Georgia - Election Night Coverage
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ,
By: Logan Phillips
Date: 1/5-1/6
Last Update: 1:48 A.M.
Jon Ossoff has just taken the lead against David Perdue. Barring a shocking turn of events, Democrats have secured a majority in the U.S. Senate. Georgia will send two Democrats to the U.S. Senate in a stunning rebuke to the Donald Trump era of American politics.
Update: 12:53 P.M.
Often invoking Martin Luther King, who grew up only a few miles away from his current home, Reverend Raphael Warnock declared victory - and his 0.8% lead is almost certain to continue to grow.
“The other day,” he said, “Because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator. So I come before you tonight as a man who knows that the improbable journey that led me to this place in the historic moment in America could only happen here.”
Here’s his acceptance speech in full.
Update - 12:10 P.M.
Perdue’s margin is down to less than 2,000 votes. The uncounted vote is still from areas that Democratic candidates dominate. It’s a question of when, not if, Jon Ossoff takes the lead over David Perdue. Expect that lead to endure.
Update - 11:29 P.M.
Chatham County, home of Savannah, Georgia, just reported a large share of votes. Perdue’s lead is now down to about 9,000 votes. The picture looks increasingly strong for Ossoff. 4% of the vote remains.
Update - 11:25 P.M.
Raphael Warnock has erased Kelly Loeffler lead, and now has a lead that is almost certain to grow. I’m confident that barring some remarkable reporting error up to this point, Warnock will win his race.
Jon Ossoff has narrowed Perdue’s lead to 20k votes. The overwhelming majority of the vote will be in Democrat’s favor. I expect it will be enough for Ossoff - but it’s not over just yet.
Update - 11:00 P.M.
Republicans have a lead - so you might be confused that I’m so bullish on Warnock’s chances. The remaining vote is overwhelmingly in Democratic heavy areas, many of which Democrats will win with 80+% of the vote.
Both Ossoff and Perdue have underperformed Donald Trump in the Atlanta suburbs. It increasingly looks like their embracement of his frankly anti-democratic stance has cost them votes among suburban voters, and didn’t do enough to juice up rural voters to make up for it.
The ramifications of this race are massive as they stand, but they go beyond just a Senate Majority. The majority of Republican Senators have pushed back sharply on President Trump’s recent efforts to overturn the will of the American voters. A sharp divide has emerged between the 13 Senators who plan to vote to affirm the electoral college results and the rest of the caucus.
The election results will be painted as a flashing warning sign to Republicans of the dangers of trying to throw out the votes of the American people. It will be a boon to the argument of the pro-democracy majority in the Republican Senate caucus.
10:30 P.M.
There have been 1,974 members of the United States Senate, but only ten of them have been black. Tonight, it’s becoming increasingly likely that number could swell to eleven. This would be a first for Georgia, and it would be a remarkable transformation for the Peach State, and a remarkable moment in American history. Warnock preaches at the very same church once served by none other than Martin Luther King. Like many of his predecessors at the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Warnock has been lifelong and strident supporter of civil rights.
It would be yet another step for the Senate, which is beginning to look more like the American people it represents than ever before. Warnock may be just the 11th black Senator in history, but he would be the sixth Senator to serve since 2008, joining the ranks of individuals like Barack Obama, Tim Scott, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris.
The pathway to victory for Kelly Loeffler continues to narrow. When she was nominated by Brian Kemp, Republicans hoped she could thrive in the suburbs. However, she has at least so far been unable to do so. She was previously viewed as a Romney-style Republican, but she fully embraced the President, policies, and style to hold off a fierce challenge from Republican Trump ally Doug Collins. The strategy punched her ticket to the runoff, but it has likely caused her to badly underperform in the suburbs to Raphael Warnock.
Last Update - 9:55 P.M.
One of the biggest sources of votes outstanding is DeKalb county, where more Georgians voted today than on election day in November. This will likely break to Democrats by well over a hundred thousand votes. Perdue is up by 65k now, and Loeffler is up 40k.
Update - 9:50 P.M.
Big news - David Wasserman from the Cook Political Report has seen enough, and is calling the race for Raphael Warnock, but has made no such call for Ossoff v. Perdue. This is a big deal because Wasserman has an excellent track record and one of the best minds in politics.
I’m not ready to follow suit just yet, but it’s increasingly clear that the vote total so far has been highly encouraging for the Democratic party. They are the clear favorites in both races at least to this point.
Update - 9:30 P.M.
I’m beginning to get more confident about Democrats’ chances of a double victory. Warnock and Ossoff barely trail their Republican opponents, and a disportionate amount of the remaining vote is coming from Atlanta and the surrounding suburbs. Those votes will heavily favor the Democratic candidates. I’d put their chances of victory somewhere between 70-80%.
Last Update - 9:25 P.M.
A Democratic victory would in large part be a direct result of a sharp increase in black turnout in the early vote. That's a sharp contrast to historic runoff elections.
This is a remarkable development considering the voter suppression in Georgia directly intended to lower black turnout. Multiple voting rights activists I’ve interviewed said the 2018 voter suppression was worse than anything they’ve seen elsewhere in the nation.
This was only possible thanks to a Supreme Court Decision in Shelby v. Holder that severely weakened the Voting Rights Act. It opened a pandora’s box of new voter suppression arguably unmatched since the Jim Crow Era, but no state rivaled Georgia.
Brian Kemp, now Governor, led the effort as Secretary of State. While current Secretary of State Raffesberger didn’t make the problem worse, he did little to fix the problem. Nonetheless, voting rights activist and Democratic party officials have put an enormous amount of hard work and money into registering black voters and turning them out, and its outpaced the voter suppression for the third straight election. It’s a remarkable success story, especially about six months after historic civil rights activist John Lewis passed away, who was beaten ruthlessly marching for his very right to vote on the historic March on Selma.
This cycle, we’ve seen Kelly Loeffler run a remarkably negative campaign that has used Rafael Warnock’s race against him. She’s aired ads featured Reverend Jeremiah Wright, with ads very similar to the ones many urged former Presidential Nominee Republican John McCain to run against Barack Obama. He refused to do so, fearing they would be seen as racist and tear apart America’s social fabric. She has had no such qualms, and run a Dixiecrat style campaign straight out of the 1970s. It would be remarkable if a surge in black voters led to her defeat, and it would send a strong warning to future campaigns that want to emulate her style.
Update - 9:05 P.M.
Republicans are gaining on Democrats and they should take a narrow lead. However, that’s mainly a result of where the vote is coming in. The final votes will likely tilt in favor of Democrats, and come from places like Atlanta and the surrounding suburbs. That’s where the largest number of votes will come in, and it will take a longer time to count.
Election workers anticipate they might be able to finish most of the count today, although the final absentee ballots that came in tonight won’t be fully accounted until tomorrow at the earliest. Additionally, if the margin is incredibly close, we’ll have to wait for the roughly 17,000 ballots from overseas, many of which are from active duty military serving abroad
Update - 8:45 P.M.
You’ll hear a great deal about Donald Trump’s call with Secretary of State Raffesberger, where he pressured him to “find” over ten thousand votes to flip the results of the election in Trump’s favor. Needless to say, this has not gone over well with many Georgians. Perdue and Loeffler have both stood by Donald Trump’s insistence that the election was somehow a grand hoax. They both are smart enough to know such claims are quite inaccurate, but they feel they cannot win without Trump’s enthusiastic support.
This could cost them support with the critical Biden-Perdue split-ticket voters. That was about 2% of the electorate in the first round and they may not react kindly to being told their votes should be essentially thrown out. That doesn't mean they'll all back Ossoff. Many are traditionally Republican and would prefer a check on Biden’s power.
One factor that has seen far less attentionally nationally was the Defense bill, which has been passed successfully for over fifty years to fund the military. This year, it was passed over Trump’s veto over an unrelated social media company issue. Perdue and Loeffler did not vote for the funding to show their support for Trump. My sources on the ground are saying this has upset a great deal many of Georgians - especially the type of swing voters that could help decide this election. Remember, Georgia has a high number of veterans and military bases. If Perdue and Loeffler underperform on election day - which we are only beginning to get in now - this could be a reason why.
However, if the Democrats win both, expect the lion share of the attention and blame to be aimed at Donald Trump’s call. Media narratives coming out of elections tend to simplify the election into one or two central themes. In reality, elections are incredibly messy animals. In close races, dozens of factors could ultimately be decisive, as voters often arrive at their decision based on a wide array of factors.
Last Update - 8:30 P.M.
This race has massive implications for the 2022 Senate Race. We’ve already released our 2022 Senate Forecast. This may sound absurdly early - but I’ve extensively tested the Senate Forecast on every election in every race since 1970. That’s over 800 Races!
When we know both nominees, we can project over 85% of races correctly without any polling data. Of course, we don’t know the challengers to incumbents just yet, but we can still get a strong early read.
If Democrats win both Georgia Senate Seats, their odds of winning the Senate would be 63%. If Republicans win both seats, their chances would be 66%. A split decision of Warnock and Perdue would make Republicans the favorites with a 51% chance of winning.
Update - 8:20 P.M.
Democrat’s have double-digit leads in both races, however no one in Ossoff or Warnock’s campaign will be popping the champagne just yet. The count so far is mostly from early votes - and we expected that to favor Democrats. The majority of the remaining vote is from election day, and we expect election day votes to favor Republicans.
Right now, the results have been a little bit better than expected for Democrats, but far from decisive.
Update - 8:10 P.M.
As we anticipated, the early vote is showing that Raphael Warnock is outperforming his fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff. In a very close election, we could see a split result, with Warnock and Republican David Perdue serving in the Senate for the next two years.
Whoever wins the special election will face reelection in 2022 in what will almost certainly be one of the marquee matchups of the next midterm election. Jon Ossoff or David Perdue won’t face another election until 2026.
Update - 8:00 PM
Earlier today, we released our final forecast for the Runoff Election. In truly dramatic form, Jon Ossoff took his first lead of the entire runoff in our projection. We have him beating David Perdue by 0.1%. We also have Raphael Warnock up by a larger but still narrow by 0.9%.
Why the difference? First, Ossoff finished behind Perdue in the general election, and that’s one of the most important data points in our forecast. There’s no comparable datapoint for Warnock v. Loeffler because that race had over twenty candidates. Second, Warnock has consistently outperformed Ossoff in the head to head polls. However, the gap between the two has shrunk considerably over the past few months. Warnock used to be up by 5% in the polls, but Kelly Loeffler narrowed his advantage to just under 2.1% on election day. Likewise, Ossoff used to TRAIL Perdue, but he surged ahead in the final weeks, ending up 1.9% on election day.
Despite the double Democratic advantage, the chance for an upset in both races was quite high. Perdue has over a 49% chance of an upset, and Loeffler has a 45-46% chance. Almost every piece of evidence we have seen suggests that this race will be highly competitive.
First Update - 7:30 P.M.
At long last, it’s finally the last election night of the 2020-21 election cycle, and we may know tonight who will control the Senate for the next two years. Early signs suggest historic turnout for a non-presidential election once again here in Georgia.
The early exit polls suggest encouraging news for Democrats. While they don’t release an official result, it’s easy to jerry-rig using the turnout and performance with each demographic that they release. They show, roughly, Ossoff up by 0.6%, and Warnock up by 1.0%.
Exit polls were not accurate in the General Election - although they were spot on in Georgia. It’s no easy to conduct an exit poll during a pandemic, especially with such a high percentage of early voting.
Turnout was very high on election day in particular, which is a good sign for Republicans. However, it depends on where the turnout is. In Dekalb county - which should heavily favor Democrats, the election day turnout was even better today than in November.
Interactive Features
Latest Articles