Democrats win one Georgia race and hold a narrow lead in the other

Democrats inched closer to taking control of the Senate on Wednesday, winning one of the two Georgia seats up for grabs in a pair of runoff elections while the second contest remained too close to call even as prominent Democrats began declaring victory.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat and the pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, defeated Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a Republican, to become the first Black senator in Georgia history and the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate in the South.

In the other contest, David Perdue, the Republican whose Senate term ended Sunday, and his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff, were separated by less than half a percentage point, with thousands of votes still to be counted, many of them from Democratic-leaning areas. Ossoff held a narrow lead.

On Wednesday morning, Ossoff declared victory, and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, proclaimed that his party would win the majority.

“It feels like a brand new day,” Schumer said in a statement. “For the first time in six years, Democrats will operate a majority in the United States Senate — and that will be very good for the American people.”

Perdue has not yet conceded.

Gabriel Sterling, a top Georgia elections official, said Wednesday morning that Ossoff would likely eventually win and do so by a margin large enough to avoid a recount, which is 0.5% in Georgia, calling him “senator-to-be, probably.”

Much of President-elect Joe Biden’s ability to enact his agenda hangs in the balance. If Democrats win both Georgia races, the party would hold 50 seats in the Senate and de facto control of the chamber, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaking vote and Sen. Mitch McConnell relegated to minority leader.

Biden, who urged patience as votes were tabulated in November, was more cautious than some Democrats on Wednesday, congratulating Warnock on his victory and saying he was “hopeful that when the count is complete, Jon Ossoff will also be victorious.”

As the Georgia results came in, Congress gathered to formally certify the results of the 2020 election and President Donald Trump rallied thousands of his supporters on the National Mall to reject Biden’s victory. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, called it the most important vote of his decadeslong career and warned of sending democracy into a “death spiral.”

“We simply cannot declare ourselves a national board of elections on steroids,” McConnell said. “The voters, the courts and the states have all spoken. They’ve all spoken. If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever.”

But other congressional allies of Trump objected to the certification of the Electoral College results, and videos showed the president’s supporters clashing with the police and trying to storm the Capitol building, with some ultimately making it inside.

The Capitol was put on lockdown, and Vice President Mike Pence was evacuated. Those inside were urged to stay away from windows.

Even before the Georgia results were official, the Republican recrimination began.

“It turns out telling voters the election is rigged is not a good way to turn out your voters,” said Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, an outspoken critic of Trump.

The twin Georgia races drew record levels of campaign spending — roughly half a billion dollars in two months — and national attention, with Trump and Biden both campaigning in the state Monday.

The remaining uncounted vote in Georgia appeared largely to be in the Democratic-leaning Atlanta area, such as DeKalb County, as well as ballots from voters in the military and overseas. The focus Wednesday morning was on those remaining votes and how they might affect the margins for Ossoff. The Democrats were winning overwhelming shares of votes in the Atlanta region, especially of mail-in and votes that were cast early.

The Perdue campaign issued a statement after 2 a.m. also predicting victory, while calling for “time and transparency.” The statement suggested that the campaign expected to soon fall behind in the balloting as it promised to “mobilize every available resource and exhaust every legal recourse to ensure all legally cast ballots are properly counted.”

The Georgia results showed both Warnock and Ossoff carrying a larger share of the vote in county after county — particularly in majority-Black areas — than Biden did in November, when he became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since 1992. “Spitballing here,” Ron Klain, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, wrote on Twitter, “but it may be that telling voters that you intend to ignore their verdict and overturn their votes from the November election was NOT a great closing argument for @KLoeffler.”

He tagged Loeffler, who on the eve of the election had said she would side with Trump and his baseless claims of voter fraud in objecting to the certification of Biden’s victory.

Loeffler spoke to supporters around midnight, before The Associated Press and other media outlets called the contest, and declined to concede.

Republicans were already seeking explanations for how the party had ceded the White House, the House and likely the Senate during Trump’s tenure.

“Suburbs, my friends, the suburbs,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and former chief of staff to McConnell. “I feel like a one trick pony but here we are again. We went from talking about jobs and the economy to QAnon election conspiracies in 4 short years and — as it turns out — they were listening!”

In Cobb County, a populous suburb outside of Atlanta, Perdue had only 44% of the vote, with most of the votes counted; in his first Senate race in 2014, he had carried that same county with more than 55%.

Perdue and Loeffler had largely sought to nationalize the race and raise the specter of complete Democratic control of Washington, portraying the party as dangerously radical. But that message was deeply complicated for Republicans by Trump’s insistence that he did not actually lose.

In the end, about 95% of voters in both runoff races said that determining control of the Senate was a “major factor” in their vote, according to AP voter surveys, with about 3 in 5 calling it “the single most important factor.”