As Election Day in Georgia’s ongoing Senate run-off races quickly approaches, polling has revealed that both of the races are apparently strikingly close. In other words, rather than a solid Republican rout, Democrats appear to definitely have a chance of winning both races, which would hand the party control of the Senate. In the event of two Democratic victories, the chamber would be 50-50 — but vice presidents break ties, and the next vice president will be Kamala Harris. As of early Tuesday, according to averages of relevant polling collected by FiveThirtyEight, Democrat Raphael Warnock leads Republican Kelly Loeffler by an average of 0.9 percent and Democrat Jon Ossoff leads Republican David Perdue by an average of 0.4 percent.
These numbers could swiftly change, but the trend seems clear: Democrats have a real chance of winning the two ongoing Senate races in Georgia, where President-elect Joe Biden recently scored a narrow victory. Biden won the state by a little over 12,000 votes, and he was the first Democratic presidential nominee to win Georgia since the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was on the ballot. Biden recently made an in-person campaign stop on behalf of the Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia, and he’s also recorded a video message on the candidates’ behalf that the duo released as a joint ad. Former president Barack Obama has also campaigned on behalf of both Democrats.
Among recent polls cataloged by FiveThirtyEight, SurveyUSA seems to have some of the best news for the Democrats. In polling that SurveyUSA conducted in mid-December, Warnock led by 7 percent and Ossoff led by 5 percent, numbers that FiveThirtyEight adjusted to a 5 percent and 4 percent lead, respectively. (FiveThirtyEight says that they “adjust polls for house effects based on how much each poll differs from the polling consensus.”) Other recent polling, including from the GOP-leaning Trafalgar Group, has the Republicans in the lead.
Loeffler and Perdue have tied themselves closely to Donald Trump. Recently, the incumbent Republican Senators even expressed public support for a Texas-led lawsuit in which top Republicans were seeking the invalidation of the election outcome in four states where Biden won, including the Senators’ own home state of Georgia. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected this lawsuit, with not a single justice expressing any openness to granting the Republicans’ anti-democratic demands.
