IT COMES DOWN TO GEORGIA
The election is over and Democrat Joe Biden won. His win is momentarily tarnished by Donald Trump’s refusal to go through the expected routines for presidential losers but that won’t last long and ultimately will have little lasting meaning. A year from now his effort to hold on to his worshipful followers will be mostly a memory.
Democrats did not make the gains they expected in the four hundred and thirty five member House but they did manage to achieve an ideal majority. Their plurality of sixteen votes is exemplary because Democrats are a fractious bunch prone to an endlessly metastasizing factionalism.
With a larger margin of victory they would have split. With a youthful progressive (not socialist) faction itching for the publicity that a struggle with other Democrats would produce, a smaller margin of victory was the best that the Democrats could hope for. Besides, the very effective Nancy Pelosi will be there to keep the troops in line.
The real challenge for Democratic effectiveness has to be in the Senate (For better or for worse, the Supreme Court is now in conservative hands.). The great debacle for congressional Republican candidates that the polls seemed to predict just did not happen. The Republicans did lose Senate members but they still have fifty members to forty eight for the Democrats. There are two Senators still not elected, both from Georgia.
Georgia, a deeply red Republican state, last sent electors for a Democratic candidate twenty eight years ago in 1992 when Georgians gave a majority of their votes to a fellow southerner, Bill Clinton. This time a much more diverse state whose voters were energized by the heroic efforts of Stacey Abrams gave the election to Joe Biden (African-American Abrams, who lost the governorship there two years ago by a 1.2% margin, has been industriously adding registered voters through her organization, The New Georgia Project.).
The reason the two Senators from Georgia are not already elected has to do with the unusual way the state selects its office holders. Georgia uses a jungle primary (more formally called a non-partisan blanket primary). Primaries normally are really party elections designed to allow members of a party to choose their party’s candidate by vote.
With a jungle primary people from all the parties run in one big primary. In the Georgia version if anyone gets more than fifty percent of the vote, that person is considered elected to the office. If not, the top two vote getters run against each other, even if they are from the same party.
Georgia was, and is, selecting two senators at the same time. In the first primary, Senator Kelly Loeffler was already in office. She had been appointed by Republican Governor Brian Kemp, to replace veteran Senator Johnny Isakson who had retired for reasons of health (Parkinson’s). Loeffler, is a white woman of enormous wealth (Her husband is chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.). In the run-off she finds herself required to run against a Democrat, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, an African-American minister who, as it turns out, is a terrific fundraiser and campaigner.
The incumbent Senator in the other race was Republican David Purdue (the cousin of Sonny Purdue, our current Secretary of Agriculture). Purdue came close in his first primary with 49.7% of the vote. He now finds himself in a run-off against Democrat Jon Ossoff. Ossoff, an investigative reporter, made a political name for himself by running in 2017 to replace Tom Price who had been appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration. Ossoff, in a sensational campaign, almost won. Now he’s back and clearly a threat to Republican Purdue’s reelection.
So the second and the final round of both these primaries will be held on the fifth of January. If they should be won by both the Republicans, Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue, then the Republicans will control the Senate. Mitch McConnell will be back in charge, and the new President will have a great deal of trouble getting any of his program through.
If both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff manage to win, the Republicans and the Democrats will be tied with fifty Senators each. The new Vice-President, Kamala Harris, as the constitutionally appointed President of the Senate, will be there to break ties. That will mean that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will have to give up his luxurious office with the big fireplace and Democrat Charles Schumer can move in as the new Majority leader.
Those office changes are symbolic (both Majority and Minority Leaders in the Senate have nice offices). What is important is that control in the Senate would pass to the Democrats and make it easier for Joe Biden’s administration to get real things done. A continued Republican majority will make real reforms difficult if not impossible.
In the November election, voters over the whole country gave the presidency to Joe Biden. A good deal of Biden’s ability to really save the population from the virus and the economy from almost total dysfunction will depend on the roughly four million voters in Georgia. If either one or both Republicans win, the government will be functionally deadlocked. Little will get done.
Seventy nine million voters voted for Joe Biden. So the successful achievement of what they desired as indicated with their votes in November will be left up to a small number of voters in Georgia. It all comes down to Georgia! Georgia will decide!
H.J. Rishel
11/18/2020
