What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia

Those Decision Desk results reflect at least part of DeKalb. Other sources should pick that up soon.

Decision Desk HQ, which looks to be a little ahead of others here, now has Warnock ahead by 30,000 votes and Ossoff trailing Perdue by about 2,500 votes.

First news org to call the race for Warnock.

Let’s do a little thought exercise. There are about 171,000 early votes left to count in DeKalb. Let’s say Ossoff and Warnock win them 143,000 to 28,000, which would mirror how Biden did in November among DeKalb early voters. That would perfectly erase Perdue’s current 115,000-vote lead and turn Loeffler’s current 82,000-vote lead into a 33,000-vote Warnock lead. And that’s without counting the remaining ballots in Cobb, Chatham and other outstanding counties.

Ah, election night confusion. A report from CNN claimed that there were only 130,000 or so votes left in DeKalb County. If true, that would be bad news for the Democrats because it’s a very blue county and Democrats need a big total from there to take the lead. But Gabriel Sterling, the voting system implementation manager for Georgia’s secretary of state, corrected them to say that more than 171,000 early votes are going to be uploaded by DeKalb. And that makes sense, as the state’s data said that 171,000 early votes had been cast in DeKalb. Now with slightly more than 90 percent of the expected vote in statewide, DeKalb looms large. Literally — it’s the huge blue dot on this New York Times map of remaining votes:

There is still no official projection in either race in Georgia, but The New York Times’s needle is quite confident in both a Warnock and Ossoff victory.

Trump supporters have been flooding into D.C. today ahead of a planned “stop the steal” rally tomorrow. There were some speeches earlier this evening, but as night closed in, the crowds took to the streets, where they have been live-streaming the demonstration as police stand by. On far-right forums online, there has been a lot of discussion of things getting “wild” and the potential for violence. And 340 National Guard troops have been deployed around the city in anticipation of the rally.

Black turnout is important for Democrats in every state, since 9 in 10 Black voters back Democratic candidates. But the overall Black vote matters even more in Georgia, because around 30 percent of the state’s electorate is Black, compared to about 12 percent of the electorate nationally. We won’t have detailed demographics information about this race in Georgia for a while, but it is virtually certain that the plurality — and perhaps even an outright majority — of Georgia voters for Ossoff and Warnock are Black.

Democrats spent a lot of time the last four years obsessing about states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and wooing white voters without college degrees in particular. And while it’s not clear that Biden did that much better than Hillary Clinton with white voters without college degrees, he did win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But Georgia is a different ball game, in part because of its big Black population. And notably, the Democrats ran a campaign for these Senate seats that reflected the large Black electorate in the state:

1. They embraced the approach of Stacey Abrams, a Black woman, of really trying to boost turnout among voters of color, younger voters and those in the Atlanta area.
2. They embraced two candidates with lots of ties to Atlanta’s Black community. In Warnock, the pastor of the church MLK and his father ran, but also in Ossoff, who worked for two Atlanta Black congressmen, the late John Lewis and Hank Johnson.
3. And lastly, they embraced a kind of social justice message. Ossoff and Warnock talked a lot about voting rights and other “Black” issues on the campaign trail.

If Democrats win one or both of these races, I would expect them to run similar campaigns to this in other states in the South with large Black populations.

One of the places where Ossoff and Warnock have improved on Biden’s performance the most: Clayton County, a 73 percent Black county where Biden got 85 percent of the vote but Ossoff is at 88 percent and Warnock is at 89 percent. Yet another reminder that, if Ossoff and Warnock pull this off, they’ll owe their victories to Black voters.

Chatham County (home of Savannah) is done counting for the night and will pick things back up at 8 a.m. tomorrow. I estimate there are about 20,000 votes left to count there, and they should lean Democratic.

Wondering how and when the networks will declare winners? Well, before the general election, Galen spoke with Dan Merkle, executive director of elections at ABC News, about how decision desks make their projections.

We’ve been talking about what a Warnock-and-Ossoff victory would mean for the Senate — for one thing, it would definitely raise the pressure on Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to retire. Breyer has been on the court for almost three decades (he was appointed by Clinton) and he’s in his 80s. And Biden has said that if he has the opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice, he wants to nominate the first Black woman to the nation’s highest court. If that happens, the entire liberal wing of the court would be comprised of women.

According to my back-of-the-napkin calculations, the counties with the most outstanding votes are DeKalb (about 200,000), Cobb (about 80,000) and Columbia (about 50,000).

That’s a good question, Galen. If I were in charge, I’d be comfortable projecting the races if and when Warnock and Ossoff pull ahead (which they may very well do when DeKalb reports). But in November, the networks waited until the last possible minute to project races. For instance, we thought they would project Pennsylvania as soon as Biden took the lead there, but they ended up waiting a full day after that to be extra sure.

The networks were pretty conservative last time. I think Warnock might get called, but Ossoff’s race is less likely. And by the way, he’s not certain to win by any means, either.

To be clear, should we expect the races to be called once the DeKalb votes come in?

Trump tweeted earlier today about broken voting machines in Georgia, but as Kaleigh Rogers explains, for the most part voting in the state went smoothly.

And regarding DeKalb County and the coming release of 171,000 or so early in-person votes, it’s worth noting that Biden won that group of voters in DeKalb by 68 points in November.

We’re focused on Georgia tonight, but as readers at home are surely aware, tomorrow is also the Senate vote on certifying the Electoral College results. And what should be a largely ceremonial vote has now become the latest litmus test for whether Republicans will show loyalty to Trump. Perry, Julia Azari and I talked about the implications of this vote earlier this week but as the Georgia vote has trickled in, there is a new escalation. Trump has released a statement in response to reporting from The New York Times that said Pence told Trump that the vice president doesn’t have the power to change the results of the election; Trump says that he and Pence are in total agreement that Pence “has the power to act.”

That’s not accurate, readers. And arguably, if the GOP does lose tonight in Georgia, that will leave many in the party angry with the position Trump has now put them in.

I mentioned earlier that some Democrats are wary of getting rid of the legislative filibuster. Meaning that if the Democrats have Senate control on a 51-50 margin (with Harris as the tie-breaking vote) — which seems very possible right now — that still wouldn’t be enough for them to pass a lot of very ambitious legislation. That said, I probably underplayed the reconciliation process (by which they can pass some legislation with 51 votes related to fiscal matters.)

A big COVID-19 relief package that includes say, hundreds of billions of dollars to states and localities, direct payments to most Americans (probably less than $2000) and other ideas opposed by McConnell and the GOP could be passed through reconciliation. And that’s a big deal both in terms of policy but also electoral politics.

A lot of Democrats think Obama aimed too low in his 2009 stimulus bill, leading to a weak recovery and hurting the Democrats in the 2010 midterms. So if Democrats end up with control of the House, Senate and presidency, I would expect them to go for some kind of big economic stimulus provision. Some of the Democrats in Trump-held districts and more moderate Democrats in the Senate like Manchin will balk at going too high, of course. But the chances of a big Biden stimulus bill will go way up if Ossoff and Warnock win tonight.

Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager for the secretary of state’s office, just tweeted that 171,000 or more early in-person votes should be uploaded soon from DeKalb County.

Yeah, Nate, and 2022 is likely to be a much better year for Republicans, given that it will be Biden’s midterm. And if Democrats do capture control of the Senate, they will have full control of the federal government, which might mean the backlash against them is more severe.

One small silver lining for the GOP is that if Warnock wins, he’ll have to defend his seat again in 2022.

With 85 percent of the expected vote reporting, Loeffler and Perdue have extended their statewide leads to 1.8 points and 3 points, respectively. But every vote that is counted in a red county just means more of the outstanding vote comes from Democratic counties. At some point today or tomorrow, a bunch of Ossoff and Warnock votes are going to be counted and reported (and, to be clear, that’s completely normal).

Well, Nathaniel and Galen, there is precedent for changing the runoff threshold. After the Democrats lost in the 1992 general-election runoffs for Senate and Public Service Commission — the first general-election runoffs in the state — the Democratic-controlled state government lowered the threshold in general elections to 45 percent (it didn’t affect the state’s majority requirement for special elections). This aided Democrat Max Cleland in 1996 when he won a U.S. Senate race with 49 percent but got to avoid a runoff. After the GOP got control of things in the early 2000s, though, they restored the full majority requirement.

And this is probably Nancy Pelosi’s last term as speaker, Micah!

Not to change the subject, but it’s wild to think that the McConnell era could be coming to an end in the Senate.

The ironic thing, Galen, is I think runoffs still probably help Republicans most of the time! If they do try to change the law, it would strike me as an overreaction to a sample size of one.

Nathaniel, that take reminds me of the Texas legislature’s move to get rid of straight-ticket voting once Democrats become competitive in the state. So, if Republicans think getting rid of runoffs will help them … then yeah, sounds likely.

Geoffrey, you’ve followed the changes in Georgia’s runoff law over the years. Do you agree that legislative Republicans could change the law again if they lose tonight?

That third pot of ☕ may have been a mistake.

Yeah, Sarah, and Steve Kornacki on MSNBC just said that much of the remaining DeKalb vote will be reported by 11 p.m. Eastern. So the coup de grâce could come soon.

As we wait for more votes to trickle in — still unsure on timing here and whether we’ll get calls tonight — here’s an important county to keep an eye on: DeKalb. Only 37 percent of the expected vote is in, and according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, it has one of the biggest tranches of early votes not yet counted.

But as Adam Kelsey of ABC News pointed out, in November, DeKalb went for Biden by 67 points, so if that ticks upward for the Democratic candidates this time (assuming their current margins hold), it could push Ossoff and Warnock into leads statewide.

New York Times’s needle just hit 90 percent probability for a Warnock victory. Relatedly, in the counties that have reported at least 95 percent of the vote, Warnock is running about 0.8 points ahead of Ossoff in terms of margin.

The Upshot currently projects Warnock to win by 1.8 points and Ossoff by 1.1 points. Obviously there’s still a lot of uncertainty there, but it’s worth nothing that those results would be very close to our final polling averages in the state.

This seems like a cogent summary if Republicans do in fact wind up losing:

With 82 percent of the expected vote reporting, Loeffler’s lead is up to 1.5 points and Perdue’s is up to 2 points. But The New York Times’s needle is more confident than ever in a Warnock and Ossoff win. That’s because the Republican-leaning votes that have come in haven’t changed the fact that a ton of votes remain to be counted in dark-blue Atlanta.

It might be tempting to think of these two races as something like a “natural experiment” about how demographics matter in elections — if Perdue does better than Loeffler, was that because of sexism? If Warnock does better than Ossoff, was that because he did a better job appealing to Georgia’s Black voters? But of course, there is a lot going on in each of these races — not just candidates’ gender and race, but also their religion, incumbency status and ideological positioning differ across the two races, complicating attempts to use them to identify the effect of any one of these characteristics.

If Warnock wins, I wonder how much of it will be thanks to his pet beagle. I thought this was a really interesting analysis by Michael Tesler.

Sarah, Warnock also has a long history of political activism in Georgia and is well known as a pastor, so he might just be more of a known quantity for some voters, or able to motivate more people to turn out. Ossoff has run in Georgia before, of course, and is very politically well-connected, but if nothing else he’s considerably younger than Warnock, and that might be a factor too.

Right, Nathaniel, and she very closely and aggressively aligned herself with Trump, so it’s not surprising that otherwise conservative Biden voters wouldn’t support her either.

And while incumbency isn’t necessarily worth as much as it once was, Perdue won in 2014, so he’s been elected in his own right. Loeffler is an appointed incumbent, which, practically speaking, means the race is functioning as an open seat.

Sarah, the differences are very slight, but Perdue appears to be outrunning Loeffler the most in the same suburban and well-educated counties where we saw a lot of Biden-Perdue voters: Cobb (where Perdue is doing 0.8 points better), Fulton (0.8 points better), Oconee (0.8 points), DeKalb (0.7 points), Clarke (0.7 points). Given Loeffler’s self-positioning as “more conservative than Attila the Hun,” moderates in those counties might have thought she was a tad too far to the right for their tastes.

Say there is a split result — and I know we’ve got some skeptics in the room — what can we say, if anything, about where Warnock is outperforming Ossoff? Or if we can’t get that granular, what are some other possible explanations here for a split result, given how nationalized these two races are and how little split-ticket voting there is to begin with?

Paulding is the first “medium-size” county (read: contributed between 1 and 3 percent of the total presidential vote in November) reporting over 99 percent of its expected vote, and it’s good news for Democrats: Warnock is overperforming Biden’s margin by 3 points there, while Ossoff is overperforming Biden by 2.3 points.

Best I can tell, Perdue and Loeffler are running slightly behind Trump in margin. We’re up to 107 counties that have reported 95 percent or more of their expected vote, and if you total up the votes in those places, Trump won them by 25.7 points in November. But Perdue is only up 25.3 points in those places and Loeffler is up 24.8 points. Plenty of votes left to count, but that’s not what the GOP wants, especially as many of these are Republican-leaning places.

The early results have looked good for Democrats despite Loeffler and Perdue currently leading in the raw vote tallies. Why is that? I talked about it with Geoff.

👀 Dave is more aggressive than most people who make election calls, though he’s saying what a lot of Election Twitter is thinking, even though I wouldn’t expect the networks to make a call any time soon. Note, however, that this pertains to the Warnock race, and Ossoff is still underperforming Warnock by around 0.8 points, so even if you think the Warnock race is in the bag for Democrats, that’s just one of the two they need. 👀

Per those same rough calculations, there are about 685,000 votes outstanding in blue counties and 350,000 votes outstanding in red counties. (Of course, not every vote in a blue county will be for Democrats and not every vote in a red county will be for Republicans.)