Click Senate Special Runoff below to see results from the race between Kelly Loeffler and Raphael Warnock, or General Election Runoff for results from the race between David Perdue and Jon Ossoff.
By the time Georgia’s polls opened on Tuesday, January 5th, for two Senate runoff races, more than three million early voters had already cast their ballots. The data from early voting, which drew thousands of new voters and a high percentage of Black voters, looked favorable to Democrats, but the races are bound to be close in a state that has been reliably red since 1996. The high-stakes runoffs, which pit two conservative Republican incumbents against liberal Democratic challengers running on a wave of anti-Trump sentiment, will decide control of the U.S. Senate.
The candidates on each side are strikingly different. Senator Kelly Loeffler, a wealthy former Wall Street executive, was appointed to her Senate seat in 2019 by Governor Brian Kemp, after the Republican incumbent resigned owing to health problems. Senator David Perdue has been in the Senate since 2015, after a business career that included serving as the C.E.O. of Dollar General and working as a management consultant. The Democratic challengers, Jon Ossoff and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, are both newcomers to politics. Ossoff is a young documentary-film producer who lost a 2017 run for Congress. Warnock is the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Atlanta, the congregation formerly led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Each party’s candidates have, unusually, run as teams, sometimes campaigning together.
The results of the races will determine Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s ability to enact key parts of their political agenda, including coronavirus-pandemic relief, climate-change legislation, criminal-justice reform, and the appointment of federal judges, including Supreme Court Justices. If both Ossoff and Warnock are successful, Democrats will control an equally divided Senate with Vice-President Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote. If either Loeffler or Perdue retains his or her seat, Republicans will keep control of the Senate. As the New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb recently put it, the race will also determine “the degree to which vestiges of Trumpism will remain in place.”
Read More About the Presidential Transition
- Donald Trump has survived impeachment, twenty-six sexual-misconduct accusations, and thousands of lawsuits. His luck may well end now that Joe Biden is the next President.
- With litigation unlikely to change the outcome of the election, Republicans are looking to strategies that might remain even after rebuffs both at the polls and in court.
- With the Trump Presidency ending, we need to talk about how to prevent the moral injuries of the past four years from happening again.
- If 2020 has demonstrated anything, it is the need to rebalance the economy to benefit the working class. There are many ways a Biden Administration can start.
- Trump is being forced to give up his attempt to overturn the election. But his efforts to build an alternative reality around himself will continue.
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