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Where things stand
The Rev. Raphael Warnock has won his challenge to Senator Kelly Loeffler in Georgia, becoming the first Black senator-elect in the state’s history — and possibly helping the Democrats seize control of the Senate as Joe Biden enters the presidency.
The fate of the chamber remains up in the air, as no official winner has yet been called in Georgia’s other Senate runoff election between David Perdue and his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff.
But with most voters casting consistent ballots for two candidates of a single party, Ossoff appears to have a good chance of joining Warnock in the winner’s circle once all votes are counted. You can follow the final results as they come in at this page.
Even once a winner is declared in the Perdue-Ossoff race, the story may not be completely finished. If their contest ends up being decided by less than half a percentage point, Georgia law dictates that the trailing candidate will be permitted to request a recount.
But officials said yesterday that they would be prepared to execute a recount swiftly, particularly after going through three separate recounts after the general election, as President Trump and his allies repeatedly challenged the results.
The story of Georgia’s runoffs turned largely on the participation of Black voters, who made up a higher percentage of the electorate than they did in November’s general election. And it leaves open the question of how badly Trump’s efforts to discredit the voting systems in Georgia harmed his own party.
Over 1.2 million votes were cast in person on election day, exceeding officials’ expectations. High day-of turnout had been expected to play out in Republicans’ favor, but enough Democrats cast ballots yesterday to prevent Perdue and Loeffler from pulling ahead. As in the general election, early voters leaned more heavily Democratic.
Perdue ran ahead of Loeffler by tens of thousands of votes, reflecting his slightly higher favorability rating, but in the end both candidates appeared on track to finish well behind the only other Republican on the ballot for statewide office, Georgia’s public service commissioner, Lauren McDonald Jr., known as Bubba, who was re-elected yesterday.
Loeffler had aggressively gone on the attack against Warnock, especially in the last few days of the race, but Perdue spent them in quarantine after being exposed to the coronavirus last week.
Neither incumbent appeared able to escape looming questions about their stock-trading activity — a topic that both Democrats had hammered them on at every turn. Both Perdue and Loeffler dumped large amounts of stock in the early phase of the coronavirus pandemic, before the public became aware of how badly it would damage the economy. The senators both came under investigation by the Justice Department, though charges were ultimately not brought against either of them.
Vice President Mike Pence broke the news to Trump last night that he would not be able to deliver him a second term as president when Congress convenes today, people briefed on the conversation said.
Trump has baselessly claimed that Pence could single-handedly block certification of the Electoral College results once Congress has approved them, but Pence told him yesterday that wasn’t the case.
Loeffler and 12 other senators have said they will join a number of Republicans in the House in challenging the results. But the Senate’s Republican leaders — and, needless to say, the House’s Democratic leadership — have indicated that they will oppose any move to prevent Biden from winning the election.
With results still trickling in from Georgia, get ready for today to be a split screen between the last few thousand votes that will determine the fate of the Senate, and the last death throes of the Trump presidency.
And you might need to add a picture-in-a-picture to that split screen, if right-wing protests on the streets of Washington turn destructive or violent, as some onlookers fear they could.
The political goings-on have probably pulled some attention away from the news in Kenosha, Wis., a flash point of the presidential race this year, where the city’s top prosecutor announced yesterday that he would not bring charges against the white police officer who shot Jacob Blake, a Black man.
The shooting of Blake, who is now paralyzed from the waist down, set off protests and rioting, leading Trump to point to the city as an example of the need for “law and order.” The president later expressed support for Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenage member of an armed group who shot three protesters in Kenosha, killing two of them.
A lawyer for Blake’s family said they were likely to sue. “We will be looking at bringing a civil action in the near future to seek justice for Jacob,” the lawyer, B’Ivory LaMarr, said.
Photo of the day
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Domonique Walker brought her children with her yesterday to a polling place at Henry Baptist Church in McDonough, Ga.
Raphael Warnock’s date with history.
By Astead W. Herndon
GARDEN CITY, Ga. — There have been so few Black Democrats elected to the Senate that when Vice President-elect Kamala Harris campaigned for the Rev. Raphael Warnock in Savannah this week, the pairing spoke volumes, even if unintentionally, about racial representation in statewide office.
In purely partisan terms, a leader of the Democratic Party was seeking to rally voters in an important Senate runoff election, the results of which will determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the chamber. But it was also a rare chance for one Senate barrier breaker to pass the torch to a man she hoped would be another. Harris was the first Black woman and woman of color to serve as a senator from California. Warnock was seeking to become the first Black senator from Georgia.
During his speech at the event with Harris, Warnock described being arrested by police officers at the U.S. Capitol during protests and political action over the years.
“I wasn’t mad at them. They were doing their job and I was doing my job,” Warnock said. “But in a few days I’m going to meet those Capitol Hill police officers again and this time they will not be taking me to central booking. They can help me find my new office.”
Warnock’s ultimate success in the early hours of Wednesday was a fitting culmination to an election cycle in which, hours after Joe Biden was declared the president-elect, he told Black voters in his victory speech, “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.”
It was also a generational breakthrough for Southern Black Democrats.
Warnock, 51, the pastor who took the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, spoke on the campaign trail about his life experiences as a Black man born and raised in the South. He ran for office in a state where people in predominantly Black neighborhoods waited in disproportionately long lines to vote last year, and where one study found that more than 80 percent of the residents hospitalized for the coronavirus in the state were Black — vestiges of systemic racism in the democratic and health care systems.
Political power in the former Jim Crow South, where few Black Americans have been elected to statewide office, is inextricably linked to race. And Warnock’s place in the political universe is distinct from the election of Harris, or Northerners like former President Barack Obama, previously a senator from Illinois, and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.
Together, Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the other Democratic candidate, have the chance to expand Biden’s legislative agenda. But Warnock alone was seeking to overcome a barrier reinforced in the South over and over again, crystallized in a saying that become popular during the civil rights movement: “The South doesn’t care how close a Negro gets, just so he doesn’t get too high.”
