ATLANTA — In a pair of razor-thin Georgia Senate runoff races where the lead changed multiple times through Tuesday night, Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock was ahead of incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler as the clock struck midnight, while Jon Ossoff and Sen. David Perdue were effectively locked in a tie.
With 97% of the votes counted, Warnock led Loeffler, 50.4% to 49.6%, while Ossoff and Perdue were locked in a virtual tie, with fewer than 2,000 votes between them.
“It’s very close,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Tuesday night, adding that there are still about 200,000 votes left to be counted.
Despite 97% of the state votes counted, it’s still undecided when either race will be called. The Ossoff-Perdue race could drag out until Friday.
Early runoff returns showed a higher-than-expected black turnout. They also revealed that the Republicans underperformed in important GOP strongholds in rural areas and the exurbs on the outer ring of Atlanta. In Cherokee County, for example, Perdue led Ossoff by 39 percentage points, with 96% of the votes counted, a narrower margin than his 41-point win in November. Perdue also underperformed in Hall and Paulding counties.
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.”
Despite his race not yet being called, Warnock delivered what amounted to a victory speech early Wednesday morning.
“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,” he said. “May my story be an inspiration to some young person who is trying to grasp and grab hold to the American dream.”
Ellen Foster, Ossoff’s campaign manager, was also bullish about her candidate’s chances.
“When all the votes are counted, we fully expect that Jon Ossoff will have won this election to represent Georgia in the United States Senate,” she said early Wednesday. “The outstanding vote is squarely in parts of the state where Jon’s performance has been dominant. We look forward to seeing the process through in the coming hours and moving ahead so Jon can start fighting for all Georgians in the U.S. Senate.”
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.
“Just happened to have found another 4000 ballots from Fulton County. Here we go!” he tweeted, suggesting voter fraud.
Just happened to have found another 4000 ballots from Fulton County. Here we go!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2021
He also retweeted Tomi Lahren, the conservative host of Fox Nation. “Democrats scrounging up votes from mystical places again …” she said.
Earlier in the evening, 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-forth 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.
Georgia’s two runoff races, which have shattered fundraising records, are among the most consequential in recent American history because they hold the key to President-elect Joe Biden’s ability to impose his legislative agenda.
Most polls on Tuesday closed at 7 p.m. EST in Georgia, although some were extended due to technical difficulties.
Throughout the day, there were only a few hiccups reported across the state.
In two Chatham County voting precincts, voting hours have been 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.
In the nine weeks since the general election, more than half a billion dollars have been poured into the campaign coffers of Republican incumbents Perdue and Loeffler, as well as their Democratic challengers Ossoff and Warnock.
Political heavyweights have traveled to the Peach State to stump for the candidates, including eleventh-hour visits Monday from 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. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said wait times at polling sites were “almost nonexistent,” averaging about one minute statewide. The purportedly low turnout is 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 their turnout went in the opposite direction, exceeding their in-person Nov. 3 turnout around 5:30 p.m. That’s not 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.
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, had 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.
If Ossoff and Warnock win the runoff races, the U.S. Senate will be split 50-50, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote. If Perdue and Loeffler win, Republicans would hold a slim 52-48 majority.
“This is history unfolding in Georgia right now,” Ossoff told reporters outside an Atlanta polling site.
If Ossoff wins his race, he would become the youngest senator at 33. If Loeffler, who was appointed to her post last year by Gov. Brian Kemp, wins, she would become the first woman senator elected from Georgia. If Warnock wins, he would become the first black senator elected from Georgia.
Perdue, who has been in quarantine and showing up to events via video, went on Fox News to plead his case,saying if Ossoff wins, the American dream dies.
