What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia

Similar to Sarah, I’m watching the suburban and exurban counties outside Atlanta, like Henry and Gwinnett. Those are the increasingly well-educated and diverse areas that helped deliver the presidency to Biden in November and were part of a larger blue suburban shift across the country. The Democratic candidates will likely need strong turnout and support from those areas to win.

Micah, I might have to wait awhile to see anything, but I’m watching the Atlanta metro area. Biden carried eight of the 10 counties that make up “the Atlanta Regional Commission,” and those counties were crucial to Biden’s win in November, as Perry wrote for the site, and they have been steadily moving toward Democrats since the early 2000s. Ossoff and Warnock need to improve their margins elsewhere in the state, but how they do in these 10 counties — Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Douglas, Fayette, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry and Rockdale — could be pivotal.

We could obviously be in for a long slog waiting to get a clear picture in Georgia, but what are people looking for first? A specific county? A turnout estimate? Nothing?

Nathaniel, that makes sense given how polarized things are right now. But it’s also a reminder that one party is probably going to carry both seats — the last time a state held two Senate elections at the same time and got a split decision was in 1966. Nonetheless, as Nate pointed out the other day, if things are super close, you might see divergent outcomes.

In November, most of Georgia’s vote was counted fairly quickly: Around 94 percent of all votes were reported by 2 a.m. Eastern on election night.

But, of course, the general election was so close that it took the state days to count the remaining 6 percent of the vote and for a winner to be projected. Indeed, Biden didn’t appear to have a lead until early in the morning on Friday, Nov. 6 — 58 hours after polls closed — because many of the last ballots to be counted came from the state’s biggest (and most Democratic) counties. For example, Fulton County (home to most of Atlanta) didn’t report 99 percent of its total vote until the morning of Nov. 7.

Today’s elections are also expected to be very close, so the outcome could once again hinge on those bigger, late-reporting counties, meaning there’s a decent chance that we won’t know the winners of either race for at least a few days.

However, there is a chance things will go faster than they did in November. The state required counties to start processing absentee ballots last week, which it didn’t do for the general election. And the lower volume of ballots to count could also help counties wrap up their work more quickly (even though turnout in the runoff is high, it will almost certainly not be as high as in the general election). So, if for some reason the Senate races aren’t as close as we’re expecting, we could get an earlier projection.

We have the first hard results! It’s not enough to extrapolate anything from, but as Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report points out, it is interesting how similarly the two races are tracking.

I’m scanning for any reports of technical difficulties during voting today, and it mostly looks like smooth sailing. There were some machine outages in Columbia County early this morning (as Trump noted), and voters used back-up paper ballots there until the machines were back online. Other than that, and a few reports of long lines in the final stretch of voting day, no major issues.

Conservative Christians are typically thought of as one of the strongest religious powerhouses in American politics — and for good reason. But in the Georgia runoffs, Warnock and Ossoff have both been relying on outreach by progressive churches and religious leaders to encourage turnout among Democratic voters. They’ve both leaned heavily into religious messages to make their pitch to voters over the past few months — and Warnock has even been attacked for his progressive, religious activism.

That religious outreach is especially noteworthy as both Warnock and Ossoff have somewhat unusual religious backgrounds for a would-be Georgia senator. Warnock is an ordained minister who has served since 2005 as the senior pastor for Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a historic Black church that was co-pastored by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. But clergy are surprisingly hard to find on Capitol Hill — if elected, Warnock would be just one of two ordained pastors in the Senate, not to mention becoming Georgia’s first Black senator. Ossoff, meanwhile, could become the first Jewish Democrat to win statewide office in Georgia, and, like Warnock, he has made civil rights activism a big part of his message to voters — a move that invokes the longtime partnership of many Black and Jewish Americans in the civil rights movement.

Loeffler and Perdue, on the other hand, will be counting on strong turnout from white evangelical Protestants, who make up a significant chunk of Georgia residents (18 percent) and tend to lean heavily Republican — but both candidates have come under fire for appearing to try to weaponize their opponents’ religious background. Loeffler was criticized by Black religious leaders for repeatedly characterizing Warnock as a “radical” and a “socialist,” and Perdue apologized earlier this year for running an ad that enlarged Ossoff’s nose. So it will be especially interesting to see if Warnock and Ossoff’s investment in progressive religious outreach pays off — or if the support that Loeffler and Perdue are likely to receive from white conservative Christians is enough to put them over the top.

That’s right, Amelia. However, it’s worth noting that, unlike in many states, Georgia counties don’t report votes in a consistent order. For example, CNN reports that Cobb and Gwinnett counties will count early votes first, but DeKalb County will count absentee votes first. So while the race overall may drift toward Democrats as the night wears on, that won’t necessarily be the pattern in every county.

We froze our Georgia Senate runoff polling averages as of 9 a.m. ET today, and all signs point to tight races. The Democratic challengers, Ossoff and Warnock, each hold about a 2 percentage point lead, but that’s well within most polls’ margin of error, so don’t be surprised if Perdue or Loeffler wins.

But if you had to pick a favorite based on the polls, the Democrats would be the choice. Polls remain our best tool for forecasting elections, and while the 2020 polls overall weren’t especially accurate, they still did pretty well in Georgia, where the final presidential margin was only off by 1 point compared to FiveThirtyEight’s final polling average.

However, we should be cautious about runoff polls. For one thing, they’ve disagreed over who is in the lead, and most have reported results within the margin of error. But on top of that, very few high-quality pollsters have surveyed Georgia: Just three of the 19 firms that have released runoff polls since the November general election have a FiveThirtyEight pollster rating higher than a B.

A reminder as the results start to come in that we could see a “red mirage” — similar to the one that we saw in the November general election — where the initial totals come from smaller, more rural counties that tend to count their votes more quickly. The six largest counties in Georgia are much more Democratic-leaning, but they will take longer to count their votes.

Based on early-voting data, 3,093,375 Georgians have already submitted ballots in this election, which is 42 percent of the voting-eligible population and 62 percent of the number of people who voted in the regular Senate race in November. This is noteworthy in that all three numbers are the highest ever for a Georgia runoff — and that’s without counting a single Election Day vote.

That uber-high turnout could mean all precedents for Georgia runoffs (which are traditionally low-turnout affairs) go out the window.

Politics podcast host Galen Druke and senior writer Perry Bacon Jr. discuss what the future holds for Georgia. Will it be the next Virginia, or will it be the next North Carolina?

That’s right, Nathaniel. According to Georgia Public Broadcasting, only a few polling precincts have gotten judicial extensions to be open past 7 p.m.: One in Gwinnett County, two in Columbia County, one in Tift County and two in Chatham County. There was also apparently a report of an accident near a polling place in Ware County that could lead to a judicial order extending poll closing time.

Back in November, Biden won Georgia 49.5 percent to 49.3 percent, but Perdue outran Ossoff 49.7 percent to 47.9 percent, and Republicans combined to outperform Democrats 49.4 percent to 48.4 percent in the special Senate election. So perhaps the easiest path to victory for Ossoff and Warnock is to win over Georgians who voted for Biden but did not vote Democratic in the November Senate race(s).

What do we know about these voters? They are probably disproportionately “country club Republicans” — upper-class white voters who traditionally support Republicans based on their economic platform but couldn’t bring themselves to back the bombastic Trump. In the November returns, Biden ran furthest ahead of Ossoff in predominantly white, well-educated counties and precincts, most notably in the Atlanta suburbs.

According to The Washington Post, the Atlanta-area precincts where Biden outperformed Ossoff were $41,000 wealthier (based on median household income), 37 percent better-educated (based on the share of adults with a bachelor’s degree) and 21 percentage points whiter than the average Atlanta-area precinct.

It’s important to note, however, that there weren’t that many of these split-ticket voters; Biden ran just 1.6 percentage points ahead of Ossoff statewide in November. However, if Ossoff and Warnock are overperforming their November selves in the Atlanta suburbs, it might be a sign that never-Trump Republicans are willing to vote Democratic in more than just presidential elections.

Polls generally close in Georgia at 7 p.m. Eastern — in just a few minutes — but at least six polling places in four counties will stay open late after experiencing problems today.

When Biden won Georgia in November, it marked the first time a Democratic presidential nominee had carried the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. Still, no Democrat has won a statewide office in Georgia since 2006, a streak Ossoff and Warnock are hoping to end tonight. The polling shows they have a real shot at it, in part because Georgia has evolved from a fairly Republican-leaning state to one that might be best described as purple.

The driving force behind Georgia’s shifting electoralate? The Atlanta metro area. Pivotally, Biden carried eight of the 10 counties that make up the Atlanta Regional Commission governing collaborative, most of which have been moving toward the Democrats in presidential elections since the early 2000s, as the chart below shows.

These 10 counties cast 45 percent of the state’s presidential vote, and collectively Biden won them by 31 percentage points, a nearly 9-point improvement over Hillary Clinton’s margin four years ago. In fact, there’s been a pretty marked shift in these counties in the last two decades: As recently as the 2004 presidential election, these 10 counties narrowly voted for the GOP in aggregate. But big shifts toward the Democrats, especially in rapidly diversifying and highly educated suburban counties such as Cobb and Gwinnett, have helped change the math in Democrats’ favor.

Notably, Stacey Abrams’s narrow defeat in Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election first showed just how close a Democrat could come to winning statewide in Georgia. She lost by 1.4 points, about 3.5 points better than Clinton’s 5-point loss to Trump in 2016. Midterm elections don’t always reveal much about the next presidential election, but in the case of Georgia, the 2018 results foreshadowed 2020’s outcome and helped pave the way for Biden’s 2020 victory.

Of course, Biden couldn’t win Georgia just by improving Democratic performance in the Atlanta area — he also performed almost 3 points better than Clinton did in the rest of the state. But the lesson here is that if a Democrat can avoid a complete collapse elsewhere in the state (remember, Trump won the area outside of metro Atlanta by 25 points), that can still be enough for a Democrat to win — especially if Atlanta goes blue in a big way.

The outcome of tonight’s Senate races in Georgia could hinge on the suburbs. Back in November, suburban voters all over the country helped deliver the presidency to Biden, with even traditionally conservative suburban areas turning bluer. That shift was especially pronounced in the suburbs around Atlanta — places like Gwinnett County, Cobb County and Henry County, which Mitt Romney won handily back in 2012 but which have steadily been drifting to the left since.

Last month, we dug into the reasons behind that dramatic blue shift in the suburbs and found that it’s pretty difficult to untangle what’s driving so many suburban voters away from the GOP. Growing diversification in the suburbs is often cited as a reason, and that’s almost certainly a big part of the story. But growing levels of education appear to be just as important — maybe even more important — in transforming the politics of the suburbs, because the places that moved most dramatically to the left were the ones that grew more well-educated and more diverse. One of those suburban areas was Georgia’s Henry County, which saw a whopping 16-point swing toward the Democrats between 2016 and 2020.

Today, Ossoff and Warnock are doubtlessly hoping that they can capture the energy that just delivered Georgia to a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992. Either way, the result will tell us more about just how lasting the shift we saw in November will be.

One possibility, according to experts we spoke with, is that those well-educated suburbanites will vote Republican because they were especially turned off by Trump, but they weren’t put off by all Republican candidates. On the other hand, it could be that what we saw in November was the first sign of a more lasting political realignment that could end up giving Democrats control of the Senate, in addition to the House and White House, in 2021.

It’s a fool’s errand to try to predict election results based on early-voting data (which paints an incomplete picture at best). But it is at least interesting that the share of early voters who are Black was higher in the runoff than it was in the general election, according to The New York Times/The Upshot’s Nate Cohn. The electorate so far is 56 percent white, 31 percent Black and 13 percent other or unknown races; in November, it was 58 percent white, 28 percent Black and 14 percent other or unknown.

That could bode well for Ossoff and Warnock, given that Black voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic and that the Black share of the electorate was lower than expected in November. However, it also might not matter: Election Day voters (who tend to be whiter and more conservative) could vote in large enough numbers to completely change the face of the electorate.

Republicans hope the past is prologue in today’s runoffs. That’s because in seven of the eight previous statewide Georgia runoffs between a Democrat and a Republican, the GOP’s vote share margin has improved compared to the general election, helped by the fact that turnout usually drops sharply from the initial vote.

The GOP usually gains ground in Georgia runoffs

Shift in vote margin and percentage change in turnout from the general election to the runoff for statewide races in Georgia

		Margin		Change
Year	Office	General	Runoff	Turnout	Margin
1992	U.S. Senate	D+1.6	R+1.3	-44%	R+2.9
1992	Public Service Commissioner	R+0.7	R+13.6	-43	R+12.9
1998	Public Service Commissioner*	D+15.8	D+31.4	-91	D+15.6
2006	Public Service Commissioner	D+2.6	R+4.4	-89	R+7.0
2008	U.S. Senate	R+2.9	R+14.9	-43	R+12.0
2008	Public Service Commissioner	D+0.6	R+13.0	-44	R+13.7
2018	Secretary of State	R+0.4	R+3.8	-62	R+3.4
2018	Public Service Commissioner	R+2.1	R+3.5	-62	R+1.4

And considering Republicans narrowly led the vote in both races in November, that means Democrats will have to do something unusual to win: Improve their vote margin in the runoff. They’ve only done that once before, in a low-key 1998 race for a seat on the state’s public service commission. Otherwise, the GOP has always done better in runoffs than the preceding general election, including in both previous Senate runoffs. Why Republicans have historically fared better in Georgia’s runoffs boils down to a few factors. For one thing, Georgia has been a Republican-leaning state for much of the past three decades. But the lower turnout and the makeup of the electorate in runoffs has usually benefited the GOP, too. Black voter turnout has often slipped, and more affluent voters — who are more likely to vote — have traditionally been more white and Republican-leaning in Georgia and in the South as a whole. However, with control of the entire Senate on the line, this runoff may go against the grain. First, there will be record-setting runoff turnout, as 3.1 million voters have already cast early and absentee ballots. That means the decline in turnout from November is already guaranteed to be the smallest ever: Based on just early vote data, turnout is only down 37 percent — and that drop will get even smaller once Election Day votes are added. (For comparison, the smallest previous decrease in turnout from the general to a runoff was 43 percent in the 2008 Senate race.) Additionally, Black voters appear to be turning out at high rates, as they’ve made up a larger share of early and absentee voters in the runoff (31 percent) than in the general (29 percent). Lastly, the preferences of white voters with a college degree have trended toward Democrats, so the pool of likely voters who are affluent and white may not benefit the GOP as much as it has in years past. It’s hard to know how predictive past runoffs will prove to be this time around, but Democrats are hoping that high turnout and the demographic makeup of early voters foreshadow victory, while the Republicans are crossing their fingers that a strong Election Day showing will help them hold onto these seats.

Elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich chats with Politics podcast host Galen Druke about the final polls from Georgia and the trends he’ll be watching tonight.

Out of the 35 Senate elections held in 2020, there were five where no candidate won a majority, including, of course, Georgia’s contests. But Georgia is only one of a handful of states that requires a candidate to win a majority to be elected to statewide office, which is why you don’t see, say, a Michigan Senate runoff despite the fact that no candidate won an outright majority.

So how did Georgia end up with this rule?

The answer is that Georgia has had a statewide electoral requirement for a very long time. In 1824, the state constitution first stipulated that if no gubernatorial candidate won a popular-vote majority, the state legislature would select the winner. And as Georgia’s primary system developed in the early 20th century, it was decided that primary winners had to win a majority of a county’s votes in the state’s “county unit system,” whereby each county was assigned two, four, or six votes based on population. But this Electoral College-esque system grossly overrepresented rural counties and violated the U.S. Constitution’s “one person, one vote” principle, prompting the U.S. Supreme Court to rule it unconstitutional in 1963 and the state to establish a new primary runoff system in 1964 based on the popular vote.

Those shifts hadn’t changed how Georgia’s general election runoffs worked, but the turbulent 1966 gubernatorial election upended everything. In that race, a highly contested Democratic primary resulted in the nomination of avowed segregationist Lester Maddox, while the GOP picked Rep. Bo Callaway, a conservative former Democrat. Georgians were frustrated with both of these choices, which led to a write-in campaign for the more moderate Ellis Arnall, who’d lost to Maddox in the Democratic runoff. Ultimately, no candidate won a majority in November, which threw the election to the state legislature to decide. And although Callaway had won a narrow plurality over Maddox, the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature chose Maddox to be governor, angering many Georgians, which in turn created the space to change the general election runoff system: In 1968, voters approved two constitutional amendments that established runoffs for statewide general elections in which no candidate won a majority.

That wasn’t the end to debates over how the majority requirement should work in general elections, however. The first runoff under the new laws happened in 1992, when Democratic Sen. Wyche Fowler lost to Republican Paul Coverdell after Fowler had finished just shy of a majority in the general election. In response, the Democratic-controlled state government lowered the threshold for avoiding a general-election runoff to 45 percent, which enabled Democrat Max Cleland to avoid a runoff and win with 49 percent in Georgia’s 1996 Senate race. But after Republicans took full control of state government in the early 2000s, they reestablished the majority threshold, which is where things stand today. (At least for now, anyway.)

With control of the Senate on the line, this runoff has national implications, and out-of-state money is flooding into the race as a result. A full 96 percent of the money Ossoff and Warnock raised on grassroots fundraising platform ActBlue from Nov. 4 through Nov. 23 come from donors outside Georgia, with big blue states like California and New York contributing eight digits each. By contrast, Georgians gave only $4.3 million via ActBlue during that period.

It’s largely the same story for Republicans: 92 percent of the money Perdue and Loeffler raised on grassroots fundraising platform WinRed from Nov. 4 through Nov. 23 came from out of state, too. They raised only $4.4 million from Georgians.

This can make it hard to know how well the money race really reflects the way Georgians are feeling on the ground. We’ll have our answer soon enough, though.

Although it won’t necessarily tell you who is going to win, the amount of money that has been raised and spent in this runoff is truly mind-boggling. Here are some stats:

• Between Nov. 10 and Dec. 28, Republicans spent about $281.7 million on campaign ads in Georgia, and Democrats spent about $256.6 million. All told, candidates and outside groups have combined to spend $469.7 million on the regular Senate race and $362.7 million on the special election. Previously, the most money that had ever been spent on a U.S. Senate race was $298.9 million.
• In the two months between Oct. 15 and Dec. 16, Ossoff raised $106.8 million, Warnock raised $103.4 million, Perdue raised $68.1 million and Loeffler raised $64.0 million. Previously, the record for most money raised by a Senate candidate in any three-month period was $57 million.

The COVID-19 pandemic has once again helped shape the way today’s election will unfold. Absentee ballot drop boxes were used for the first time in Georgia in the general election under an emergency rule implemented due to the pandemic, and that rule was extended for the runoff. In November, county officials had the option to process those votes two weeks before Election Day, but now the state election board has updated the rule to require counties to begin processing at least a week beforehand. (They can’t count votes until after polls close, but the ballots can be processed in advance and ready to go.) And like the general election, a record number of Georgia voters cast ballots ahead of Election Day, possibly to avoid potential crowds while voting in person today, as the state is in the midst of another spike in cases.

On Monday, the state health department reported that more patients were hospitalized with the coronavirus than at any point since April, and the state has also reopened its field hospital at the Georgia World Conference Center to deal with the surge. Some 94,000 Georgia residents have received their first dose of the vaccine, and Gov. Brian Kemp expanded how many people are eligible to receive the vaccine at the end of December. That allows people 65 and older, law enforcement officers, firefighters and first responders, along with health care workers and those living or working in long-term care facilities, to receive the vaccine. But with cases continuing to climb and few restrictions on public activity in place, the virus continues to be a major threat and may be one reason we’ve seen so many votes cast in advance.

We might already be five days into 2021, but there’s one 2020 question that we still need an answer to: Which party will control the U.S. Senate?

Luckily, we should know soon, as today marks the final day of voting in Georgia, where not one, but two Senate runoffs will determine control of the chamber. Historically, Republicans have been favored in runoffs in Georgia, but there are several reasons that may not be true this time around. The most important is that in last year’s presidential election, Democrats won Georgia for the first time since 1992. It was a nailbiter (Biden won by less than a percentage point), but Georgia has been getting bluer for some time now.

Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are favored in the polls, but as FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley will tell you in a bit, the polls are close enough that you shouldn’t be surprised if Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler win in the end. Remember, Democrats must pick up both seats to lock down a majority. (There are currently 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats in the Senate, so if Democrats win both runoffs, they’ll have control of the chamber with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as tiebreaker.)

Early voter turnout has already surpassed turnout in all other Georgia runoffs — and that’s not including the Election Day vote — so if the polls and November result are any indication, these are going to be two close races once again. Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, told ABC News earlier today that officials hope to have results within two days, so buckle up, as we might all go to bed tonight — and even tomorrow night — without knowing who won.

We’ll be tracking results and news in real time as the night unfolds, so be sure to follow along. And if you have any questions, ping us at @538politics.