The party that controls the Senate will be decided by two runoff races underway in Georgia. Republicans will hold onto control of the chamber if they win one of the seats, but Democrats need to win both seats.
Turnout has already set a record for a runoff election in the state, on the strength of early voting alone. Before voters hit the polls Tuesday, over 3 million ballots had already been cast in the runoffs. That includes approximately 2 million in-person and a million mail ballots.
There’s always a dropoff in turnout between general elections and runoffs, but the pace of early voting in Georgia’s Senate runoffs has been tremendous and points to very high turnout, perhaps around 4 million total votes. In particular, Black voters have been outpacing other groups of voters.
Both parties are hoping to motivate their bases from the presidential election. Georgia was a critical state in the presidential election, and was narrowly won by Mr. Biden, a result that was affirmed again and again by an initial count and two additional recounts.
Republican incumbent Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are facing well-funded Democratic opponents, Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock.
President Trump has zeroed in on the state in his fruitless effort to overturn the election results with baseless claims of fraud. In a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Saturday, audio of which was obtained by CBS News, Mr. Trump attempted to pressure Raffesnperger to “find” more than 11,000 votes so he could win the state. But even if he were able to do so, it would not be enough for him to change the outcome of the election.
Georgia’s top elections officials, Gabriel Sterling, on Monday debunked Mr. Trump’s claims one by one.
“This is all easily, provably false. Yet, the president persists,” Sterling said, as he went one-by-one through the various unfounded allegations about Dominion Voting Systems and uncounted ballots.
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