The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports the results of Tuesday’s runoff election for two U.S. Senate seats, UPDATE: Warnock scores historic win; Ossoff leads Perdue:
Democrat Raphael Warnock defeated Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler to become the first Black senator in Georgia history, capturing one of two Georgia runoffs that will decide control of the U.S. Senate and shape Joe Biden’s presidency.
In the other contest, Democrat Jon Ossoff held a narrow but widening lead over U.S. Sen. David Perdue. If Ossoff prevails, Democrats will hold control of Congress when Biden takes office on Jan. 20.
National outlets projected Warnock’s victory early Wednesday, hours after he surpassed Loeffler in the vote total. Loeffler told supporters that victory was still possible, though most of the remaining uncounted ballots originate from Democratic-leaning counties.
Warnock, the pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, is the first Georgia Democrat to win a statewide contest since 2006, and his stunning victory was fueled by epic turnout from African American voters and strong support across metro Atlanta’s suburbs.
Warnock followed [Biden’s route] by tapping into voter frustration over Republican policies with a promise to enact sweeping new voting rights legislation, expand affordable health care and boost public health funding to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
In his victory speech early Wednesday, Warnock spoke of his unlikely path to the Senate and noted that his mother used to “pick somebody else’s cotton” during her childhood in rural Waycross.
“We were told that we couldn’t win this election. But tonight we proved that with hope, hard work and the people by our side, anything is possible,” Warnock said. “May my story be an inspiration to some young person who is trying to grasp and grab hold to the American dream.”
The Sedition Party refuses to concede, following the malignancy of their “Dear Leader”:
Republicans signaled they would not soon concede the high-stakes races. Perdue’s campaign said it would “mobilize every available resource and exhaust every legal recourse.” And Loeffler told a cheering crowd shortly after midnight that she still had a “path to victory.”
* * *
Loeffler’s defeat is a decisive blow to Gov. Brian Kemp, who picked her to fill the seat over the objections of Trump. She survived a tough challenge from the president’s preferred pick, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, emerging as the leading Republican in a special election of 21 candidates to gain a spot in the runoff.
* * *
Ossoff’s campaign manager, Ellen Foster, expressed confidence that he would win as the last votes were tallied.
“The outstanding vote is squarely in parts of the state where Jon’s performance has been dominant,” she said. “We look forward to seeing the process through in the coming hours and moving ahead so Jon can start fighting for all Georgians in the U.S. Senate.”
* * *
At stake is control of the Senate, where Republicans had a 50-48 edge before the runoffs. Democrats need to sweep both the elections to gain control of the chamber, with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking vote once she becomes vice president.
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[O]n the eve of the election, both Republicans announced they supported the doomed effort by some Senate Republicans to challenge the Electoral College results in Congress on Wednesday. Loeffler was greeted with cheers — and chants of “fight for Trump” — when she announced the decision at the Dalton rally with the president.
Even after defeat, Loeffler plans to return to Washington on Wednesday to contest Biden’s victory in Congress.
“We are going to keep fighting for you,” Loeffler told the crowd.
Why are either of these Republicans allowed to vote today? Perdue’s term ended on January 3, and Loeffler was just declared the loser of this Senate race. Neither one of them should be casting a vote today. If they had any sense of duty to their oath of office and sense of common decency, they would abstain from voting today. Tuesday’s vote is confirmation of Biden’s win in November. Oh, that’s right they are Republicans who believe that only Republicans can legitimately be elected, and they reject the will of voters of color for Democrats as being illegitimate. White supremacy still lives in the old Confederacy.
Ossoff and Warnock framed their campaign around an image of a post-Trump America where Democrats can push measures promising to boost funding to fight the pandemic, expand health care access and adopt a sweeping voting rights measure.
They were bombarded by attacks from the two Republican incumbents and their allies, who aimed their appeals at the party’s most conservative factions by describing the Democrats as “radical liberals” and warning that only GOP control of the Senate could “save America” from socialism.
The Republicans also had to face down tough attacks, including numerous ads accusing the incumbents of profiting from the coronavirus pandemic through stock transactions made on their behalf [true!] Both say that federal investigators have reviewed their stock deals and cleared them of any wrongdoing [it pays to have friends on the inside to look the other way].
[P]erdue, a former Fortune 500 chief executive who emerged from a crowded field in 2014 to win his first term. He was one of the earliest supporters of Trump, and depicted Ossoff as an inexperienced waif unprepared for the rigors of the Senate.
Ossoff relentlessly painted the Republican as a crooked member of the Washington establishment, and the Democrat leaned on his experience running an investigative journalism firm to frame himself as a crusader against corruption.
The GOP incumbents were hobbled by a [sociopath] president who has engaged in unrelenting open warfare with state GOP leaders who defied his calls to overturn the state’s election. At Monday’s rally, he promised to return next year to wage campaigns against both Kemp and Raffensperger, two of his favorite punching bags in Georgia.
Democrats faced their own challenges. The biggest is whether they could draw back to the polls the coalition of African American voters and Atlanta suburbanites who helped fuel Biden’s slim victory in Georgia, this time without a presidential contest on the ballot. They succeeded!
And all four candidates had to overcome exhaustion from voters bombarded by an onslaught of ads, teams of canvassers, text messages, digital messaging and other breathless appeals to vote. Celebrities cajoled them to vote, and big-name politicos have fanned out across the state to hold rallies.
More than $830 million has been spent on the races, an astonishing total that will only rise as the final spending comes into clearer view. And more than 4 million Georgians cast their ballots, surpassing the number of votes cast in Georgia during the 2016 race for the White House.
James Carville colorfully commented on MSNBC that “People used to say that Mike Tyson would punch you in the mouth so hard that you would taste differently afterwards.” If Democrats win these Senate seats, “everything will taste different after Tuesday.”
The “Grim Reaper of the Senate” graveyard, Mitch McConnell, can start digging his own grave today after losing control of the Senate and losing control of his GOP Caucus to the Sedition Caucus of Trump traitors.
This loss should chasten some of these Trump traitors today, but it won’t. They are all trying to lay claim to Trump’s crazy base in pursuit of their own political ambitions. There is not an honorable politician among them.
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Once again LBJ’s comment rings true: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
And these seditioninst are the lowest form of white people. To quote Frank Zappa “Hey you know something people
I’m not black. But there’s a whole lots a times I wish I could say I’m not white”
The demographics are clear. In almost any jurisdiction, the likely Trump voter is; older, whiter, less educated, poorer, in a non metro area. The incredible thing has been Trump has never cared one iota about them. They are just rubes to be taken, and they don’t realize it. However, when McConnell is in the minority, one thing is guaranteed, he will be whining to high heaven. Every time he whines, his list of statements he said during his dismissive majority should be constantly read back to him verbatim.
One could make the comparison of the Georgia Senate runoff results to the Battle of Gettysburg, Pickett’s Charge which is considered the high point of the Confederacy in particular. We’ve just witnessed the modern day repulsion of the charge at the Bloody Angle where Confederate forces under General Lewis Armistead actually breached the Union line only to be beaten back with horrific losses.
Like the rest of the Civil War there is no guarantee that the Union (us) will ultimately prevail and if ultimate victory is achieved there will be lost battles along the way. So my unsolicited advice to the Democratic Party is to keep moving toward Progressivism, fight each battle as if it were life and death (leave no race unchallenged) and unabashedly show the country the benefits of our policies.
On the other hand, I don’t get cable or satellite TV so what do I know?
The political party that embraces America’s diversity and can get out the vote will be the one that prevails. And while Democrats savor the victory in Georgia they should think about how it was won and who voted for them.
Those 74 million Trump voters will loom over us for awhile. So another question is, how do we create better people? We need to “move toward Progressivism”, to be sure. Progressive policies are long, long overdue in this country. But it’s a hard thing to accomplish when almost half of the electorate was ready to sign up for Fascism.
What if Trump hadn’t botched the federal government’s pandemic response? What if he had just simply gotten out of the way and allowed better people to develop and carry out a strategy that succeeded? He probably would have been re-elected. Perhaps that was impossible, given his priorities, the “beautiful” economy and so forth, but it’s not that far fetched.
Even so, today is truly a day for celebration. What GA accomplished is phenomenal.
Liza said “The political party that embraces America’s diversity and can get out the vote will be the one that prevails. And while Democrats savor the victory in Georgia they should think about how it was won and who voted for them.”
Yup x 1000.
“This loss should chasten some of these Trump traitors today, but it won’t….There is not an honorable politician among them.”
I’ve thought about this, how a politician could go this low. But it all starts with the GOP leaders and who they want in elected office. The best fit is someone who is truly despicable, lacking a conscience, devoid of humanity and not very smart. These Trump politicians think that this is how they advance their careers, that their loyalty will be rewarded either by the next right wing administration or the voters.
And it’s hard to say how long Trumpism will be around. It won’t vanish overnight, but at least people are learning that when we all vote we can make a difference.
The margins are slim and there is much work to do, but the American Experiment lives on.
Until we fix the electoral college, Citizen’s Untied, the media, and gerrymandering, the wanna’ be Donald’s have no reason to change.
The problem the wanna’ be Donald’s have is they don’t have a hit reality TV game show propping up their failing businesses, buildings with their name on them, a creepy mail order bride, and a family of grifters to back them up.
They lack Donald’s phony mystique. The cult will live on but it’s a personality cult, it’s going to change, probably for the worse. Donald’s remaining businesses will probably start failing, he’ll face charges, that may take some steam out of the MAGAs.
There’s a long laundry list of things that need fixing, but today I’m a pretty happy guy, Proud to Be American Again (may sell some PBAA hats), and looking forward to voting for Harris/Abrams in 2024.
And man am I ecstatic for the DACA folks and the rest, because Stephen Miller will be going back to his cubicle in hell.
I agree. Today is most definitely a moment to celebrate the victory in GA, Mitch McConnell’s demotion, and the fact that a woman of Black/Indian descent will cast the deciding votes in the Senate for at least two years.
I’m quite pleased.
And I actually do have some hope that Trumpism will fail. Trump can’t lead a movement because he has no interest in promoting anyone but himself, and that’s not what movements are about. Hopefully, the sycophants who are right now objecting to AZ’s electoral votes will soon learn that the well is dry.
I don’t think Trump expected to be president, but when he won the electoral vote and did become the president he soon became addicted to the absolute power of the office. And he never once used that power to promote anything that was not either self serving or intended to erase Obama’s legacy.
I hope that Trump is Racist White America’s last dying gasp, I really do.