A week ago, few election prognosticators had Georgia on their minds.
Collective Wisdom directed our attention chiefly toward the 2020 election’s big players: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania especially, as well as Florida and Arizona. Those five states alone proved deserving of the attention they got. Trump won Florida handily, giving him early momentum, but Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona (tentatively) have since been called for Biden. All three went for Trump in 2016, as did Pennsylvania, and Biden has the edge there now.
One state that was not commanding as much attention going into the election was Georgia. It sure is now.
On Friday, Biden inched past Trump in Georgia, a state that the president won in 2016 by more than 200,000 votes. Georgia’s secretary of state told reporters on Friday that a recount would be in order, a surprising development considering how well the GOP typically performs there.
In 2012, Mitt Romney bested President Barack Obama in Georgia by more than 300,000 votes. Obama’s 2008 campaign was historic, and that helped drive him to victory in more reliably red states such as Indiana and North Carolina, not in Georgia. John McCain beat Obama there by 204,792 votes. Bill Clinton, in 1992, was the last Democrat to win Georgia. He lost the state in 1996.
Trump could certainly still win Georgia. As of Friday morning, there were a few thousand outstanding ballots from four counties. There were also 8,899 outstanding ballots from military and diplomatic personnel stationed abroad, though it is unclear how many of them will arrive by the Friday deadline in order to be counted.
Aside from a neck-and-neck presidential race, the fate of a Republican Senate majority remains to be seen because of what happened in Georgia’s unique Senate races. Incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler were both up for reelection. Neither was able to win outright, and both now face runoffs in January.
If Republicans win the yet-to-be-called Senate races in North Carolina and Alaska, and if both Loeffler and Perdue win their runoffs, the GOP will have a 52-vote majority. If Thom Tillis loses in North Carolina, the margin of error is even smaller. Loeffler and Perdue have work to do.
The presidential victor in Georgia will be known sooner than the final Senate makeup. As of this writing, Biden leads Trump by less than 2,000 votes. If the former vice president pulls out a victory in Georgia, it will be, as he has said, “a big (bleeping) deal.”
