Georgia on Our Minds: Understanding the Senate Runoffs

by Jeremy Bernius ‘21

For many Georgians, January 5th, the election date for the ongoing Senate runoffs, offers an appreciated end to heightened national attention and intense campaigning. However, January 5th is better seen as the last day to vote rather than the day of the election. Already, a record-breaking number of Georgians have voted in the runoff and voted early. By the end of early voting on Thursday, December 31st, over 3 million people had cast their votes, surpassing the 2.1 million total during the 2008 Senate runoff. While many of these early votes come from predominantly Democratic areas, hundreds of thousands of ballots that will probably lean Republican are still likely to be cast on January 5th. With polls predicting incredibly close results, the race will be up in the air until the very end.

How did Georgia become the newest political battleground? For one, Joe Biden was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Additionally, Georgia had two Senate seats up for election, and both were pushed to a runoff. Georgia is a state that requires a runoff between the top two candidates if no candidate earns more than 50% of the vote in a general election, and no candidate passed this bar in either Senate race. Additionally, Georgia represents a very rare occurrence where two Senate seats are up for election at the same time. Senators’ six year terms are staggered to prevent multiple seats in a state being up for election at any given time, but some candidates face a special election to fulfill the remaining two years of Republican Senator Johnny Isakson’s term after he retired in 2019 due to health issues. Kelly Loeffler, the incumbent Republican, was appointed to the position by Governor Kemp and is fighting a challenge from Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, an Atlanta pastor running as a Democrat, to finish Isakson’s term. In a normal election, Republican David Perdue is seeking another term as his current one ends, but Democrat Jon Ossoff hopes to unseat the incumbent. 

This double election is not the only reason that Georgia has garnered national attention. Following the 2020 general election, the Senate is composed of 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats (including two Independents that caucus with the Democrats). If both Ossoff and Warnock win their elections, the Senate will be evenly split, empowering Vice President-elect and future President of the Senate Kamala Harris to break any ties. However, if Republicans win even only one of their races, the Republicans will maintain control over the Senate. If Democrats are able to control the Senate, the Biden administration will have a greater chance at delivering campaign promises and having appointments confirmed. If Republicans stay in power, the Biden administration will certainly have a large constraint on its abilities during the first two years of Biden’s presidency. Within the runoffs, this tension has manifested in key issues such as healthcare, criminal justice reform, policies on COVID-19, and stimulus checks. 

With this in mind, it is no surprise that the entire country has turned its attention to Georgia. Shaping up to be the most expensive Senate races in history, over $500 million (some sources calculate the total to be closer to $800 million) have already been spent during the election on billboards, radio commercials, television advertisements, and online campaigns, with more than 90% of online donations coming from out of the state. Because of how critical this election is for the Biden administration, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been campaigning for the Democrats throughout Georgia in hopes to turn out more voters. Similarly, Donald Trump has toured the state in an effort to keep Republican control over the Senate and curb the power of the incoming administration, though some worry he might be more of a detriment because of his baseless attacks on Georgia’s electoral integrity, including a controversial phone call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat.

However, the question still remains: how did a Democratic presidential candidate win a state that seemed like a Republican stronghold, and why are the Senate races too close to call? Much of the credit to this political shift can be attributed to the work of Stacey Abrams. She first gained prominence in the state through her 2018 bid for governor, hoping to be the first black female governor in the nation, falling just 55,000 votes short of her opponent Republican Brian Kemp. The election was notorious for alleged voter suppression as Kemp, then in charge of running the election as Secretary of State while also running as a candidate for governor, purged voter rolls, closed voting precincts, and sent broken equipment to specific counties—all of which disproportionately affected black voters in the state. Ever since her narrow loss, Abrams has focused on fighting to protect and expand voter rights, advocate for election reform, and encourage voter registration through her state-focused New Georgia Project and her national organization Fair Fight. Abrams’s approach to winning elections is to register and turn out new voters who are likely to vote for Democrats—such as young, lower-income, and minority voters—rather than trying to appeal to moderates or swing voters. As such, the New Georgia Project claims to have registered over half a million voters in the state over the past five years, and Fair Fight claims to have registered over 800,000 first time voters in the past two years nationwide.

Many Democrats nationwide are looking to and learning from Abrams’s approach to energize and engage the nation’s changing and diverse population, especially as more rural and blue-collar white voters, traditionally Democratic voters, embrace the Republican Party. While her strategy seems to have paid off in the 2020 presidential election, people throughout the nation, both Democratic and Republican, are anxiously waiting to see if the Democratic momentum will hold in the Senate runoffs. With control of the Senate and the subsequent ability of the Biden administration to govern hanging in the balance, the nation will continue to focus on Georgia for at least a little while longer.