What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia

With a big drop of votes coming in, the raw vote counts have tightened a lot. Ossoff now leads by 1.2 points and Warnock leads by 1.8. However, those votes were expected to be pretty Republican and the changes were very much in line with The Needle’s expectations, for instance. Thus, the overall outlook is relatively unchanged.

This is A) not good, B) not surprising, C) not an indication of GOP confidence.

One thing I’m thinking about as we continue to see good results for the Democrats (although of course there’s time for that to change!): Loeffler in particular spent a lot of time trying to paint Warnock as a “radical” and a “socialist” and even used a clip of one of his sermons in an attack ad. Some religious leaders were quite upset about those attacks and characterized them as a broader assault on the Black religious community. There was some speculation in the lead-up to the election that those attacks might end up backfiring on Loeffler.