Washington will have to get used to that. He’ll have to get used to that himself. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who has been the most powerful man in Congress for years, will soon have a new title: minority leader.
If what the leading US media predicts after a long election night and the extensive counting of the votes is confirmed, the Democrats will celebrate a triumph that they did not expect – not in Georgia, in the conservative south of the USA. It is Donald Trump’s last and almost complete defeat. His party has already lost the presidency under him, as has the House of Representatives. And now the Senate.
According to unanimous projections, the Democrats will win the two seats in the Georgia by-election, breaking Republican dominance in the Senate. They break the power of Mitch McConnell.
It’s not official yet, the margins are tight, a recount is possible in one of the races. But everything points to a double victory for the Democrats, a slide to the left – and thus a new era in the USA.
Warnock would be Georgia’s first black Senate candidate
On the one hand, the party owes this victory to its candidates. 51-year-old Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock, who preaches at civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s church, would become the first black person to represent the former Confederate state of Georgia in the Senate. Warnock has never held political office but is well known in Georgia as a pastor. He is on the left wing of the Democrats. His lead over Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler is so large that a recount seems impossible.
With Warnock’s historic election all but certain, he addressed voters in a video message and spoke about his 82-year-old mother, who used to pick other people’s cotton in the field. With her vote, she has now contributed to her youngest son becoming a United States Senator. “This is America,” Warnock said.
In the other by-election, filmmaker Jon Ossoff managed to win more votes than David Perdue, the second Republican incumbent. Ossoff’s lead is much narrower, but Republican observers also assume that nothing will change in the interim result. And while a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington, the AP agency and the broadcasters NBC, CNN and CBS committed themselves: Ossoff will also win a Senate seat. The Democrat positions himself more at the center of the party and at 33 he would become the youngest Senator since 1973 – the year a certain Joe Biden was first sworn in.
Loeffler and Perdue, two extremely wealthy investors, had described their challengers in an aggressive campaign as left-wing extremists who would help Biden turn the USA into a socialist hell. This might have worked in previous elections. Probably not this time. Loeffler and Perdue were not good candidates. They have been under pressure since the start of the pandemic, selling off large blocks of shares before people realized just how dangerous Covid-19 really is. Their Democratic challengers never missed an opportunity to exploit these stock deals.
Trump and his talk of electoral fraud cost votes
But the Republicans’ own weakness was only one factor. The more important one was called Donald Trump. In the minds of Republican strategists, the Georgia by-election should have been a referendum on whether Biden and his Democrats would be able to rule Washington in the future or whether they would be controlled by a Republican-dominated Senate.
But Trump thwarted that plan. For weeks, the president-elect has continued to steer the debate around himself by making verifiably false, increasingly bizarre allegations of voter fraud and attacking Georgia’s Republican election officials. He also urged the two senators in his party to accept at least parts of his conspiracy theories, which they readily did.
It is not yet possible to say precisely whether Trump’s talk of fraud is the reason that significantly fewer of his party supporters went to the polls on Tuesday than two months ago. But in Republican circles, Trump is already being held responsible for this. The Democrats, on the other hand, were much better at mobilizing their own voters – especially black Americans and voters in the suburbs.
For the Republicans, the foreseeable loss of the two seats is a disaster. The Senate, as the conservatives had repeatedly emphasized in recent weeks, was their last line of defense against Biden’s future administration – their bastion from which they would block everything from the White House to Congress. Now that bastion has fallen. Joe Biden will benefit from this. His party now has 50 seats in the chamber, as many as the Republicans. With the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris, however, the Democrats can break a stalemate, provided they keep their own faction together, which includes the two independents who have traditionally leaned towards the Democrats, including left-wing primary candidate Bernie Sanders.
But even 51 votes are not enough for the really big projects
This would mean that Biden will have no problem getting his cabinet and his candidates for the federal courts confirmed by the Senate – which makes his government work much easier. It will also allow him to implement at least parts of his agenda. A simple majority in the Senate is sufficient to spend more money on combating the economic consequences of the pandemic or to raise taxes.
On the other hand, the future president will still need the 60 votes in the Senate that are needed to pass most laws for big projects such as an infrastructure package or a climate protection program. He will therefore be dependent on the cooperation of the Republicans, which, however, will not exist for many of the Democrats’ desired projects.
Smaller compromises, on the other hand, would certainly be possible again after years of standstill. From the point of view of the Democrats, a medium-sized miracle would have happened in Georgia – at least.