After having fought four excruciatingly close Senate races in two years, Raphael Warnock gets to sit for a full six-year term in the United States Senate. And Georgia, until not that long ago, a solidly red state, continues to shift in a more competitive direction. Biden’s win there in 2020 was the first by a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton won the state in 1992, and it now has two Democratic Senators neither of whom, it’s worth pointing out, particularly tried to position themselves as a moderate who would defy the national party leadership. Republican Brian Kemp just won a solid reelection victory as governor, and the state legislature remains in GOP hands. But as its metro areas, especially Atlanta, expand, Georgia will become an increasingly viable state for Democrats. And they’ll need it. As Florida and Ohio become increasingly out of reach for Democrats, they’ll need new strongholds to make their electoral math work. Georgia, Arizona and Nevada become crucial to that equation.
Warnock is Georgia’s first full term Black Senator (as Walker would have been, of course). Indeed, according to MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, two thousand people have served in the United States Senate in its history. Including Warnock, a grand total of eleven, that’s a tick above one half of one percent, have been Black.
The difference between a 50-50 tie and a 51-49 majority is, under Senate rules, highly consequential. At 50-50 for the past two years, the Senate operated under a power-sharing agreement in which committee apportionments were split evenly between the parties and which, procedurally, made it much easier for Republicans to slow down Senate business, especially with respect to approving nominees, including to the federal courts. If Democrats do nothing else these next two years, expect them to make hay filling judicial vacancies. The outright majority also gives Senate Democrats subpoena power akin to what Republicans will now have in the House. Whether that means, for example, they will pick up the work, in some form, of the January 6 committee, whose work will end at the conclusion of this Congress, on December 31, remains to be seen. But it will deny House Republicans exclusive purview over investigations and the news cycle oxygen that accompanies it, during these next two years.
Warnock’s win Tuesday night completes what was a no good, very bad year for former President Trump. His special handpicked candidates, including Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, Kari Lake in Arizona, Tudor Dixon in Michigan and now Walker, all lost. J.D. Vance, a Trump pick, did win his Senate seat in Ohio, but in what is now a solidly red state where the GOP governor was reelected by 25 points, while Vance won by 5.5. No doubt, Trump will now engage in deep and serious self-reflection about where he might have done wrong and how to improve himself. In the meantime, we can expect growing tensions within the Party about how to deal with Trump, who remains the frontrunner for the 2024 presidential nomination.
Of course, the 118th Congress will still be a divided one, and with people like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene having significant leverage in the GOP’s House Majority, expect more performative histrionics than any serious attempt at passing legislation. How stable this GOP House majority will be remains to be seen. The incoming majority is half a dozen seats, the likely Speaker, Kevin McCarthy will be hobbled from Day One and vacancies occur in every two year cycle, so we’ll see.
Warnock’s win doesn’t just matter in the immediate term. The Senate map in 2024 is a very bad one for Democrats. Democrats will be defending seats in West Virginia, Montana and Ohio, as well as Nevada and Arizona, among other places. By contrast, every Republican incumbent up for reelection in 2024 is in a safely red state. It’s two years away, it’s a presidential election year, and we don’t know what the climate is going to look like then. But from where we sit today, it would frankly take a miracle for Democrats to hold the Senate in ‘24. In other words, Democrats needed to bank every seat they could this cycle.
What does it all mean? Warnock is a strong candidate, but he might well have lost had Georgia Republicans nominated someone other than the woefully deficient Herschel Walker. And had that been true, we’d be telling very different stories today about Georgia’s and the country’s political future. I heard pundits talking last night about a Warnock “coalition,” the increasingly diverse pool of voters that makes wins like his possible, and a demographic shift that will prove more and more beneficial to Democrats in the years ahead. We’ve heard this talk before, and I’d caution that, if it’s not only wishful thinking, it’s partly that. The same trends that are favorable to Democrats in Georgia are pulling in the opposite direction in places like Ohio. We’re a big, messy, complicated country and we remain absurdly closely divided. Just a reminder.
One of my closest friends has been threatening to leave the country if Walker won. I’m glad he’s staying.
A final comment: though he didn’t mention Warnock by name, at least in the three-minute clip I watched, Walker conceded last night without incident or fanfare. It was, by the way, by far the most coherent Walker has sounded.
While I'm overjoyed that Warnock won, it has to be troubling that with all of the effort and high energy that went into getting the vote out, the margin was only about 30,000 votes - against what had to be one of the worst candidates ever to jump up on the soapbox. Despite the horrible personal history and the stupidity that flowed from his mouth like a mighty river, it was a razor-thin victory, and Warnock ran a flawless campaign.