During the first week of January 2021, all eyes turned towards the southern US State of Georgia, where the Senate run-off elections of 5 January had become the final battleground of the memorable 2020 American election season. This run-off election was mandated by the state’s majority-vote requirement, which requires any candidate to secure at least 50 per cent of the vote cast before he or she can be declared the winner of the contest. None of the candidate had crossed this milestone during the 3 November 2020 elections, thereby necessitating a re-election.
A staunchly Republican state in recent years, Georgia’s sixteen Electoral College votes were cast in favour of Democratic candidate Joe Biden during the November presidential election. This particular outcome was itself the subject of many legal challenges by the Trump team, all disallowed, and culminated in an infamous hour-long phone call by Donald Trump on 2 January to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, in which Trump asked him to “find 11, 780 votes”, which would allow him to overtake Biden’s lead by the unambitious margin of a single vote. Trump’s call seems to have violated federal election law, an infringement committed ironically by the head of the federal executive branch himself!
The Senatorial contest pitted two Republican incumbents against two Democratic contenders. The outcome was of particular importance for the President-elect, since a Democratic victory in both seats would level out the US Senate with equal numbers, 50 each, of Democratic and Republican senators, and allow a Democratic majority through the casting vote of the new Vice-President in the event of any voting along strictly partisan lines.
The Republican candidates were exactly what you could expect the GOP to field during the elections. Both conservatives as well as Trump sycophants, David Perdue, a former CEO of Reebok, had been Senator since 2015, and Kelly Loeffler, businesswoman, part-owner of the Atlanta Dream women’s NBA basketball team and wife of the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, had been nominated as Senator in December 2019 following the resignation of Senator Johnny Isakson for health reasons.
The Democrats fielded a first-time African-American candidate, the Reverend Raphael Warnock, and a media-savvy Jewish Millennial, Jon Ossoff. Warnock has been a pastor since 2005 at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where his father had once been co-pastor alongside Dr Martin Luther King. Jr. Warnock’s victory, with 50.9 per cent of the votes, made him Georgia’s first black Senator, one of three black Senators in the 117th Congress, and only the eleventh black Senator in American history. Ossoff, an investigative journalist and documentary film maker, who won 50.46 per cent of the votes, has been with Insight TWI, a London-based independent film production company since 2012, most recently as CEO.
The results in Georgia reflect recent demographic shifts within the state’s voter base, alongside increased voter registration and participation by African-Americans, especially women. The black vote does matter, given that African-Americans account for 30.5 per cent of the population in America’s ninth most populous state. In addition, suburban voters have increasingly developed liberal sympathies in response to Trumpism, mainly in the sprawling suburbs of Atlanta. The state has in recent years also benefited from the return of many previous residents, as well as from an influx of Asian-American and Hispanic settlers. Georgia is a relatively affluent state and has attracted many jobseekers because of the opportunities provided by its big corporations and strong financial services and manufacturing sectors. Atlanta has become the commercial capital of the south, and home to the most affluent African-American community in the nation.
Georgia has delivered for Joe Biden, at a potential turning point in the state’s history. It is an important victory. The largest of the states of the Deep South, Georgia has played an important part in America’s history. The last of the original thirteen colonies of the United States, it happens to be named after an 18th-century British monarch, George II, in a reminder of America’s own colonial past. At various times, it has been a pro-slavery state, a leading member of the Confederacy, a Jim Crow state, and a staunchly Dixiecrat state. It had a series of segregationist governors and Senators, including the infamous Lester Maddox, and even voted for George Wallace for President in 1968, while also being the home state of Jimmy Carter, one of America’s most liberal presidents, during the Seventies.
As the narrow victory margins attest to, it cannot be concluded that Georgia has become safe Democratic territory. There is much conservative and libertarian support within the state, and Trump has a particularly strong supporter base there, especially in rural areas and among poorer whites. Despite a surge in Democratic votes, Georgian electorate has also returned some notable figures of the far-right, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-supporting Representative for the 14th Congressional District. A lot depends on what transpires between now and 2024, and whether an epiphany among large sections of the voting public leads to a re-engagement with the world of reality, rather than persisting with a concocted conspiratorial worldview.
Ashis Banerjee