In the early days after Nov. 3, a good many conservatives maintained something like, “At least Republicans will keep the Senate,” or the more cautious, “At least it looks like Republicans will keep the Senate.”
“Republicans have a strong chance of holding the Senate and defanging a Biden presidency from the outset,” wrote the editors of National Review.
Others wrote that voters, in the aggregate, saw virtue in divided government and went for it. I wrote that. The judgment was based on Republican down-ballot performances and on the assumption that surely, surely, Georgia’s incumbent Republican senators would prevail in their runoff elections.
Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler has since lost to Democrat Raphael Warnock, and it looks like Republican David Perdue will lose, too.
Those initial instincts were developed through empirical observation. Republicans generally win statewide offices in Georgia. And to help further justify judgments about the final outcome of the Senate runoffs, it became reflexive to look at the character of the Senate races themselves.
Perdue’s margin against Democrat Jon Ossoff was close in the general election, but Perdue got more votes. There was also a libertarian in the race who got 115,000 votes. It was reasonable to assume that many of those voters would, without a libertarian moving on, vote for Perdue in a runoff. Even if the libertarians didn’t turn out for Perdue, he still had the facial advantage, assuming level or better Republican turnout.
Because of Georgia’s no-primary special election structure, Loeffler was running against 19 other candidates when she placed second in the general election. Warnock got a plurality, advancing him to the runoff, but the assumption was that the 20% of voters who supported Republican Rep. Doug Collins (one of the other 19) would go for Loeffler in a runoff and that she would hold on to her seat.
Then the next two months happened.
Nobody foresaw that frantic, Rudy Guliani-led election fraud press conference. Nobody foresaw that Atlanta lawyer Lin Wood would come out of nowhere to discourage Republican voters from participating in Georgia’s runoff election. In my estimation, the participation of so many congressional Republicans in contesting the election, beyond the court cases and congressional hearings and into Congress’s joint session, was so far-fetched as to be unimaginable.
Now, Trump’s election challenges were entirely foreseeable, though their character and persistence, and their outgrowth, were not.
In the two-month period between the general election and Tuesday’s runoffs in Georgia, and especially in the last week or two, the Republican Party has fractured in ways yet unseen under Trump, and all at the worst possible political moment as a Senate majority hung the balance. That was unforeseen.
The president went to battle with Georgia’s Republican governor and Republican secretary of state. Senate Republican leadership, while deferential to Trump’s election challenge early on, has since recognized Biden’s win and discouraged members from contesting it. They are now on his bad side, too.
The fight over $2,000 relief payments, along with the defense authorization veto override, provided other occasions for division within the caucus just days before the Jan. 5 runoffs. Who could have foreseen that in early November?
The one early sign giving favor to the Democratic candidates was Joe Biden’s victory. If voters could deliver Georgia to him, they could elect two Democratic senators.
But then, Perdue got 88,000 more votes than Ossoff in the general, and he ran slightly ahead of Trump. Loeffler did not, but the vote was split 19 ways in her race. Ultimately, Democrats overcame their disadvantages.
It probably would have been better for Republicans to lose their majority outright back in November. It would have given them time to regroup and to lick their wounds, to reckon with the consequences, and determine their course. Perhaps it would have allowed them to go into the Biden era more unified.
“Though not insurmountable, the runoff is not what Republicans wanted” is another something I wrote in early November. At least that one, I think, has been proven true.
