Democrats on brink of U.S. Senate control, winning one Georgia race and leading in second

Raphael Warnock, a Baptist preacher from the historic church of Martin Luther King Jr., beat Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler to become the first Black senator in the history of the deep South state.

Jon Ossoff, a documentary filmmaker who at 33 would become the Senate’s youngest member, held a narrow lead over incumbent David Perdue in the other race, with a final outcome not expected until later on Wednesday at the earliest.

The results were a repudiation of Donald Trump in a state his Republicans have controlled for decades.

The outgoing president campaigned for both Republicans, while at the same time leveling false accusations that his own loss in the November presidential election was tainted by fraud, and attacking Republican officials in the state. Some Republicans said that discouraged his supporters from voting.

With 98% of votes in and counting mostly stopped for the night, Warnock was ahead of Loeffler by 1.2 percentage points, roughly 54,000 votes, according to Edison Research. Ossoff led Perdue by more than 16,000 votes, or 0.4 percentage points, just shy of the state’s 0.5 percent threshold to avoid a recount.

Winning both contests would give Democrats control of the Senate, creating a 50-50 split and giving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote once she and Biden take office on Jan. 20. The party already has a narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.

If Republicans hold the second seat, they would effectively wield veto power over Biden’s political and judicial appointees as well as many of his legislative initiatives in areas such as economic relief from the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, healthcare and criminal justice.

The campaign’s final days were overshadowed by Trump’s attacks on his own election defeat in the state, including a recording of a phone call in which he hectored Republican Georgia officials to “find” enough votes to make him the winner.

Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and a top election official in the state, told CNN that if Democrats won, the losses would “fall squarely on the shoulders of President Trump and his actions since Nov. 3.”

The election also signaled a shift in the politics of Georgia and the wider deep South. Black voters, the most reliable Democratic supporters in the region, turned out in numbers unprecedented for a run-off vote.

In a video message, Warnock, whose Ebenezer Baptist Church is legendary in Georgia because of its role in the civil rights movement under King, recalled his humble upbringing as one of 12 children of a woman who worked in cotton fields.

“Because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator,” he said.

During the campaign, Republicans had painted Ossoff and Warnock as radicals who would pursue a hard-left agenda. But that message failed to resonate with many white suburbanites who have increasingly abandoned the Republican party under Trump.

Trump’s flailing efforts to overturn his own defeat move to Congress later on Wednesday, when Vice President Mike Pence is due to preside over the counting of electoral votes to certify Biden’s victory.

Trump has called on Pence to throw out the results in states he narrowly lost, although Pence has no authority to do so. Some Republican lawmakers have said they will try to reject some state tallies, a move that stands no chance of success but which could force debate and drag out the certification process.

Trump’s supporters plan to rally in the streets of Washington, with the city bracing for potential violence. Police banned the leader of a far-right group from the city and made several arrests as protests ramped up on Tuesday. Trump is due to address the crowd at 11 a.m. (1600 GMT)

Both Republican senators, following the lead of Trump who has never conceded his own loss, predicted they would ultimately win and insisted they would fight on: “We have a path to victory and we’re staying on it,” Loeffler told supporters in Atlanta.

REUTERS