On the menu today: At this hour, it appears Democrats won both Senate runoffs and with them, control of the U.S. Senate; the increasingly unhinged President Trump insists that Vice President Mike Pence can reject the presidential-election results and have the House of Representatives resolve the election; and why bigger states will have a tougher time getting their coronavirus vaccination rates up.
It Was a Rough Night for Republicans
As of this writing, we know that Democrat Raphael Warnock defeated Republican Kelly Loeffler in one of Georgia’s two Senate runoffs, 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent. And with 98 percent of the expected vote in, Democrat Jon Ossoff leads Republican David Perdue, 50.2 percent to 49.8 percent, a margin of 16,730 votes. The remaining votes are believed to be in heavily Democratic-leaning margins.
At some time today, Ossoff is expected to be declared the winner. The Senate will be split 50–50, and starting January 20, Vice President Kamala Harris will break ties. Chuck Schumer will be Senate majority leader, and Mitch McConnell will become minority leader in the chamber. And the Democratic Party will begin the legislative cycle with the White House and narrow control of the House and Senate. For Republicans, this outcome may not be the absolute worst-case scenario of 2020, but it’s not that far from it.
This is because Republicans couldn’t hold onto either Senate seat in Georgia. This is a state where Republicans had won every Senate election since 2002 — and the winner in the state’s 1998 Senate race was Democrat Zell Miller, who by the end of his term was giving the keynote address at the Republican National Convention. Republicans won every gubernatorial race in Georgia since 1998, despite what Stacey Abrams claims. In Georgia, Republicans won every lieutenant gubernatorial race since 2004, every secretary of state race since 2002, and every state attorney general race since 2006. Heading into the 2020 cycle, Republicans had won the presidential elections in Georgia in eight of the past nine cycles.
In 2014, the last major midterm election before Donald Trump descended the escalator and ran for president, Republicans won the gubernatorial election by more than 200,000 votes, and the lieutenant governor’s race and the down-ticket races by margins close to or exceeding 400,000 votes, while Perdue won the Senate race by more than 197,000 votes. In other words, up until very recently, Georgia was a really, really Republican-leaning state.
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