What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia

In terms of outstanding votes, there will also be a few thousand provisional ballots around the state. More than 11,000 provisional ballots were cast in the presidential election, and a little more than 60 percent went for Biden. There will likely be fewer than that for the runoffs, but they will also lean Democratic.

We’re not sure exactly how many votes are still outstanding in Georgia and exactly where they are — a fuller picture should be available around lunchtime — but here’s what we do know. The New York Times estimates that about 73,000 ballots have yet to be counted, mostly in very blue counties (e.g., 19,000 in DeKalb, 11,000 in Fulton). Other media outlets have also reported that there are about 4,000 absentee votes left in Fulton County and 3,000 left in Chatham County.

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.