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Why the Runoff for Georgia Senate Matters
Can the Peach State wrestle Senate control from the GOP?
In the wee hours of the morning on November 6, three days after the election, something miraculous happened in Georgia. Joe Biden overtook Trump’s lead for the first time. The counties that helped deliver the votes during those final nail-biting hours included Clayton, Fulton, and Gwinnett counties — strongholds for minority voters. Military, provisional, and the final ballots to trickle in widened Biden’s lead over Trump to 14,000. For Georgia, though, this election was only Round One. Round Two, the U.S. Senate runoff race on January 5, will have far greater nationwide consequences than the state’s 16 electoral votes did.
First, some perspective — for the first time since 1992, in an election with historic voter turnout, a Democratic presidential candidate has beaten a Republican candidate in the Peach State. A look at the latest electoral college map underscores this stunning victory. A wide patch of red begins in Florida, and stretches north, almost uninterrupted to West Virginia and Ohio, and then winds itself west, and north again through the Great Plains to Montana and Idaho. The lone light blue state bobbing in a sea of southern red is Georgia. The win is all the more sweet given Democrats’ crushing defeat in the 2018 midterms, when then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who oversaw elections, also ran as the Republican candidate for governor. Amid a stunning degree of voter suppression, Stacey Abrams narrowly lost.
With two U.S. Senate seats up for grabs, all eyes are on Georgia. If Democrats Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock win, half of the 100-seat Senate will be held by Democrats, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting tie-breaking votes. With this makeup, and a House of Representatives still in Democratic control, President-elect Joe Biden can quickly sign a plethora of bills into laws, including a stimulus bill, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, the Dream Act to grant dreamers a path to citizenship, the expansion of the Affordable Care Act, and legislation to curb climate change.
McConnell has stonewalled some 400 bills during his tenure, including those with bipartisan support.
