What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia
We’re Back Covering The Vote In Georgia And What’s Happening On Capitol Hill
With about 98 percent of the expected vote tabulated, we have one call in Georgia: ABC News and other outlets have project Warnock as the winner in the special election. The regular Senate election is still too close to call, though. Ossoff has a much slimmer edge of about 0.4 percentage points and we’re not sure when we’ll get a call there, as there are still a number of outstanding ballots to be counted. The good news for Ossoff, though, is that they’re mostly in Democratic-leaning areas, which may be one reason he declared victory earlier this morning.
We’ll be tracking in real time where those votes are and how the margins shift in that race as more votes are counted, but we’re also going to track what’s happening in Washington today, as the Senate prepares to certify the election results. This vote is traditionally a largely ceremonial, low-key affair, but this year a faction of GOP senators has said they plan to mount a protest vote. (They cannot, in fact, overturn the result.) But given how the results in Georgia will shape Washington — Republicans are on the verge of losing their Senate majority — we’ll be live-blogging that today, as this is one of the first big tests of how the Republican Party will handle “Trumpism” post-Trump.
Stay tuned for that and everything Georgia. If you have any questions, please ping us at @538politics and we’ll try to answer them.
Although Warnock has already been declared the winner in one race and Ossoff looks to be in good shape in the other, neither Loeffler nor Perdue has conceded. This, of course, comes after Trump has yet to concede his loss in the general election, nine weeks after the fact. If not conceding elections becomes a habit for Republicans going forward, it will be very concerning for democracy.
In keeping with, well, the past four years, Trump is making false claims that votes were “found” in Georgia. Gabriel Sterling, a Republican and the voting system implementation manager for the Georgia secretary of state, just shot down these lies.