Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan’s reelection Tuesday has shifted the future of the Senate majority 4,500 miles southeast, to Georgia, where a rare double runoff contest for two open Senate seats will determine which party controls the gavel in January.
Democrats remain in the minority with 48 seats unless they can win these two seats. Voters will pick winners in these Senate races in a Jan. 5 runoff.
Sullivan’s reelection has secured the GOP 50 seats when the Senate convenes for the 117th Congress in January, but that won’t be good enough if presumptive President-elect Joe Biden takes office later that month. Kamala Harris would cast the tie-breaking vote as vice president and president of the Senate. That’s why Republicans will focus heavily on holding the Georgia Senate seats.
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat who hopes to be running the Senate next year, is hardly giving up.
“When it comes to the Senate,” Schumer said Tuesday, “It’s not over.”
Georgia’s election history suggests the two Republican candidates have the advantage, partly because voter turnout is typically much smaller in runoff elections, and in Georgia, those contests tend to favor Republicans.
“The Democrats do not have a good history of winning these runoffs,” John Couvillon, head of polling firm JMC Enterprises, told the Washington Examiner.
Election Day results gave incumbent Sen. David Perdue a slight advantage, with 49.7% of the vote compared to Democrat John Ossoff’s 48%.
A second Senate race to fill a vacated seat left the incumbent, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, a Republican, trailing Democrat Raphael Warnock on a ballot that included 20 candidates.
Warnock garnered 32.9% of the vote to Loeffler’s 25.9%, but the picture is less rosy for Warnock than it appears.
The GOP vote was mostly split between Loeffler and Republican Rep. Doug Collins, who won 19.9% of the vote, and several other GOP candidates.
It’s far more likely those voters, if they turn out in January, will back Loeffler, not Warnock.
Several lower-ballot Democrats won roughly 16% of the vote combined.
Warnock has centered his campaign on healthcare and has attacked Loeffler for supporting the elimination of Obamacare, which he said would hurt Georgia, particularly in rural areas.
Loeffler’s campaign has deployed a new ad attacking Warnock as a “Marxist and a socialist,” who labeled the police “gangsters and thugs.”
The race will be affected by national parties and outside political groups pouring millions of dollars into Georgia over the next two months. The effort is likely to increase turnout beyond normal runoff numbers, and that could benefit Democrats as the electorate in some densely populated areas of Georgia have shifted away from the GOP. But it could also ramp up voter turnout in rural areas that typically vote Republican.
Democrats believe a win is within striking distance.
Schumer pointed to two 2018 runoff races in Georgia, one of them for secretary of state, in which Democrats lost but came within 4 points of winning.
Schumer said, in those runoff races, “not much Democratic money or effort” was deployed, but that will not be the case this time around.
“There’s this conventional wisdom that Democrats don’t win runoffs in Georgia,” Schumer said. “We are working very hard to win Georgia, and we believe that we have a very good chance of winning.”
Senate Republicans believe the trend in congressional races leans toward the GOP.
The House, rather than shedding GOP seats, will end up with a much smaller Democratic majority after Republicans flipped nine seats and are ahead in several outstanding races.
The Senate GOP over-performed polls that predicted Democrats sweeping into the majority on Nov. 3.
“There was not a blue wave,” Senate Majority Whip John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said. “There wasn’t even a blue ripple.”
Thune credited the GOP agenda and the far-Left agenda of some prominent Democrats who promoted defunding the police and the Green New Deal, which calls for eliminating all fossil fuels, among other drastic reforms.
“I’m quite confident that after Georgia, we are going to be in the majority here in the United States Senate,” Thune said.
Georgia Democrats are fighting the GOP effort to label them leftist, which could be politically fatal in a state where most of the electorate leans Republican.
In an interview on MSNBC, Warnock rejected Loeffler’s latest campaign ad that claims he adheres to the far-Left agenda.
His focus is on healthcare, Warnock said, and Loeffler’s support of Republicans’ efforts to eliminate Obamacare.
“The truth is, I’m not interested in defunding the police,” Warnock said. “I’m interested in the concerns of ordinary people. And I think she’d rather talk about all of these things because I imagine it must be difficult to explain why you want to get rid of healthcare in the middle of a pandemic.”
Jessica Taylor, an editor at the non-partisan Cook Political Report, said party efforts to get voters to the polls could decide the winner.
“The question is: ‘Who can get out their base and their voters the most when there isn’t a presidential race driving the turnout?'” Taylor told the Washington Examiner.
Georgia is set to undergo a full, by-hand recount of its presidential results, which show President Trump trailing Biden.
