (Libertarian Shane Hazel siphoned off 2.3 percent of the vote on Election Day). The Republican vote was similarly split in Senator Kelly Loeffler’s race; the right will be more unified in January. While victories for Perdue and Loeffler are far from inevitable—an ungodly amount of money will be poured into the race on both sides—to hope feels daring, even dangerous.

I don’t know that I’ve earned my pessimism. I’ve lived in Georgia for only three years. But if there is hope, I know as well as any lifer that it’s not the natural state of affairs; it was made and so can be unmade. It is currently being unmade in and around Atlanta. The first election I voted in as a Georgia resident was the gubernatorial race between Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams. A former state representative and voting-rights activist, Abrams capitalized on the idea that there was untapped electoral potential for Democrats in low-propensity voters. She sought them out, got lots of them to go to the polls, and ended up with the tightest governor’s race since 1966. She fell short of her goal, but the blueprint was there. Despite the efforts of vote suppressors at the highest levels of state government, Georgia didn’t look so conservative anymore. The suburbs around Atlanta, built up as refuges for white people who didn’t want to live near Black people or send their kids to school with them, have been watching their walls crumble for decades. The state’s Sixth Congressional District, where more Black, Hispanic, Asian

American, and liberal-leaning white residents have been flooding in, is now held by a Democrat for the first time since Newt Gingrich got elected there in 1979.

So here we are, tentatively under the impression that it’s a new day in Georgia. We won’t know how durable this change is until after January 5, and I’m not hopeful that we’ll like what we learn. History continues to stalk us. People have fought and died for generations to transform the state into a place that didn’t send feckless white supremacists to the legislature, to the governor’s mansion, and to Washington. How much flipping the state mattered will depend on how much worse things get. With the stakes so high, there are no moral victories, no condolences for the outrageous fact that it all comes down to a state still very much contending with the ghosts of Jim Crow. The results in Georgia may have stunned America, but they guarantee nothing. There’s consolation in knowing better is possible. We just have to hope it’s not too late.