Georgia Senate battle is a high stakes poker game

The Democratic failure to win a majority in the U.S. Senate on Nov. 3 leaves the country and Joe Biden in a precarious position and the voters of Georgia in the driver’s seat.

Biden will face the challenges of the escalating COVID-19 pandemic, the shattered economy and the budget deficit with one hand tied behind his back. The GOP has a two-seat edge in the Senate and unless both Democratic candidates in the Georgia runoff elections win on Jan. 5, Biden will have trouble getting a ham sandwich through the Senate. Otherwise, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will reign supreme.

The auguries for cooperation between Biden and McConnell have not been auspicious. The two men who served together in the Senate have not spoken since Election Day. The Senate majority leader has been resistant to efforts by House Democrats to pass new pandemic assistance legislation that would provide much needed financial assistance to unemployed Americans, hard pressed state and local governments and first responders on the frontlines of fighting the raging COVID-19 pandemic. 

The best hope for aggressive action against the ferocious forces that threaten the U.S. are Democratic victories in the two Senate elections in Georgia. 

The Georgia Senate runoff campaign is a game of high stakes poker. The people of the state hold the fate of the rest of the nation in their hands. If Democrats win both races to take control of the Senate with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, it will be an auspicious time to dust off Winston Churchill’s comment on the brave Royal Air Force pilots who won the Battle of Britain against Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Churchill honored them when he said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Voters in Kentucky failed to ditch Mitch, but the people of Georgia still have a chance to depose McConnell from his perch as Senate majority leader. The most impressive part of Biden’s successful national campaign for president was his victory in Georgia, the old confederacy. The big question is whether Democrats can build upon Biden’s success there and take the two Senate seats still in play in the Peachtree State.

Georgia, deep in the heart of Dixie, has become a purple state. In the last two cycles, races have been tight as a tick on a hound dog. On Election Day, Biden won by 0.2 percent and Sen. David Perdue (R) beat the Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff by only 1.8 percent. In 2018, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp edged out his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams by a mere 1.4 percent.

The virtual contestants there are Biden and McConnell, but the actual contestants are the four candidates. The candidates for the full six-year term are the Republican incumbent Perdue and his Democratic challenger, former congressional candidate Ossoff. The combatants in the race to fill the remaining two years of former Sen. Johnny Isakson’s (R) term are Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to the Senate by Gov. Kemp, and the Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock, the African American pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church where civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. 

Polls shows that both races are tight. But there are caveats to the polling in the state. Many polls in 2020 races significantly underestimated GOP votes so the two Republicans might have an advantage. These races are both special runoff elections with no presidential contest on the ballot so it’s tricky for pollsters to gauge turnout.

Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia is a template for victories for the two Democrats. The Democratic presidential stand bearer fared poorly with white voters, but he won overwhelming support from non-white voters who made up four-tenths of the electorate. Biden lost rural Georgia, but he won big in urban areas like metro Atlanta and almost broke even with Trump in the state’s suburbs. 

The two Senate races have been unrelentingly negative. Democrats have hammered both wealthy Republicans for using inside information gleaned from their Senate positions to make profitable stock trades. Republicans have tried to brand the Democrats as socialists and radicals. The Democratic candidates must hope that the African American turnout doesn’t drop without a presidential race on the ballot.

The ace in the Democratic deck is Abrams who came close to beating Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial contest. The indefatigable Abrams has worked tirelessly in recent years to register and rally new voters and her efforts paid off in Biden’s win. She plans on running against Kemp again in 2022 and victories by Warnock and Ossoff would be a big boost to her campaign and make her into a national political powerhouse.

While Democrats are unified in their pursuit of victory in Georgia, Trump has created division in the Republican ranks. He has criticized Kemp for failing to overturn Biden’s victory there and the two GOP candidates must contend with die hard Trump supporters who want Republicans to boycott the runoff because of alleged election rigging.

The national stakes of the runoff races in Georgia were evident over the weekend. Former President Barack Obama did a virtual campaign rally with Warnock and Ossoff on Friday. Saturday, Trump campaigned with the two Republican senators even though the president was as focused on his own electoral misfortunes as the electoral hopes of Perdue and Loeffler. If Democrats win both races, the big loser will be McConnell. If Republicans win either of the two races, Biden will be on the hot seat. 

Brad Bannon is a Democratic pollster and CEO of Bannon Communications Research. He is the host of the podcast Deadline D.C. with @BradBannon and the Progressive Voices network.