Election overtime: US Senate control on the ballot in Georgia
WESLEY MACKINNON: The nightmare of election season is not over. Even as the last of infuriatingly slowly counted mail-in ballots are counted and President-elect Biden prepares to take office, a pair of US Senate runoffs in Georgia are set to decide control of the US Senate, and the fate of Biden’s agenda for the next four years.
Democrats fell below expectations on Election Day, netting only one seat, two short of the number needed to get to 50 seats, which would allow Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to break the tie in favor of her party. However, the chamber is still up for grabs because of a provision in Georgia law mandating that any race in which no candidate takes a majority of the vote goes to a runoff between the top two finishers in January. This managed to occur in both of the state’s Senate seats, as Libertarian Shane Hazel snagged 2.3% of the vote in Georgia’s regular election, keeping Republican incumbent David Perdue from the magic 50 percent threshold. The other senate seat, held by appointed Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R), was always headed to a runoff, with upwards of 20 candidates of both parties on one ballot (in Georgia special elections, all candidates appear on the same ballot regardless of party in the first round). The Democratic candidates will be Jon Ossoff, an investigative filmmaker who lost what was then the most expensive house election in history in 2017, and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who preaches from what was once Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s pulpit.
Despite Joe Biden’s victory in a state that hasn’t voted Democratic for President since Bill Clinton won it in 1992, the two Senate seats are perceived as uphill climbs for the Democratic candidates. The most recent Senate runoff, triggered in 2008 when Democrat Jim Martin finished just behind Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss in the first round, culminated in a runoff where Democratic turnout collapsed, and Martin lost by 16 points. In 2018, Democrat John Barrow finished just 16,000 votes behind Republican Brad Raffensperger in the state’s secretary of state contest; in the subsequent runoff, Barrow lost by more than 50,000 votes. The trend is simple: Democrats have a harder time getting their voters to come out for January runoff elections, in which Republicans subsequently perform better than they did in the first round.
Despite this history, there are some causes for Democratic optimism as well. The stakes in this election are far higher than they were in the 2008 runoff, given that control of the US Senate will be at stake, potentially driving up turnout. Democrats are also highly cognizant of the potential to win the state this time, and massive get-out-the-vote operations are already fully activated and knocking on thousands of doors to an extent previously unseen in the state. The candidates themselves may also be a factor: Ossoff and Warnock complement each other well, with the former’s strengths lying among the moderate suburbanites that make up the congressional district he nearly won three years ago, and the latter’s resting in his ability to drive up Black voter turnout. If both of those crucial constituencies come out to vote–– and vote for both Democrats–– the two candidates may have a chance. Finally, there is one additional variable: President Trump’s undermining of the sanctity of the electoral process may suppress conservative leaning voters. Raffensperger himself has speculated that this phenomenon cost Trump a victory in the state, and that was before Trump amped up his rhetoric after his loss on November 3.
It may be an uphill battle for Team Blue, but there is a viable path to victory––and Senate control–– for Democrats. Moreover, the races have taken on an outsized importance not just because of the national implications, but also because of the disastrous state of the two incumbents. Loeffler, after being appointed as a “moderate” choice, disingenuously morphed into a far-right provocateur to avoid being outflanked by Rep. Doug Collins (R) in the primary. To that end, she has embraced QAnon conspiracy theorist and Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R) and aired ads proudly declaring herself more conservative than Attila the Hun, the notorious mass murderer of the fifth century. Perdue, following up his internationally circulated mocking of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s name, issued a joint statement with Loeffler calling on Raffensperger, a Republican, to resign solely because he has discounted the baseless claims of voter fraud being circulated by the White House. Loeffler and Perdue represent the worst of the Republican Party’s impulses, and Georgia will decide not just which party controls the US Senate, but also whether basic dignity will return to American government.
Wes MacKinnon is a sophomore in Georgetown College majoring in government.