Rev. Raphael Warnock declared victory in his hard-fought Senate runoff election, putting him on the verge of becoming the first Black senator from Georgia and putting Democrats on the precipice of Senate control.
Decision Desk, the Cook Political Report, TV networks, and the Associated Press have called the race for Warnock, who led Republican Sen Kelly. Loeffler by 50.4 percent – 49.6 percent with 98 percent of precincts reporting when he declared victory early Wednesday morning.
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“Georgia, I am honored in the faith that you have shown in me, and I promise you this tonight: I am going to the Senate to work for all Georgians,” Warnock said shortly after 12:30 a.m. EST.
Loeffler refused to concede.
“We have a path to victory and we’re staying on it,” she declared in a brief speech not long after midnight EST.
But the outstanding vote looks to be heavily Democratic, and Warnock’s lead is likely to grow by enough that it may be beyond the 0.5 percent threshold for a recount in Georgia.
Warnock, the head pastor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s old church, is the first Black Democrat to win a Senate race in the South and only the 11th Black senator in U.S. history. His victory puts Democrats one seat shy of Senate control, with Democrat Jon Ossoff looking like the favorite over Republican Sen. David Perdue.
Warnock won by driving massive turnout from young and non-white voters that smashed previous runoff records, and ran up overwhelming margins in and around Atlanta and its inner-ring suburbs — as well as in Georgia’s Black-heavy rural counties. He ran slightly ahead of Ossoff largely because Perdue, a native Georgian who’d won his race, was a bit stronger in Atlanta’s upscale suburbs than Loeffler, who was appointed to her seat just over a year ago.
President Trump did his party no favors. He refused to accept that he lost the state, and the presidency, lobbing increasingly aggressive attacks on some of the state’s top Republican. That created a schism in the party and convinced most of his followers to doubt the election results — and may have convinced some that their runoff votes wouldn’t matter. He repeatedly lashed out against Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who had appointed Loeffler, and slammed GOP Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, baselessly claiming they allowed the election to be stolen from him.
The extent of Trump’s effort to bully Georgia election officials into reversing the state’s results was revealed when audio leaked earlier this week of a phone call where Trump demanded Raffensperger find enough votes for him to flip the state’s results. Even as he campaigned for Loeffler and Perdue on Monday night, Trump spent much of his time lying that he’d won the state while threatening to recruit a primary challenger to Kemp.
Republicans publicly fretted that Trump’s repeated claims that Georgia’s election process couldn’t be trusted might convince some of his voters to stay home. And while turnout on both sides was sky-high for a runoff, Republicans’ turnout dipped just a bit more than Democrats’ from November.
It wasn’t all Trump’s fault, though. Loeffler, the Senate’s wealthiest member, kicked off her political career with a scandal about whether she’d used insider information about the coronavirus to enrich herself with trade deals. She’d been appointed partly because Kemp thought she’d be able to appeal to suburban women and improve Republican’s performance with the state’s fast-growing minority populations, but ran a race-baiting campaign against Warnock that repeatedly took his comments to his church out of context. Democrats believe that both helped spur Black turnout to historic levels and damaged her standing among college-educated white voters in suburban Atlanta.
