Georgia senate runoffs: Warnock wins; Ossoff in lead

In Georgia, Raphael Warnock defeated Kelly Loeffler to win a Georgia Senate seat. He has a lead of over 46,000 votes over Loeffler.

The second race between Jon Ossoff and David Perdue was too close to call, but results showed Ossoff with a lead of about 17,000 votes. Ossoff himself declared victory, but the race has not been called by major media outlets. The remaining votes to be counted in Georgia is in historically Democratic counties, so it doesn’t look like Perdue can catch up.

What this means is that Georgia is truly a battleground state and has changed. The state used to be safely red, or Republican leaning, but now it’s more along the lines of Florida with equal amounts of Republican and Democratic voters.

President Donald Trump has tried to paint Georgia as a state with hundreds of thousands of fraudulent or fake voters, but his loss in the 2020 election to Joe Biden and the very close races for Senate last night shows that Trump is wrong — Georgia is a tossup.

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We’ll see how long it takes for the vote totals to be counted in the Ossoff race.

If he is the projected winner, then Republicans lose control of the Senate and it’ll be a fully Democratic federal government after January 20 with Biden as president and Democrats in control of the House and Senate. It’s a “sweep.” The same thing happened in 2016, but it was a GOP sweep with Trump winning the presidency and Republicans having control of the House and Senate. Those things do happen in cycles.

For the Senate, with an Ossoff win, it’ll be split evenly 50-50 among Democrats and Republicans. Vice-President elect Kamala Harris has the power to break ties, so she may be very busy the next two years if a certain piece of legislation ends up in a 50-50 deadlock. Harris will have to come in to side with Democrats.

Warnock’s win is historic because he is the first Black senator from Georgia. He will be the 11th Black person to serve in the U.S. Senate. Warnock explained in his victory speeches that he grew up in public housing in Savannah and was the 11th of 12 children. He attended Morehouse College and is the senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, which is where Martin Luther King Jr. preached. Warnock said his victory is a symbol of the American dream.

President-elect Biden tweeted an image of him calling Warnock and Ossoff to congratulate them on their campaigns.

We’ll know more after tonight what the race looks like for Ossoff and Perdue. There may be a recount because of the narrow margin.