After a November that brought Democrats a decidedly mixed bag of electoral results, Tuesday’s Senate contests gave us a moment of unexpected celebration. As of Wednesday morning, it appears Raphael Warnock has defeated Kelly Loeffler and Jon Ossoff has seemingly edged out David Perdue (though the latter contest was close enough that many media outlets haven’t called it yet). That gives Democrats control of the Senate by the narrowest possible 50-50 margin and therefore control over the federal government. It also reaffirms what many Georgia Democrats have been saying for years: Their state may be on its way to turning fully blue, which would upend the usual math in the Senate and Electoral College.
Here are other takeaways from the two-pronged Georgia beatdown:
Filling jobs in the Biden administration just got a lot easier
Unseating Sen. Mitch McConnell from his perch as Senate majority leader doesn’t mean we’ll get a wave of progressive legislation. But it does take away the GOP’s ability to block Joe Biden’s nominees to federal posts. Before Tuesday, nominees who really shouldn’t be controversial, like Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden, would have faced an uphill climb to confirmation. Biden might have been forced to follow Donald Trump’s precedent and appoint “acting” agency heads. Lower-profile sub-cabinet positions could have been held up by Republicans for no other reason than that it would make it difficult for the administration to function. And McConnell would likely have held up judicial nominees in an effort to keep control of the third branch of government.
Now that Democrats control the Senate—including the committees that are key to the confirmation process—Biden will have a much freer hand to appoint whoever he wants without worrying about McConnell’s veto. He also won’t be able to use that veto as an excuse for not nominating more progressive figures.
Georgia is fully purple now
Even if Ossoff and Warnock had lost, the simple fact that statewide elections in Georgia are routinely competitive is a major victory for Democrats. Their victories underscore that Georgia is on its way to turning blue.
The evolution of a state’s electorate occurs in steps that aren’t always apparent to the naked eye. When a region goes from red to blue or blue to red, the chief markers are statewide elections, which offer a time-lapse view of the changes. The Atlanta metro area has been undergoing a demographic shift for two decades, as the suburbs get less white and the fast-growing region attracts new residents who vote Democratic. Unless you were closely following Georgia’s economic and population trends, you wouldn’t have been aware of those shifts—but in hindsight, it’s obvious that these would boost Democrats’ political fortunes. This process has played out in other states, most notably Virginia, where increased racial diversity in the suburbs helped turn it into a Democratic stronghold. Could it have already reached Georgia?
Long-term voter turnout investment offers good ROI
After Stacey Abrams’s narrow loss in the 2018 gubernatorial election, her campaign manager Lauren Groh-Wargo released a memo outlining Georgia’s promise as a swing state and calling on the party to invest in the state. “Georgia is not a future opportunity for Democrats,” she wrote, “it is a necessity right now.” Abrams, with Groh-Wago as an adviser, went on to found the Fair Fight PAC, which focuses on voter outreach and education in Georgia and nationwide. The group has rapidly grown in clout and fundraising, taking in a $5 million donation from Michael Bloomberg in 2019 and getting a total of $34.5 million in 39 days as the general election went down to the wire. Democrats in Georgia have been echoing Abrams’s methods ever since 2018: There are a lot of potential voters here that need to be registered and activated—all the national party needs to do is invest.
Well, they were right. There were a ton of voters ready to vote Democratic, and thanks in no small part to the organizing efforts of Abrams and others, Black turnout carried Ossoff and Warnock to victory. Could similar outreach and turnout efforts help Democrats win in other states with heavily Black and diversifying populations, like Mississippi? That sounds like a longshot, but Tuesday’s results show how big the payoff can be.
Democrats are growing less afraid of boldness
Ossoff and Warnock are typical swing-state candidates in that they have avoided endorsing controversial progressive positions like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. But they haven’t gone out of their way to hew to the center, either. In Warnock’s long career as a minister he has spoken out about racial justice, and as a candidate, he has called for bail reform and other policies aimed at reducing incarceration rates. Ossoff, in his 2017 run for Congress, ran as a mild-mannered centrist, but has transformed into an advocate for legal weed, new jobs programs and civil rights legislation; he’s also gone on the attack against Republicans, calling out Loeffler for campaigning with a Klansman.
For decades, Democrats seeking statewide office in the South have followed a playbook that basically boiled down to: Be white and conservative. But candidates have recently demonstrated that having mainstream Democratic views doesn’t doom them to defeat, even in nominally red states. Doug Jones’s pro-choice stance didn’t stop him from winning a (profoundly bizarre) Alabama Senate race; Ossoff and Warnock’s liberalism didn’t disadvantage them in Georgia. This isn’t to say that DSA-style leftism is a winning message in the South, but it does seem that Democrats here no longer feel the need to be Democrats with a dash of Republicanism to them.
Joe Manchin won the election
Progressives can justifiably celebrate Warnock and Ossoff’s victories for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that Warnock will become the first Black Democratic senator from the South. But moderates are surely even more excited. When Democrats have 50 Senate votes, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, by virtue of being the most conservative Democrat in the chamber, will wield enormous power—if he doesn’t approve of a piece of legislation, he can single-handedly block it.
That means, for one thing, that there’s slim to no chance the filibuster will be eliminated; other centrist Democrats, like Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and Montana’s Jon Tester, have opposed doing away with the supermajority requirement for most legislation along with Manchin. The only pieces of legislation that have a chance of passage are those that the entire Democratic caucus can get behind, and that may comprise a fairly narrow sliver of issues. Democrats technically have control over Congress and the White House, but it may feel like we still live in an era of divided government, especially when it comes to issues like climate change, on which Manchin has not been exactly a progressive ally.
Democrats have to deliver on their promises
The structure of the Senate will make it hard to govern with a zero-seat majority. But Democrats still have to do at least some of the things the party has spent the last several years talking about. Whether that means a jobs-creating infrastructure package, a minimum wage hike, improvement and expansion of the Affordable Care Act, a new voting rights bill, or some combination of the above, Democrats have to do something. If their agenda is held up by gridlock, voters won’t accept any excuses about Republican obstructionism. Some Americans will blame Democrats for Washington dysfunction, and some of the low-propensity voters that the party absolutely needs to win elections in places like Georgia will become disillusioned if these big elections don’t result in change.
One question: How much did Trump help Democrats?
This was the last election of the Donald Trump era, and the president may have harmed Republicans with his bizarre tirades about electoral fraud, his denunciations of his own party, and the general atmosphere of chaos he brings with him. He may have damaged the GOP brand among suburban voters or even persuaded some Republicans that voting was pointless. And if he was a drag on the Republican ticket, that should temper Democratic high-fiving a little bit. A post-Trump GOP may be better positioned to win back some suburban voters; Democrats may have more trouble turning voters out without the intense anti-Trump feelings.
That just means Democrats in Georgia and elsewhere should double down on their efforts to contact voters and convince them that politics matters to their lives. It means donors shouldn’t stop donating to groups like Fair Fight. It’s unclear what state the Republican Party will be in by 2022, or what issues will define that election, but the stakes of those midterms will be extremely high. Democrats can probably spend a couple days celebrating before getting back to work, though.
