ATLANTA — In suburban Marietta, Brenda White said she was worried about health care costs and the stability of the economy as she cast her ballot on Tuesday for the two Democratic candidates in Georgia’s Senate runoffs. “My future depends on who wins,” she said as she voted at a government building, adding that she believed she would be better served by the Democrats.
In rural Northwest Georgia, Derrick Wall, 49, said he backed the Republicans because he preferred a divided government in Washington. Mr. Wall, who attended President Trump’s rally the night before in Dalton, said he thought the Republican candidates would fare better at the polls than Mr. Trump did in November because they were viewed as less polarizing.
At schools, churches and even a comedy club in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, Democratic voters turned out across metropolitan Atlanta, an area that has long been a mecca for African-Americans, to support Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock — and to register their opposition to Mr. Trump, for perhaps the last time. In conservative areas dominated by Mr. Trump’s base of working-class white voters, Republicans cast their ballots for Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
The runoff elections here will determine which party controls the Senate and the scope of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s initial policy agenda, and they will measure just how much politics have changed in a Deep South state in transition.
The weather was cold on Tuesday morning when the polls opened at 7 a.m., but warmed up later, and there were few reports of major problems at polling sites. Four hours after the polls closed, the two Republicans held slight leads with 90 percent of the vote counted, but Democrats were hoping that a trove of votes still to be tallied in heavily Democratic DeKalb Country would erase their disadvantage.
Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler have unwaveringly linked themselves to Mr. Trump as he brazenly attempts to overturn his defeat. And both are supporting an effort by Republican lawmakers in Washington on Wednesday to defy the will of the voters and reject certification of Mr. Biden’s victory. Together, the two events loomed as a consequential reckoning over the party’s embrace of Mr. Trump in the final days of his presidency.
Turnout for the Senate races was pivotal for Republicans, who were most likely playing catch-up to Democrats. During an early-voting period that ended last week, more than three million Georgians cast their ballots, and turnout was heavy among African-Americans and in liberal bastions around Atlanta.
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For voters, the choice between the two pairs of candidates was stark: Mr. Perdue, 71, and Ms. Loeffler, 50, are both white millionaires who leaned into more conservative policy positions like gun rights and opposition to abortion. They also made the case to voters that their business success gave them real-world experience in handling economic matters.
Mr. Ossoff, 33, and Mr. Warnock, 51, were a more diverse pair of candidates. Mr. Ossoff, who is Jewish, is the head of a video production company and worked as a congressional aide. Mr. Warnock is the pastor at the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. Mr. Warnock is hoping to become the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate in the South.
Both men promised a more robust response to the coronavirus pandemic and an expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and they embraced the national Democratic Party.
They also railed against Mr. Trump, who ensured that he was regularly on Georgia voters’ minds with his incessant — and groundless — insistence that he was robbed of victory in the state by a “rigged” general election in November.
After his narrow defeat, Mr. Trump spurred a Republican civil war in Georgia, lashing out at two fellow Republicans, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, when they refused to take steps to alter the presidential results. Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler, both ardent defenders of Mr. Trump, chose sides early, accusing Mr. Raffensperger of incompetence and calling on him to resign a few days after the election.
Right up to the eve of the runoff vote, Republicans worried about the potential fallout from Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat, particularly the revelation that he had called Mr. Raffensperger on Saturday and pressured him to “find” the votes that would help the president declare victory. Mr. Trump’s spurious claims of fraud stoked fears among some in his own party that his supporters would take him literally and sit out the election on the grounds that their votes would not amount to much in a compromised system.
Even on Tuesday afternoon, when his party was fervently pushing Election Day turnout, Mr. Trump was calling into question the integrity of Georgia’s election system. He asserted via Twitter that voting machines “are not working in certain Republican strongholds.” Mr. Raffensperger said the problems were minor and were resolved by 10 a.m.
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Still, Mr. Trump’s false claims resonated with some voters. “I’m highly skeptical that our votes will make a difference,” said Terri Orr, 59, as she voted with her husband, Jim, in Buckhead, a wealthy neighborhood of Atlanta. She said she believed the November election was stolen from Mr. Trump, but that she didn’t see a feasible path toward overturning the results at this point.
Mr. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat robbed Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler of what might have been their best argument in what is still a slightly right-leaning state — that they would be a check on the liberal excesses in a government fully controlled by Democrats. Instead, the two Republican senators were left with the tricky task of arguing that Republican control of the Senate was crucial to constraining Mr. Biden, without conceding that Mr. Biden had actually won the presidency, which would punch a hole in Mr. Trump’s false narrative.
If the Republican hopefuls contorted themselves to accommodate Mr. Trump’s die-hard supporters — and risked alienating Biden-backing suburbanites in the process — the two Democrats did little to defy their own party.
In a state where Republicans hold every statewide office, Mr. Warnock and Mr. Ossoff ran as national Democrats rather than emphasizing any differences they had with party orthodoxy, in the fashion of an earlier generation of Georgia Democrats. While resisting some of the ambitions of the far left, like defunding the police, the two candidates expressed support for abortion rights and gun control.
That left them unable to present themselves as a different brand of Democrat. Republicans seized on these issues, as well as the biographies of Mr. Ossoff and particularly Mr. Warnock, as they argued that the two men were too liberal for Georgia.
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Mr. Ossoff was mostly known for having run and lost in an expensive, hotly contested special House election at the outset of the Trump era in 2017. Among Mr. Warnock’s main challenges, by contrast, was the length of his record as a public figure and an activist preacher.
After Mr. Warnock largely escaped criticism in the November election, when Ms. Loeffler was focused on fending off a challenge from her right, he came in for particularly harsh criticism.
Republicans spotlighted Mr. Warnock’s most controversial sermons and portrayed him as a critic of the military and law enforcement, potent attacks in Georgia, even as Mr. Warnock rebutted them. Mr. Warnock sought to defuse the attacks and soften his image by airing tongue-in-cheek commercials featuring him with a puppy.
Advertising by Republicans was full of ominous warnings that the country would slide into a morass of hard-left socialism if the two Democrats were to win. At the rally on Monday, Mr. Trump warned that Democrats would “turn America into Venezuela, with no jobs, no prosperity, no rights, no freedom, no future for you and your family.”
Mr. Ossoff also took some hard shots at Mr. Perdue, calling him a “crook” over controversial stock trades the senator made, while accusing him of trying to profit off the coronavirus pandemic, something Mr. Perdue denies.
Neither party lacked for resources to make its arguments. These were the most expensive Senate contests in U.S. history. Including the campaigning before the runoff, more than $469 million was spent in the Perdue-Ossoff contest, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and more than $362 million was dedicated to the Loeffler-Warnock race.
That the races were competitive at all was a testament to the changing nature of Georgia.
Though dominated by Republicans for much of the past two decades, the state is shifting because of an influx of newcomers, immigrants and American-born voters, chasing warm weather and Sun Belt opportunity.
And the two Senate races were pushed into runoffs by some of the defining forces shaping national politics.
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Mr. Ossoff made his political debut in 2017 as a fresh-faced and virtually unknown candidate vying for an open suburban Atlanta House seat. The special election served as one of the first major referendums on Mr. Trump; Mr. Ossoff, despite his obscurity, was inundated with money from energized liberals around the country.
Locally, he gained the support of women organized around opposition to Mr. Trump, and benefited from the growing racial and ethnic diversity of Atlanta’s northern suburban arc.
Though Mr. Ossoff lost a 2017 race for Congress, he carried his experience and name recognition into the 2020 battle, where, with the help of a libertarian candidate who nabbed 2 percent of the vote, he was able to keep Mr. Perdue just under the 50 percent threshold the Republican needed to avoid a runoff.
In the other race, Ms. Loeffler was appointed to the Senate by Mr. Kemp in December 2019 to fill the seat of Senator Johnny Isakson, who retired because of health concerns. The governor made the choice with his own political future in mind, hoping Ms. Loeffler could restore the party’s standing in the suburbs ahead of 2022, when both Mr. Kemp and Ms. Loeffler could both be on the ballot.
But his choice displeased Mr. Trump, who had wanted Mr. Kemp to tap Doug Collins, then a hard-right congressman from Georgia who had served as one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal defenders during his impeachment.
Mr. Collins jumped into the race anyway, forcing Ms. Loeffler far to the right. The strategy helped Ms. Loeffler win a place in the runoff, but seemed to obviate Mr. Kemp’s original rationale for appointing her as she rebranded herself as a hard-line Trump loyalist.
Rick Rojas, Astead W. Herndon and Sean Keenan contributed reporting.
