Georgia has not one, but two U.S. Senate runoff elections scheduled for January 5, the first Tuesday of the new year. And what's going on now in the Peach State could affect the election later.
Democrats Raphael Warnock (left) and Jon Ossoff are respectively challenging Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the former matchup being a special election to determine who completes a term that expires in January 2023. Despite the numerous and numerously valid charges of corruption against the Republican senators, they are both favored to win at this point because Georgia is just such a Republican state and because Democrats don't normally vote in off-elections. And here's the thing. The Republicans just need one of these seats to win control of the Senate in the 119th Congress; the Democrats have to win them both.
But there's more. Although Georgia has certified its results for the presidential election and given its 16 electoral votes to Joe Biden, Donald Trump's lawyers promising a lawsuit of "biblical proportions" that they say will "blow up" the state, a suit expected to implicate Republican Governor Brian Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as part of a plot with a voting machine company to commit major fraud. This could affect the runoff election in two ways. (The Trump campaign has already requested a third vote count in Georgia in an effort to overturn the result.) On the one hand, this move could embolden already angry Georgia Republicans to turn out and put Senators Loeffler and Perdue back in their seats. On the other hand, it could tear up the Republican Party in Georgia and allow Democrats to help Warnock and Ossoff win the elections, as many Republican voters would be turned off by the Trump team's antics and many of them wouldn't even bother to vote.
Either way, this blog endorses both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, for all the obvious reasons.
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