Projected double upset in Georgia would see Democrats take the Senate

The Democrats look set to win the two Senate run-off elections in Georgia giving the incoming Joe Biden administration a razor thin majority in the Senate. While some votes are still straggling the tallies now look clear, saving us the agonising days-long wait for final results experienced back in November, partly thanks to new rules that sped up the counting of early votes. Recounts are probably inevitable but no change should be expected.

Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock has been declared the winner of his race and if John Ossoff can maintain his razor thin lead, which he is expected to do, the Democrats and Republicans will control 50 senators apiece. This gives the Democrats a functional majority of one as when votes tie the casting vote will fall to the incoming vice-president, in this case Kamala Harris.

With this thinnest of Senate Majorities on top their narrow House of Representatives majority Democrats now control the presidency and both halves of the legislature – an undeniably impressive achievement. Still, these are not the thick margins they were hoping for pre-3 November last year and likely not enough to enact sweeping change.

Besides Biden the single most powerful politician in America is, arguably, set to become the self-described “moderate conservative Democrat” Senator for West Virginia Joe Manchin. Already Manchin has flatly disavowed some of the more radical ideas Democrats flirted with during the Biden campaign such as abolishing the filibuster and during the negotiations over pandemic relief pushed for spending more moderately than the party line.

Other moderates on both sides of the aisle – Jon Tester, Mark Kelly, and Kyrsten Sinema for the Democrats; Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins for the Republicans – also look set to become powerful. The traditional sweetners doled out to the states of Senators holding the balance of power means now is probably a good time to be a construction worker in West Virginia or a lobsterman in Maine.

Still, even if we should expect most of the Democrats’ more ambitious plans to be quietly abandoned this doesn’t mean nothing will be done. The $2000 pandemic relief cheques, which Democrats and Donald Trump called for but most Republicans opposed, now look fairly likely. More radically, admitting Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. as states, which would reduce the Republican’s structural advantage in the Senate and the Electoral College, might also now be on the cards.

It also gives the Biden administration a freer hand to exercise its executive power and in picking his Cabinet and other officials who require Senate confirmation. Judicial appointments, which Republicans ended up stonewalling under Barack Obama, should now also run fairly smoothly.

Outside of governance pundits are desperately reading the exit polls and voter tally tea leaves to try and figure out the electoral future of both parties. For the Democrats the win, however narrow, will raise hopes that Georgia might be going the way of Virginia drifting from a reliably red state, to purple, to blue.

As for the candidates themselves they mainly reflect the existing Democratic voter coalition. Warnock will doubtless seem the more inspiring of the two for many, as his slightly stronger performance than Ossoff suggests. Warnock, a Baptist minister who leads a church once ministered to by Martin Luther King, will be first black Senator to a state with one of the USA’s largest African-American populations. Ossoff, meanwhile, a Jewish millennial who has threaded the needle between moderate and progressive tending to the former on economic issues and the latter socially.

The bigger and more uncertain question is what this portends for the Republicans. On the one hand this could be cast a repudiation of Trumpism. Republican candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue both tied themselves closely to Trump on the campaign trail. Most notably both signalled their support for the doomed – and frankly shameful – piece of theatre being mounted by many Republican elected officials who plan to try and refuse to certify Biden’s victory today.

Arguing these antics harmed their candidacies will be useful tool in the hands of the Trump-sceptic elements of the Republican party that still remain. They will press the party to distance itself from Trump and his claims of fraud, which he has already started to allege about these Senate races as well.

However, many Republicans might also conclude these elections show the need to keep Trump close. With slight dips in Republican turnout being a key factor in their defeat last night it can be argued that Trump’s star-power has an ability to pull in voters which Republicans will struggle to replicate without him on the ballot. By this logic Trump’s likely 2024 run might be Republican’s best shot at power. Equally, where Perdue and Loeffler did break with Trump it was most notably in their opposition for the $2,000 pandemic cheques. Trump’s occasional willingness to indulge in occasional damn-the-deficit economic populism seems an electoral asset many Republicans are unwilling to cash in on.

Biden’s battle for the “soul of the Republic” may have just gained another electoral victory. Long-delayed to the disappointment of many, the battle for the soul of the Republican party may be getting underway.