Jon Ossoff's Surge has raised the Chances of a Democratic Sweep in Georgia
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ,
By: Logan Phillips
Date: 12/13
The road to a Senate Majority for the Democratic party has always been a bit more challenging than for their Republican compatriots, as they have to win both Senate seats in the Georgia January Runoff to secure victory. Republicans still retain their edge, but the odds of a historic double victory in Georgia are on the rise. In just two weeks, Jon Ossoff has flipped the script on Republican incumbent David Perdue, trading in a 2.5% deficit for a 1.0% lead.
In our Georgia Senate Runoff, the Democratic party’s chances of winning the Senate have sharply increased from 36% to 44% — a nearly double-digit increase in just the last two weeks alone. However, Perdue still has a slight - albeit increasingly narrow - advantage in our projection, buoyed by his edge in the November election and his status as an incumbent.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact cause for Perdue’s recent slippage, but he could be getting backlash for backing President Trump’s false claims that the Georgia election was stolen from him. Perdue is more than smart enough to know these election fraud allegations are nonsensical. He’s clearly convinced that he has to stand by them or risk being on the receiving end of the President’s wrath.
Trump has already demanded that former allies like Georgian Governor Brian Kemp resign. Similar attacks would likely be the kiss of death for Perdue, and risk depressing turnout in January considerably. He’s not exactly shown restraint himself lately, and recently called for the Republican Georgia Secretary of State to resign.
Polling, as well as common sense, suggests most Georgians are not falling for the conspiracy theory. Just a month ago, Survey USA found Perdue was winning five percent of Democratic voters, compared to his fellow Republican Loeffler’s one percent. I'm betting Perdue has lost a significant portion of that support, and that's caused the race to tighten. Perdue is still the favorite, but this one is now a highly competitive election, and a victory in either direction should surprise no one.
Raphael Warnock (D) vs. Kelly Loeffler (R)
On the other side of the coin, Democratic Reverend Raphael Warnock has a 2.5% lead in the polls against appointed Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler. He’s been leading head-to-head polling since September, although Loeffler has made considerable gains since the General Election. Warnock once had a lead of over 7%. While 2020 was not exactly a banner year for pollsters in most states, in Georgia they excelled at predicting the Presidential election and were respectable in the Senate race.
Photo Credit:Marc Nozell from Merrimack, New Hampshire,
Some of this decline was inevitable. For almost a year, Loeffler had waged war on the air waves against fellow Republican Doug Collins for the final spot in the Senate Runoff. Their contest became a scorched earth campaign of negative ads that turned off more than a few Collins supporters to Loeffler. Now that she’s the only Republican candidate, most Doug Collins supporters have reluctantly come back in the fold, buoying her standing in the polls. Warnock was a beneficiary of their feud, and he had a chance to build a political profile without facing much incoming fire from his future Republican opponent.
Those days are long gone - and he’s been on the receiving end of a negative ad spending blitz that will likely surpass a hundred million dollars. Some of the ads coming from Kelly Loeffler’s campaign have raised more than a few eyebrows. The most egregious has featured the unexpected return of Jerimiah Wright, the former reverend of Barack Obama. Then-Senator Obama faced headwinds in the final stages of the primary when ABC News played tapes of a sermon by Reverend Wright condemning America for its history of abuse towards African Americans.
“No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that's in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human," the Reverend said in the sermon. "God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.”
The sound bite was pitch-perfect for misuse by the negative ad peddlers to take out of context and weaponize. Many feared it could derail Barack Obama’s bid in the final round of one of the closest and most hard-fought presidential primaries in American history. David Plouffe, President Obama’s campaign manager, told the history channel that “Reverend Wright was like a nuclear bomb dropped on our campaign in Chicago; it was the toughest thing we dealt with. We weren’t prepared for it and we were scrambling.”
Barack Obama took the issue head-on in a speech that will almost certainly be considered one of the defining moments of his political career, addressing the complexities of race in America in a way he never had before in his presidential campaign. According to Jon Favreau, he said afterwards, “I don't know if I can get elected saying the things I did about race today. But I also know that if I was too afraid to say them, I don’t deserve to be elected.”
Barack Obama arguably redefined the way politicians can talk about race that day, and he successfully navigated that potentially devastating political landmine. It’s more than a little surprising to see the issue once again become part of American politics over twelve years later. Nonetheless, Kelly Loeffler has returned Reverend Wright to the center of the American political universe.
Her ad plays a short clip of Reverend Wright bellowing “Not God Bless America, God Damn America”, - then it plays a soundbite from an interview where Warnock says: "We celebrate Reverend Wright”. They claim that Raphael Warnock gave him an award for his sermon.
To be crystal clear, these advertisements are disingenuous even for a political ad. It has failed to pass muster for the fact-checkers - and the Pulitzer prize-winning Politifact claimed the ad was mostly false. The claims about the award are pure fiction, plain and simple.
In 2008, Warnock said that “I think that the country has been done a disservice by this constant playing over and over again of the same sound bite outside of context." He argued Reverend Wright was channeling a tradition in Black Churches to tell hard truths that people often don’t want to hear in his sermon about race in America. However, despite the insinuations of the ad, he never celebrated nor supported his comments of “God Damn America”.
Photo Credit:Gage Skidmore
In her eagerness to tie Warnock to Wright, Kelly Loeffler has drawn a staggeringly sharp contrast between herself and the late John McCain. McCain was under immense pressure as the Republican 08’ Presidential nominee to use the Wright videos as the tip of the spear of his campaign against Obama. His team, and much of the senior GOP brass, thought this was a golden opportunity to paint Barack Obama as a radical. McCain loathed this kind of dirty politics dripping in racial undertones and was adamant that they would not be used against America’s first Black Presidential Candidate on his watch.
"McCain thinks that the bringing of racial religious preaching in black churches into the campaign would potentially have grave consequences for civil society in the United States," a political official told Politico at the time. Kelly Loeffler has shown no such restraint. If you pay attention to the underlying message, you’ll see one of the single most sinister forces in our political history. They take a black man angry about the country's shortcomings on race and condemning America for its sins. It’s twisted out of context to suggest Warnock is a radical, un-American, and different from the rest of us.
It’s a direct appeal to the very worst instincts in our country, the type of ghost we have fought for generations to exhaust but which far too often emerge from shallow graves to haunt us once again. It’s no coincidence that this specific style of tricks seems to emerge only when a black candidate has the gall to run for public office.
The entirety of the political world has their eyes squarely on this race, and most of them know exactly what Loeffler is doing. Not everyone has the scruples of John McCain, and if this strategy works, we will likely see it re-emerge across the country, especially against Black candidates. It’s up to Georgians to decide if this time things will be different.
You can keep track of the latest Projections for the Georgia Runoff right here at RacetotheWH.com. For all the latest polls released in the runoff, stay tuned to the new Georgia Poll Page, which will be kept up to date going into election day.
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