Voters in Georgia will determine control of the U.S. Senate and the fate of President-elect Joe Biden’s agenda as polls in the state closed amid record-breaking turnout and intense national interest under the specter of President Donald Trump’s push to overturn his Nov. 3 loss.
There were reports of strong in-person turnout in some counties on Tuesday after almost 3.1 million Georgians cast ballots early ahead of the election. Because of the high number of absentee ballots, there is a chance the winners will not be determined for days, or even weeks, as all the mail-in votes and others are counted.
The two Georgia Senate runoffs with Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff trying to replace Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue were nationalized campaigns from the start.
Smaller counties are expected to finish counting Tuesday night and the majority should be done by Wednesday afternoon, depending on how close the margins are, said elections official Gabriel Sterling, citing a rules change that requires them to begin processing mail-in ballots one week before Election Day.
Polls were to close at 7 p.m. New York time, though the state will have some precincts in a handful of counties delay closing, most of them by minutes, Sterling said.
Fighting for party control of the Senate was huge enough. But against the backdrop of Trump’s claims of vote fraud and corruption by Georgia elections officials -- topped by his extraordinary hourlong phone call laying out fraud claims and urging officials to “find” enough votes to overturn the presidential election -- the races also became a test of Trump’s continued hold on the GOP.
The races also will determine Biden’s power to advance his agenda, as Democrats need victories in both seats to leave the Senate with a 50-50 split, enabling Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to cast tie-breaking votes. If either Republican wins, Biden faces a still-GOP-controlled Senate largely unwilling to back many of his plans to develop a federal response to controlling the coronavirus pandemic, deliver more economic stimulus, or raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
Perdue, 71, a first-term Republican Senator and former corporate executive, is seeking re-election against Ossoff, 33, a documentary filmmaker who gained national attention in a 2017 special election for an Atlanta-area House seat.
And Loeffler, 50, the wealthiest member of Congress, is trying to hold on to her seat against a challenge from Warnock, 51, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a position once held by Martin Luther King Jr.
Loeffler and Perdue need a strong showing from in-person voting to overcome Democrats’ expected advantage in mail-in and early balloting ahead of the election. In an unusual joint statement issued about 3/12 hours before the polls closed, the two candidates called on Republican voters in Georgia to turn out. After noting that they were “encouraged by reports of high voter turnout across the state,” they pivoted to urge more Republicans to show up at polling places.
“This generational election will be decided by the votes cast in the next few hours -- no one should be sitting on the sidelines,” they wrote in the statement sent at 3:39 p.m. “Go vote!”
Voter turnout in DeKalb County, a Democratic stronghold, on Tuesday exceeded levels seen in the nov. 3 general election, a county spokeswoman said. While turnout numbers weren’t available early Tuesday evening, a strong total in the metro Atlanta county would likely benefit Warnock and Ossoff. The county supported Biden over Trump in November by a margin of 83% to about 15%.
The Senate majority was the most important issue for 60% of voters and important for 34%, while only 6% said it was a minor factor or non-factor, according to AP VoteCast, a phone and online survey of verified Georgia voters conducted over the past eight days.
The survey also showed that 43% of Georgia voters approve of Trump’s handling of the 2020 election results while 55% disapprove. Also, 46% of voters said they are very confident in the accuracy of the 2020 vote, compared with 16% who are somewhat confident, 12% not too confident and 26% not at all confident, according to AP.
Democratic wins would mark the first time Georgia elected a senator from the party in two decades, and if Warnock defeats Loeffler, he would be state’s first African-American U.S. senator.
The races also smashed Senate-race spending records, together nearing a half-billion dollars spent since the Nov. 3 general election, on top of the $205 million spent before that, according to Rick Dent, a political consultant who tracks campaign spending.
“I don’t remember a time when control of Congress hinged on two elections in one state,” said Kerwin Swint, a political scientist at Kennesaw State University, of the high stakes.
Perdue and Loeffler, and Ossoff and Warnock, essentially ran as party tickets in their unprecedented all-or-nothing runoff, with good reason. History suggested they would be joined at the hip in the eyes of voters, anyhow.
There have been just 56 instances where both of a state’s Senate seats were on the ballot in the same election since voters began choosing their senators in 1914, said Eric Ostermeier, a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
The outcomes have split by party only eight times, the last time in South Carolina 54 years ago, Ostermeier said.
In almost every way, Perdue’s and Loeffler’s calculations were to stick tightly to the president, or at least not alienate Trump voters and the party’s base. The duo both called for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to resign after he dismissed Trump’s allegations of voter fraud, and both have backed the effort in the Senate to challenge the election results when Congress certifies the November election on Wednesday.
Both Republican senators describe their foes as “dangerously radical” and warned Ossoff and Warnock would hand over power in Washington to “socialists” like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Ossoff and Warnock depicted their wealthy Republican opponents as out-of-touch multimillionaires. Loeffler’s husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, recently became a billionaire and is the chief executive officer of Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. Loeffler co-owns the Atlanta Dreams WNBA team and some players have campaigned against her.
The Democrats both accused Perdue and Loeffler of using their offices for questionable stock transactions to cash in on the Covid-19 crisis, although investigations found no wrongdoing. And during the battle in Washington over a COVID-19 relief package, both accused the senators of not wanting to help out-of-work Georgians.
Early voting data showed a possible Democratic advantage heading into Tuesday, including a larger percentage of Black voters than there were in the general election. Stacey Abrams, Georgia’s political star and former Democratic gubernatorial candidate, played a leading role in getting voters to the polls. Georgia Republicans tend, however, to vote in person on Election Day.
Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, said some Black voters came to view Loeffler as using a “type of racially charged” language in some of her attacks on Warnock. State Representative Roger Bruce, interviewed last week at one of a several church parking-lot rallies held for Warnock, agreed that Black voters were being motivated by what some consider “big time” racial overtones in the rhetoric on the other side.
That uncertainty over the impact of the Black vote contributed to the drama on Tuesday.
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