Georgia election: Huge victory for Democrats as they flip the Senate, giving Biden one-party control

With Senate majority in hand, Biden can remake US tax code, rebalance federal judiciary’s conservative tilt, and avoid GOP oversight for the next two years

Democrats have taken back control of the Senate after Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock defeated incumbent Georgia Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler by razor-thin margins in a pair of runoff elections on Tuesday.

The Associated Press called Mr Warnock’s win in the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday and determined Mr Ossoff had won several hours later, around 4:15pm on the east coast. 

While the new Senate Democratic majority promises to be a massive – and unexpected – asset for the president-elect Joe Biden as he takes office later this month, the news of Mr Ossoff’s victory barely made a ripple in Washington on Wednesday as throngs of rioters supporting Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol.

Congress was forced to evacuate the building in the middle of proceedings to certify president-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory from November.

The threat against US democracy has – justifiably – buried the key development that Democrats will now control both chambers of Congress and the presidency through 2022.

Mr Ossoff’s and Mr Warnock’s victories on Tuesday effectively take the Senate gavel out of Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s hands, ending the Kentucky senator’s two-year reign over a chamber that has been a “graveyard” for liberal legislation from the Democratic-controlled House.

Into the hands of new Majority Leader Chuck Schumer the gavel will go, giving the New York Democrat nearly complete autonomy over what action reaches the floor for votes.

To be clear, without a supermajority of 60 senators, Democrats cannot pass nearly any of Mr Biden’s top priorities, such as his proposed climate, health care, infrastructure, and immigration legislation.

Republicans can still torpedo any new Covid relief bill that doesn’t meet their specifications.

“It is not a watershed moment” for Democrats’ ability to enact their preferred policies, said Jim Manley, a longtime aide to former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

“It doesn't guarantee they’re going to be able to pass a Green New Deal or Medicare for All,” he said.

“But,” he added, “it would put them in a decent place to try and move different aspects of his legislative agenda.”

For instance, Mr Biden and his Senate and House majorities will attempt to undo the Republicans’ massive tax code overhaul from 2017, implementing Mr Biden’s plan to raise rates on corporations and people in the top income bracket.

And If Senate Democrats stick together on Mr Biden’s Cabinet picks, they can move at a breakneck pace to help the president-elect’s administration get off to a quick start.

Mr Ossoff’s and Mr Warnock’s victories also spare Mr Biden the frustrations of Senate Republican committee chairmen launching countless oversight probes into his administrative decisions – and his personal life.

“Senators like [Wisconsin Republican] Ron Johnson can forget about their half-baked, so-called investigations of Hunter Biden,” Mr Manley said.

Republicans will no doubt continue calling for investigations into Mr Biden, but with Democrats controlling committee schedules and subpoena authority in both chambers, the GOP will have no power to pursue their claims.

The question facing the new Senate Democratic majority is how much of Mr Trump’s administration they want to investigate.

Mr Biden’s circle has signalled the president-elect is eager to move forward with his policy agenda and let the tumultuous Trump years largely fade into the history books, but some Democratic senators will be keen to probe Trump administration officials who they have accused of unprecedented corruption.

Democrats turn the tide in Georgia

While Tuesday’s elections may not be a watershed moment for Democrats in Washington, the historic nature of Mr Ossoff’s and Mr Warnock’s success in Georgia cannot be understated.

Georgia hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in 16 years, and it had been even longer since a Democrat won a state-wide runoff there.

Over the last two decades, the Republican party in Georgia has invested heavily in turning out voters in rural parts of the state, the party’s demographic backbone nationwide and particularly in the South.

“For most people, voting isn’t a habit,” said Amy Steigerwalt, a professor of political science at Georgia State University.

“That is something, though, that the Republican party has done really well historically in Georgia – of creating this cache of voters who vote as a matter of habit. So no matter what the race is, no matter how small the stakes, no matter how big the stakes, they’re going to turn out and they’re going to vote.”

But the county-by-county results on Tuesday showed the turnout in those rural, Republican-leaning parts of Georgia far below levels from the general election.

By contrast, the Democratic-leaning DeKalb and Fulton Counties, which include the urban population centre of Atlanta, saw turnout nearly on par with that of the general.

What went wrong for Republicans

Mr Perdue and Ms Loeffler both losing their seats despite the advantages of incumbency could force a reckoning about Donald Trump’s influence within the GOP.

Mr Trump won more than 75m votes nationwide in his 2020 loss to Mr Biden, a staggering total that would have won him any other presidential election in US history.

Twice – first in 2016 and again in 2020 – he demonstrated the ability to rev up the GOP’s conservative base of voters and translate that energy into prodigious turnout figures.

But in both the 2018 midterms and on Tuesday in Georgia, when Mr Trump wasn’t officially on the ballot, Democrats cleaned Republicans’ clocks.

That poses the question: how effective of a strategy was it for Mr Perdue and Ms Loeffler to tie their fortunes to the outgoing president’s cult of personality and his insistence that he actually won the 2020 election.

“Ironically, by President Trump continuing to contest the election results... it means that he on some level was still at the top of this ticket, that this was very much kind of a referendum” on how Mr Perdue and Ms Loeffler have reacted to his post-election behaviour, Ms Steigerwalt said.

At a rally headlined by the president on Monday, the day before the election, Ms Loeffler spoke for roughly 90 seconds.

She used that time to announce she would object to Congress’ certification on Wednesday of Mr Biden’s victory in the Electoral College, a move that is doomed to ultimately fail, but which aligned her with Mr Trump’s interests.

“We’re going to get this done,” Ms Loeffler said alongside Mr Trump on Monday in Dalton. “This president fought for us. We’re fighting for him.”

It is likely to be one of Ms Loeffler’s last votes of consequence as she becomes a lame-duck senator.

Mr Ossoff and Mr Warnock are slated to be sworn in on Friday, 15 January.