ATLANTA — Democratic Senate candidate Raphael Warnock will be Georgia’s first black senator after he defeated appointed Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler in one of his state’s critical runoffs.
Warnock, the senior pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, now brings the Democrats within one seat of Senate control in this Congress.
“We were told that we couldn’t win this election. But tonight, we proved that with hope, hard work, and the people by our side, anything is possible. May my story be an inspiration to some young person who is trying to grasp and grab hold to the American dream,” he said via livestream earlier on Wednesday morning.
The political novice’s narrow victory comes after a campaign marred by personal and professional attacks lobbed by both sides. In particular, Warnock’s career of sermons was pulled apart, the preacher receiving criticism for comments he made about police and the military.
With 97% of the vote counted, Warnock was ahead of Loeffler by over 40,000 votes around 2 a.m. Fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff also inched ahead of Republican Sen. David Perdue in a race that had swung back and forth throughout the night.
Should Ossoff follow Warnock in winning his race, the U.S. Senate will be split 50-50, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote. That could transform President-elect Joe Biden’s ability to impose his legislative agenda.
“It’s very close,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said earlier Tuesday night.
Gabriel Sterling, the elections manager for Georgia, said: “It’s going to be a long night for all the campaigns here.”
“It’s going to be, I refer to it as a nickel-and-dime, scratching and clawing over the next several hours, as these continue to come in,” Sterling said.
“There’s big tranches of votes for Democrats, and there’s lots of little tranches of votes for Republicans, which is kind of what you expect to see. You see large blue sections around the cities, and lots and lots of little red sections in the rest of the state.”
In the nine weeks since the general election, more than half a billion dollars were poured into the campaign coffers of Republican incumbents Perdue and Loeffler, as well as their Democratic challengers Ossoff and Warnock.
Political heavyweights traveled to the Peach State to stump for the candidates, including 11th-hour visits Monday from President-elect Joe Biden, President Trump, and Vice President Mike Pence.
“You’ve got to swarm it tomorrow,” Trump told supporters at a rally Monday night in Dalton, Georgia.
State election officials, though, reported light turnout Tuesday. Raffensperger said wait times at polling sites were “almost nonexistent,” averaging about one minute statewide. The purportedly low turnout was expected to help Democrats in the runoffs, as it did Biden in the general election.
The Washington Examiner went to five polling places in Atlanta Tuesday afternoon and found wide-open parking lots and no lines.
“I voted early,” Tonya Meeks told the Washington Examiner.
Meeks, who moved to Georgia from Alabama in 2012, was handing out bottles of water, snacks, and sanitizer.
“Anything that will make voters feel more at ease,” she said, standing with her son outside of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.
In DeKalb County, which stretches from Stone Mountain to Dunwoody and is among the more demographically diverse places in Georgia, election officials said around 5:30 p.m. their turnout went in the opposite direction, exceeding their in-person Nov. 3 turnout. That wasn’t necessarily good news for Republicans. In the general election, about 83% of voters in DeKalb voted for Biden.
Fulton County also beat in-person turnout Tuesday.
Throughout the day, there were a few hiccups reported across the state.
Around 1:45 a.m. on Wednesday morning, DeKalb County election officers announced they had run into technical issues. “Due to technical issues, the remaining 19,000 ballots must be manually scanned in order to be tabulated and added to the final vote count.”
In two Chatham County voting precincts, voting hours were extended after Savannah Mayor Van Johnson and other members of the Democratic Party of Georgia asked for the extension from a judge due to technical issues and possible misinformation.
One issue took place in Columbia County, where voters in some precincts had to fill out paper emergency ballots because poll worker access cards weren’t working. The issue was resolved by 10 a.m.
Paulding County reported a ballot scanner went down at the Crossroads Library. Voters placed their ballots in an “emergency ballot box” until the scanner was replaced less than an hour later.
President Trump, who has repeatedly claimed he won Georgia’s presidential race despite losing to Joe Biden by more than 11,000 votes, weighed in on Tuesday’s election earlier in the night, floating once again the theory of voter fraud.
“Just happened to have found another 4000 ballots from Fulton County. Here we go!” he tweeted.
He also retweeted Tomi Lahren, the conservative host of Fox Nation. “Democrats scrounging up votes from mystical places again …” she said.
Trump predicted election officials would release a large batch of ballots that would erase the early lead of Perdue and Loeffler.
“Looks like they are setting up a big ‘voter dump’ against the Republican candidates. Waiting to see how many votes they need?” he said.
In reality, the back-and-forths in such tight contests are common, and swings in votes in population-dense counties, such as DeKalb, tend to favor Democratic candidates. Trump made a similar complaint during his own race against Biden. He has said that when he went to bed, he was leading in the polls but when he woke up, Biden had surpassed him.
The head of Americans for Prosperity Action, a conservative political action committee that campaigned for Perdue in the runoffs, told the Wall Street Journal he was worried.
“We’ve got to make up a lot of ground today,” Tim Phillips, of the Virginia-based group long funded by the Koch family, said, adding, “They’ve outperformed us in early voting; there is no question of that. We need a big turnout today.”
A record 3 million Georgians, or about 38.8% of all registered voters in the state, cast their ballots before Tuesday. The number easily exceeded the previous early voting record of 2.1 million ballots cast in the 2008 Senate runoff race between Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin.
Tuesday’s races are playing out because none of the candidates got more than 50% of the vote in the Nov. 3 general election, as required for winning a statewide race in Georgia.
