“This is going to be the determining factor of whether we have access to healthcare and access to Justice…to make certain that Joe Biden has the support and the congressional mandate he needs to move the country forward.” The New Georgia: An Inflection Point “We know this is going to be a hard fight,” says Abrams who is already mobilizing and raising millions of dollars for the January vote. But to win the two precious Senate seats, they have to up their game even further in the January vote.

3, which enabled them to force the runoff elections. To capture Georgia’s two Senate seats, the Democratic challengers have to roll up huge majorities in the four metropolitan counties surrounding Atlanta – Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb, and Gwinnett – as well as gaining solid majorities in mid-sized cities like Athens, Augusta, Columbus, Macon, and Savannah. Total turnout for the November election hit a record 5 million. Political leaders like Stacey Abrams, the black legislator who in 2018 came within 55,000 votes of getting elected governor of Georgia, have put on a full-court press for the past two years to arouse, register, and mobilize hundreds of thousands of new minority voters who helped Biden win. The political power of urban Atlanta is buttressed by densely-populated suburban collar counties, where college-educated women have become a potent political force along with assertive black voting rights movements. In the past decade, Georgia has added two million people, immigrants from everywhere, so that the electorate is now 10 percent foreign-born and 40 percent non-white. Promising because the modern demographics of Georgia have changed so dramatically in recent years, transforming the commercial hub of the Old South into high tech, high finance cosmopolitan electorate with a trendy hip-hop culture pitted against the grits and corn-pone values of traditionally conservative small-town Georgia. Changing Demographics Fuel Democrats’ Chances Democrats pinning hopes on exploiting same promising political arithmetic that won for Biden.

Poll numbers from Fox News in Atlanta show both races are tight, with Warnock in paper-thin lead, Ossoff trailing slightly. But the two Democratic candidates have each raised more than $100 million, record levels that are well ahead of their Republican rivals. Normally, the odds would favor the Republican incumbents because Georgia is a red state, long dominated by the GOP and because Republican PAC money enjoys a huge 5-1 money advantage over Democrats. Just over three million Georgians have already cast ballots in early voting – 2,072,000 voting in person and 928,000 by mail, with another 450,000 mail ballots requesteds but still outstanding. And the early voting has been far heavier that in most runoff elections. The battle is intense – already a super-record of $470 million is pouring into campaign ads. So the stakes in Georgia are extremely high. But if Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock can upset and oust two incumbent Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, in Georgia’s January 5 runoff election, that would literally tie the Senate at 50-50, and give the deciding vote to Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris. Right now, Republicans have locked in a 50-48 advantage in the Senate and that poses a serious obstacle to President-Elect Biden.

Senate runoff elections in Georgia in early January and thereby gaining control of the U.S. Washington – Joe Biden’s tradition-shattering, razor-thin, 11,799-vote victory in the Deep South state of Georgia in November is the political explosion that fires Democratic dreams of winning two fiercely fought U.S.

Nytimes georgia runoff