Democrats are on the verge of taking control of the Senate while Rev. Raphael Warnock’s victory in one of the two Georgia finals matches and Jon Ossoff’s victory in the other.
“It is with humility that I thank the people of Georgia for electing me to serve in the U.S. Senate,” Ossoff said in a video released Wednesday morning when his margin of victory over Republican David Perdue, whose term of the Senate expired Sunday, has grown to more than 16,000 with 98% of the vote counted.
Final votes are still being counted, and the race has not been officially called in Ossoff’s favor. But Republicans were pessimistic because most of the remaining uncounted votes came from the Atlanta and Savannah areas – areas where Democrats are accumulating significant majorities.
An important question is whether the race with sufficient margin will be decided to prevent a retelling. Under Georgia law, a candidate can apply for a re-application if the margin is less than 0.5%; the gap early Wednesday was 0.4%.
But Democrats appear to have gone further than the coalition that won Georgia’s victory over President-elect Joe Biden in November. Both Warnock and Ossoff led their GOP rivals by more votes than Biden’s lead over President Trump – largely due to strong turnout among black voters.
The Republicans’ prospect of losing the Senate – their last bastion of power – came to the fore when they invaded an important day on Wednesday. Congress is ready to officially confirm Biden’s victory in the presidential election, but only after an attempt by many Trump allies who want to challenge the inevitable conclusion is doomed to fail.
Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York welcomed the results in Georgia, which, if played out as expected, would make him the Senate majority leader. “It feels like a brand new day,” Schumer said. “For the first time in six years, the Democrats will have a majority in the U.S. Senate – and that will be very good for the American people.”
Neither Biden nor Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has commented on Georgia’s results. Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, said Warnock’s rival, GOP senator Kelly Loeffler, hurt herself by declaring on the eve of the election that she would support Trump’s attempt to thwart Biden’s victory. .
“To spit ball here, but it may not be a good closing argument for @KLoeffler to tell voters that you intend to ignore their verdict and block their votes from the election in November,” he said. Klain wrote on Twitter.
Even before Ossoff declared victory, Republicans had already begun blaming Trump for the party’s poor performance, saying his futile, unfounded attempt to overthrow his own loss in November had made the party bitterly divided and its candidates in Georgia, which tried to portray a continuing depiction. GOP Senate Majority as a Firewall Against Democratic Power.
“The president has effectively dispelled the strongest Republican argument by refusing to admit he lost in November,” said Josh Holmes, a GOP strategist close to Kentucky Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Holmes, who now describes the GOP’s vote as’ boiling ‘, said Republicans’ embrace of the Trump-era conspiracy theories had hurt the party, especially among suburban voters.
“Suburbs, my friends, the suburbs,” Holmes said on Twitter. “We talked about the QAnon election conspiracies over 4 short years of work and the economy, and they – as it turns out – listened!”
Bernard L. Fraga, a political scientist at Emory University, tweeted that it is likely that more black voters will vote at the end of the election than in the presidential election, a remarkable reversal of previous such contests, when the black emergence usually decreases. The total return is likely to be just under 90% of what it was in November.
The left-wing Democrats are ready for their party to take over Congress and have increased the pressure on the party to pursue a progressive agenda, despite a 50-50 split in the Senate, with Harris casting a decisive vote as vice president, they will have the most ambitious proposals that are difficult to accept.
“WIN in Georgia must lead to transformative change in America!”, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said on Twitter. “Repeated survival checks, trade unions paying a living wage, guaranteed health care, racial justice, suffrage, immigration reform, climate action, repro-justice, education, and MUCH more.”
The level of government assistance to Americans severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the curves that Trump threw at the Republican candidates in Georgia. The president made an 11-hour pitch to increase checks from $ 600 to individuals approved by Congress to $ 2,000 as part of COVID-19 legal aid legislation.
The GOP-controlled Senate rejected the idea, although Perdue and Loeffler supported the increase. Speaking in Georgia on Monday, Biden seized on the matter by promising to provide $ 2,000 if Democrats gained control of the Senate.
Rick Tyler, a Trump critic who was a political adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, said: “You will have to admit to President Trump that he is completing the trifles of losing the House, the White House and now the Senate. has. Will the Republican Party ever wake up? ”