Jon Ossoff (D) leads Sen. David Perdue (R) by over 16,000 votes this morning in the runoff race for Georgia’s second U.S. Senate seat. By 9:40 p.m. Eastern time, Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman had already “seen enough” to declare (in his early call) that Raphael Warnock (D) had defeated Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) for the other. Warnock makes history as the first Black senator from Georgia and the first Black Democrat to represent a southern state.
Warnock’s victory by over 50,000 votes puts him ahead by over a point with 98 percent of votes counted statewide. Ossoff’s lead is more tenuous. No winner has been declared. Ossoff’s lead is under a half a percentage point and within the threshold for a recount. Readers will recall that Donald Trump’s multiple Georgia recounts failed to erase the 12,000 statewide vote lead Joe Biden held in November.
Soon eneough (and after now-standard court challenges), a second seat called for Ossoff will mean a 50-50 Senate. President-elect Joe Biden will have legislative opportunities he did not have hours earlier. He will have months to beat back the coronavirus pandemic; alleviate its economic impact on Americans; improve health care; strengthen voting rights; raise the minimum wage; lead criminal justice reforms; roll back the worst of Trump’s economic, environmental and foreign policy damage; and more. It’s exhausting just typing it up.
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell may revert to Minority Leader status, but he will launch an all-out effort to stymie every effort by Biden to chalk up wins. If the filibuster remains in place, he will still have a lot of leverage. And with control of the Senate hanging on tie-breaking votes by Kamala Harris, expect posturing conservative Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to do their deficit-scold best to gum up Biden’s works.
The hero of the hour, of course, is Stacey Abrams. “Revenge can be very cathartic,” she said after her narrow 2018 loss to Brian Kemp in the Georgia governor’s race. Last night she got it, and more:
Ms. Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia state House, has spent a decade building a Democratic political infrastructure in the state, first with her New Georgia Project and now with Fair Fight, the voting rights organization she founded in the wake of her losing campaign for governor in 2018.
Late Tuesday night, Ms. Abrams came close to declaring victory in a tweet that praised the thousands of “organizers, volunteers, canvassers & tireless groups” who helped rebuild the state’s Democratic Party from the rump it was when she became the state House minority leader in 2011.
While Ms. Abrams is widely expected to run for governor again in 2022, she is at the moment one of the most influential American politicians not in elected office. It was her political infrastructure and strategy of increasing turnout among the state’s Black, Latino and Asian voters that laid the groundwork for both President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in November and the Democrats’ performance in the Senate races. Ms. Abrams was not alone in Georgia, of course: Numerous other Black women have led a decades-long organizing effort to transform the state’s electorate.
Abrams had plenty of help from on outgoing president whose pity-party rally Monday night in Dalton, Ga. failed to boost turnout there. In fact, Republican turnout was down over 12% from November (based on unofficial results). Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen believes “we’ve reached peak saturation of the conspiracy machine.” Trump’s conspiracy shtick played poorly in the suburbs. Recriminations have already begun. McConnell will not be spared. Democratic strategist James Carville predicted Republicans will go after each other with meat cleavers.
As the runoffs began, Warnock cautioned in a now-famous TV ad that Loeffler would spew lies and disinformation about him. If Warnock had a similar preemptive ad “in the can,” last night would have been the time to launch it. Because when Republicans win, Real Americans™ have spoken; when Democrats do, the default right-wing explanation is Democratic fraud.