Georgia Runoff Elections to Decide Senate Control
Georgia was already in the national spotlight for flipping blue this year. The last state to be called by the Associated Press, Georgia’s polls locked Joe Biden into the Presidency with a total of 306 electoral votes. It’s the first time the state has elected a Democratic President in decades.
However, the state’s hour upon the stage is far from over: On January 5, 2021, both of Georgia’s U.S. Senators will face runoff elections to hold their seats in Congress. The current Republican Senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, are campaigning against Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock, respectively. Their seats are the only remaining unresolved Senate results.
These runoffs are for more than just Georgia’s Senate seats: control of the Senate itself hangs in the balance. Republicans went into the 2020 General Election with a 53-47 Senate majority but already surrendered one seat of their total to the Democrat opposition.
If Democrats gain two more seats through Georgia, the Senate will be split 50-50, leaving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to cast tiebreaking votes—thus flipping Senate majority control blue.
Loeffler and Warnock’s contest is part of a special election to fill the vacated seat of Georgia’s previous Republican Senator, Johnny Isakson, who retired in late 2019 (Loeffler was appointed to the seat, not elected). Both of the upcoming runoffs were triggered because none of the candidates were able to secure the 50 percent of votes required to achieve victory.
Georgia’s runoff system began in the early 1960s. The U.S. Supreme Court put an end to the state’s “county-unit system” of electoral votes that gave more power to votes in (predominantly Caucasian) rural areas while stifling Black voters’ impacts. It was created when a political candidate lost his race after his opposition earned a five-to-one margin of the Black community’s vote. When the loser, Denmark Groover, returned to an elected position years later, he fought to implement runoffs into state law.
According to Groover, Black voters in Georgia were voting as a group for one candidate; meanwhile, white voters were spreading their votes out over several contenders. The runoff system, which was already active in other formerly Confederate states, would introduce an efficient way to handicap the Black vote.
The runoff system’s history is all the more pertinent now that Georgia is at the center of the 2020 election. If Republicans keep their stronghold in the Senate, the entire Democratic agenda fueling the President-elect will encounter little but roadblocks in Congress. With the courts already tilted sharply against him (Trump has done relatively little in the days since the election apart from continuing to churn out federal judges), and the necessity of passing legislation and presidential appointments through the Senate, Biden’s Presidency would have trouble getting anything done.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell already demonstrated the reach of these powers when he blocked President Barack Obama’s federal judge picks for two years, along with his U.S. Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. McConnell boasted that his success blocking Obama’s Supreme Court nomination was “the most consequential decision I’ve made in my entire public career.”
Four years of such consequences could be detrimental to aspects of Biden’s Presidency. There will be opportunities to negotiate with both chambers of Congress, but a lack of party control in the Senate could critically impede Biden’s efforts to confirm progressive cabinet appointments and pass legislation promised on the campaign trail, like a sweeping new COVID-19 stimulus bill.
Georgia may have turned out record voter numbers in November (particularly impressive with all the newfound Democratic support), but January’s runoff races are unlikely to equal the gravitas of a presidential election—or match the high record-breaking voter turnout of one.
Turnout might prove the most vital component of the runoff races in January. The immense impact of the Senate race is keeping both Democrats and Republicans in full campaign mode for the next two months, both to rally party support and to convince voters to return to the polls once again. The contests have already prompted over $100 million of television ads, along with robocalls and vast social media campaigns, to sway voters before January.
Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott even commissioned an attack ad to warn Georgians not to allow “radicals” to change America, and other Republican leaders are flocking to salvage their Senate supremacy. Both parties are butting heads with Facebook and Google, both of which have extended their policies to temporarily ban political ads on their platforms (an effort to combat political misinformation and disinformation).
Despite not meeting the 50 percent vote threshold, the Democrats were at least within sight of triumph in the General Election: Ossoff trailed behind Perdue by around 90,000 votes; Warnock finished against Loeffler with a lead of over 340,000 votes. The upcoming runoffs’ results are, at this point, steeped purely in speculation.
This historical battle for congressional control set on the stage of Georgia, along with Trump’s unceasing efforts to discredit the election for alleged—but completely unsubstantiated—fraud and corruption (a theory already shut down in Georgia by a hand tally recount), casts a dense fog over the future of the U.S. government. Both Democrats and Republicans are watching Georgia with trepidation, and at least some sense of hope, for what comes next.
