From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Georgia Voters Can Put an End to Mitch McConnell’s Grim Reaping
Date November 13, 2020 3:25 AM
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[ January runoff races could flip the Senate and prevent the
majority leader from obstructing another Democratic presidency. This
is a richly deserved nightmare scenario for <itch McConnell who has
given Americans so many nightmares for so many years.]
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GEORGIA VOTERS CAN PUT AN END TO MITCH MCCONNELL’S GRIM REAPING  
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John Nichols
November 6, 2020
The Nation
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_ January runoff races could flip the Senate and prevent the majority
leader from obstructing another Democratic presidency. This is a
richly deserved nightmare scenario for <itch McConnell who has given
Americans so many nightmares for so many years. _

Georgia Senate candidates Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff
(pictured) look to unseat Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.,
Elijah Nouvelage / Getty Images // The Nation

 

Not so fast, Mitch McConnell. The grim reaper from Kentucky can’t
count his Senate majority just yet, thanks to a quirk of American
democracy and a constitutional codicil that could see Georgia voters
take his gavel away.

Unlike most states, Georgia allows for runoff elections when no
candidate for the US Senate receives a majority of the votes in
initial balloting. The state had two Senate elections on November
3—a regular contest for the seat held by Republican incumbent David
Perdue and a special election for the seat held by appointed
Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler. The special election pitting
Loeffler against the inspired candidacy of the Rev. Raphael Warnock is
definitely headed to a runoff on January 5
[[link removed]], and it now appears
the regular election for the Perdue seat will go the same direction.

If both seats flip, as is a real possibility in the suddenly
competitive state of Georgia, McConnell’s numbers no longer add up.
At best, he’s got 50 of 100 seats—and this is where the
Constitution comes in. If the Senate is tied 50-50, the vice president
has the authority to tip the balance to one party or another. And it
now looks like the new vice president will be Democrat Kamala Harris,
the California senator who with running mate Joe Biden is poised to
prevail over the Republican ticket of Mike Pence and Donald Trump.

This is a richly deserved nightmare scenario for McConnell, the
cynical political careerist who has given Americans so many nightmares
for so many years.

McConnell has been the definitional figure in the governing of the
United States for the better part of a decade. As the conniving and
calculating majority leader of the US Senate, he obstructed President
Obama and empowered President Trump. McConnell has packed the Supreme
Court with right-wing judicial activists and blocked life-and-death
aid in the midst of a pandemic. He has stacked the deck in favor of
his billionaire donors, Wall Street speculators, and the
military-industrial complex. Yet, when the results of the 2020
election were initially being tabulated, he looked to be positioned to
continue as the ghoul of American politics—sapping the life out of
the anticipated presidency of Biden.

Despite their track record of thwarting economic, social, and racial
justice, of denying climate change, and of squandering budgets on tax
breaks for the rich and military adventurism, McConnell’s
Republicans did well enough on Tuesday night.
[[link removed]] While
Biden appears to have prevailed with a promise to be less obnoxious
than Trump, his soft-focus campaign offered little in the way of
coattails. Democrats gained seats only in Arizona and Colorado, while
they lost a seat in Alabama. For the most part, vulnerable Republican
incumbents survived. By Wednesday, even as Democrats held out slim
hope for good results from unsettled contests in North Carolina and
Alaska, it looked as if McConnell and the Republicans would at least
hang on with a 51-49 majority, and perhaps enjoy a 52-48 advantage.
That would have enabled the majority leader to dictate who a President
Biden could appoint and what policies a new administration might
advance. Instead of sweeping to power with a mandate for change, Biden
would begin as a lame duck looking to achieve incremental progress
with executive orders and and modest appointments.

Then the voters of Georgia weighed in. A historically conservative
state that both parties had in recent decades written
off—Republicans who were sure they would win it, Democrats who were
sure they wouldn’t—saw a surge in voter turnout (Thank you, Stacey
Abrams.
[[link removed]])
that required days of ballot counting. The tabulations eventually
moved Biden into a narrow lead, positioning him where he might become
the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the state in 28
years. They also resurrected the Senate candidacy of Jon Ossoff, who
was thought to have fallen short on election night. In the early
count, it looked as if Perdue was over the 50 percent mark and headed
for a second term. But as Biden’s vote total ticked up, Perdue’s
edge ticked away. By Friday morning, Perdue had dropped to 49.8
percent, _The Atlanta Journal-Constitution_ headline
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“Ossoff, Perdue appear headed for runoff in Georgia,” and the
Democrat’s campaign was declaring
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“We have all the momentum, we have all the energy, we’re on the
right side of history. Y’all ready to work? We’re just getting
started.”

There are still hurdles for Ossoff. Perdue’s all but certain to
demand a recount
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in hopes of clawing his way over the 50 percent threshold.

Democrats should fight to make sure the recount goes their way. But
they shouldn’t wait to start campaigning for Ossoff and Warnock.
This is the time for Democrats who want to see a successful Biden
presidency to go all in for a pair of Georgia candidates who can both
win. While some hope is being held out for an upset in Alaska’s
slow-counting Senate race, the best bet is Georgia, where the
party’s  gaining the two Senate seats will give it control of the
chamber. The stakes are as high as they possibly could be, because, as
Syracuse University political science professor Steven White notes,
“If Democrats win the two Senate races in Georgia, their odds of
being able to pass the legislation in their platform [go] up
dramatically.” And McConnell’s odds for obstructing another
Democratic president decline just as dramatically.

Ossoff and Warnock are different candidates who have run distinct
campaigns. But the likelihood is that they will rise or fall together
in what could well be the most expensive Senate competition in
American history. Loeffler is reputedly “the richest politician on
Capitol Hill
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and she’s already spent more than $20 million of her own money on an
ugly campaign that has positioned her to the right of Trump. Perdue is
also a multimillionaire, and McConnell will steer every
special-interest dollar he can find into these two races. But
Democrats have held their own in fundraising this year, and they have
a powerful grassroots apparatus in place in Georgia. A Working
Families Party assessment [[link removed]] of the
November 3 numbers is spot on when it argues, “The results we’re
seeing across Georgia prove that there is a path for progressives in
the South.”

Both Democratic candidates bring strengths to the competition. Ossoff
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who built name recognition and fundraising prowess with a high-profile
2017 congressional bid in suburban Atlanta, shredded Perdue
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debate. Warnock [[link removed]], the senior
pastor of the Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of
the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., finished first in the initial
vote [[link removed]] thanks
to an urban-rural coalition with a proven capacity to mobilize voters.

Former President Barack Obama has already been campaigning for these
two Democrats—dismissing the scandal-plagued Republican incumbents
as “Batman and Robin gone bad…the dynamic duo of doing wrong”
and reminding Georgians
[[link removed]] in
an Atlanta appearance just before the November 3 election, “You’ve
got the chance to flip two Senate seats.” Now that the map is
clearer, Obama, Biden, Harris, and the Democrats should reframe that
message to this: You’ve got the chance to flip _the Senate_, and
prevent McConnell from obstructing another Democratic presidency.

_[JOHN NICHOLS is a national affairs correspondent for The
Nation and the author of the new book The Fight for the Soul of the
Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace's Anti-Fascist,
Anti-Racist Politics
[[link removed]] (Verso).
He’s also the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field
Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America
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from Nation Books, and co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People
Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless
Democracy
[[link removed]].]_

_Copyright c 2020The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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to The Nation for just $12.00!_

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