- The Democratic Party regained control of the US Senate, according to the projected results of two decisive elections in Georgia.
- As Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their respective runoff elections in Georgia, the party will have 50 Senate seats and effective control of the upper house because new Vice President Kamala Harris will have the tiebreaker vote.
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The Democratic Party gained control of the U.S. Senate, according to the projected results of two crucial run-off elections in Georgia.
Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock on Wednesday were designed to win their races against Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
The Senate will now consist of 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats and two independents who join the Democrats, resulting in a 50-50 split. But Democrats will effectively control the chamber because new Vice President Kamala Harris holds the tiebreaker vote.
The Senate map was confronted with the GOP in the 2020 election cycle. Of the 35 senators running for re-election, 12 were Democrats and 23 were Republicans. Of those, Republicans had to defend 10 seats in races considered competitive, while Democrats had to defend only two.
Democratic Senator Doug Jones of Alabama was expected to lose his seat, meaning Democrats hoped to get four seats to reach a 50-50 tie and five seats to obtain a majority.
The Democrats’ most likely route to the majority would be to regain seats in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and North Carolina and get an additional seat in Georgia, Iowa, Montana or Kansas to reach 51-49, according to election analysts.
Democrats finally won seats in Colorado, Arizona and Georgia and lost hotly contested elections in North Carolina, South Carolina, Iowa, Maine and Montana.
Democratic activists, legislators and fund-raisers have made a big effort to get the vote as early as possible because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and more people voted by mail and personally in last year’s elections than at any other time in recent history .
The drama was intensified and extended when the two races in Georgia went to the second round, with campaign money flowing into the state before election day on Tuesday.
The second round saw a huge turnout. According to the US Elections Project, more than 3 million people voted before election day, which represents about 39% of all registered voters in the state.
Republicans were struggling both in terms of policy and strategy.
The coronavirus pandemic caused concomitant economic and health crises, and President Donald Trump and the Republican Party failed to deliver on their campaign promise to revoke the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and replace it with another health plan, even while the party controlled both the House and the Senate in 2017 and 2018. The White House also promised for months to release a health proposal, but it never did.
The Republicans’ accusation that President-elect Joe Biden would start socialized medicine has dropped, given his opposition to “Medicare for All” and strong support for Obamacare, which Biden has promised to expand with a public option.
While Trump inherited a strong economy when he took office and oversaw historically low unemployment rates for several years, his economic approval rating dropped before the elections.
Trump and his allies also spent weeks baselessly attacking the integrity of the 2020 elections and denying Trump’s defeat. All along, most of the dominant Republican establishment was silent or actively supported the president’s conspiracy theories.
In Georgia, Republican lawyers who support Trump, Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, asked voters to boycott the second round, arguing that the disputes were already “rigged”.
At a “Stop the Steal” rally in the state last month, Wood told a crowd of Trump supporters not to vote for Loeffler and Perdue.
“Don’t give it to them,” he said. “Why would you go back and vote in another fraudulent election, for God’s sake? Fix it! You have to fix it!”
“I would encourage all Georgians to let you know that you will not vote until your vote is guaranteed – and I mean that, regardless of the party,” said Powell. “We cannot live in a republic, a free republic, unless we know that our votes are legal and safe.”
Republican establishment members quickly distanced themselves from Powell and Wood and told voters to ignore them. But it was not only marginal actors that generated controversy for the party.
Ronna McDaniel, the president of the Republican National Committee, appeared to be facing a messaging crisis that she created last month when, after weeks of supporting the president’s denial of her defeat in re-election, she struggled to persuade Georgia voters who believed in her. election was rigged to participate in the second round of the Senate.
When a Trump supporter echoed the president’s baseless claim that the voting machines were tampered with and illegally exchanged votes from Trump to Biden, McDaniel replied, “We didn’t see that in the audit, so we just have to … That evidence we didn’t see , so we’ll have to wait and see. “
At another point, a voter asked why they should invest “more money and work” when the two disputes “were already settled”.