With votes still rolling in from across the state, the special election for U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s seat will go to a January 5th runoff, while the battle between Sen. David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff remained too close to call Tuesday night.
State law requires candidates to capture 50% plus one to win an election without a runoff.
Loeffler will face the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat and senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, after defeating her GOP rival in the race, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins.
Collins said he called Loeffler to congratulate her on making the runoff. “She has my support and endorsement,” he wrote on Twitter.
Perdue won his Senate seat in 2014 on a winning message of being a political outsider with a successful business record as CEO of Reebok and Dollar General.
But after six years in Washington, including four years during the Trump administration in which Perdue acted as one of the president’s closest allies in Congress, the senator’s road to reelection has been a bumpier ride, with Ossoff making the race a neck-and-neck battle to the end.
Perdue has cast Ossoff as an inexperienced hand with a “dangerous, socialist agenda” while painting himself as a results-oriented leader in the Senate.
Ossoff, for his part, has hammered Perdue for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in Washington and accused the senator of profiting off the crisis while telling everyday Georgians the pandemic is entirely manageable.
A complicating factor for both Perdue and Ossoff has been the presence of Shane Hazel, the Libertarian candidate in the race, who has pulled in about 4% of support in polls and kept both Perdue and Ossoff struggling to pass the 50% threshold to win the race outright.
Special election, different dynamic…
The special election for Loeffler’s seat had been a radically different kind of race with 21 candidates and no partisan primaries.
Gov. Brain Kemp picked Loeffler in December to succeed ailing U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, banking on her potential appeal to suburban Atlanta women and her ability to finance her own campaign as a multimillionaire financial services executive.
But Collins challenged Loeffler for the seat, even without the governor’s blessing.
The result was an extraordinarily personal intraparty clash, with caustic attacks and dueling claims over who is the most “pro-Trump,” even as 50% of Georgians say they disapprove of the job the president is doing in office.
But Loeffler had the resources to push her message far and fast, spending $23 million of her own money to finance her campaign.
Like Perdue, Loeffler cast herself as a successful business executive and Washington outsider with a “100% pro-Trump” voting record.
Collins, meanwhile, launched his own “Trump Defender Bus Tour,” named for his role in defending the president against during the House impeachment trial.
While Loeffler and Collins battled each other, Warnock beat back other Democrats, consolidating support with big-name endorsements like Stacey Abrams, former president Barack Obama and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer.
Warnock spoke to media and staff at his campaign headquarters in Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood as it became clear he would face Loeffler in the runoff, saying he is ready for a brutal runoff campaign with plenty of divisive attacks, which Republicans have already signaled they will deliver.
“So, while they try to tear me down I’m going to be busy trying to lift the families of Georgia up,” Warnock said. “Because we’re all we got.”
Georgia is the only state in the country this year with two Senate seats on the ballot. Depending on results around the country, the outcome of Georgia’s races could eventually determine which party controls the Senate, where Republicans held 53 seats heading into Election Day.
