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U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) speaks during an election night party
The Peach State has spoken
“The people have spoken,” US Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock said late Tuesday night as he took the stage after winning a nail-biter run-off election in Georgia. Warnock narrowly defeated his GOP rival Herschel Walker, of former NFL fame, to give Dems a 51-seat majority in the upper chamber. (Neither candidate reaped 50% of votes in the first round last month, sending the Peach State back to the polls for round two.) This result confirms that Senate Dems protected every seat they had on the ballot in last month’s midterms, as well as flipping one crucial seat in Pennsylvania. This edge means that Team Blue will now lead every Senate committee, giving them more wiggle room to confirm President Biden’s judicial picks and prevent their Senate rivals from tinkering with legislation. The defeat of Walker, backed by Donald Trump, is another big blow for the former president, whose interventions in the midterm election proved disastrous for the GOP. It also confirms that Georgia, once a deep-red state where Brian Kemp recently won reelection as governor, is now a battleground state that's up for grabs in 2024.
Georgia votes: Democratic candidate U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker
What We’re Watching: Georgia's runoff election, Iran’s bluff, Putin's black eye, Ramaphosa's political survival
Walker and Warnock reach the finish line
Tuesday is the day that Georgia voters, exhausted by months of this bitterly contested election, will have their final votes counted. Incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock is expected to win a close race with football legend Herschel Walker. Early voting, which is expected to favor Warnock, has had a historically heavy turnout. The Democrats have already secured their Senate majority by winning 50 seats. (A 50-50 tied vote is decided by Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat.) But a 51st seat would be important for Democrats, because it ensures that no single Democrat can win concessions by threatening to block the party agenda and that Democrats have majority control within every Senate committee, speeding the approval of judges and other Biden appointees. A Warnock victory would also give former President Donald Trump yet another political blackeye in the hotly contested state of Georgia. President Joe Biden carried the state in 2020, while Democrats Warnock and Jon Ossoff were elected. Gov. Brian Kemp and particularly Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, distinguished themselves in 2020 and 2021 by refusing to support Trump’s effort to overturn his presidential loss in the Peach State.
The Islamic Republic’s smoke screen
Many media publications jumped the gun Sunday in declaring that the Islamic Republic of Iran had axed the modesty police – the unit that imprisons and beats Iranian women who fail to adhere to the regime’s strict modesty rules. So what really happened? In response to mass protests that started after Mahsa Amini, 22, died in custody on Sept. 16 after being arrested by police for improperly wearing her hijab, Iran’s Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazer said on Saturday that the regime’s “morality police … have been abolished by those who created them." He also stated that the regime’s strict hijab laws were under review. Western media outlets appeared to eat up the Islamic regime’s propaganda, even though Montazer himself clarified that “no official authority” – meaning Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – had agreed to these measures. While US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken offered cautious praise, saying such a move would be a “positive thing,” prominent Iranian dissidents, including journalist Masih Alinejad, who recently spoke to GZERO, said that such takes miss the point because the protest movement is calling for full-blown regime change. This comes as a new report released by a Norwegian-based rights group reveals that the Islamic Republic has executed at least 500 people so far this year.
A black eye for Putin
Is Ukraine taking its fight against the Kremlin deep into Russia now? Early on Monday, large explosions were reported at two major Russian air bases located hundreds of miles from the Ukrainian border. Moscow, which blamed Ukrainian drones and said it had shot down several unmanned Ukrainian craft, responded by lobbing a fresh barrage of missiles into Ukraine later in the day. Kyiv, for its part, was mum on any responsibility for the attack as of this writing — saying only, gamely, that “the earth is round.” If the Russian version is true, it would be a brazen strike on the heart of Russia’s national security complex — one of the bases targeted is home to some of Russia’s nuclear bomber fleet, as well as criticaltanker aircraft. The attack is sure to provoke some ripples within the Kremlin: Russian nationalist bloggers have already criticized the military for leaving the bombers exposed, and some Western military experts have suggested that the drones might have been launched from … within Russia itself.
Ramaphosa’s political escape
Regional leaders of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa's governing party, have rescued the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, from corruption charges and the threat of a successful impeachment vote in parliament. In 2018, Ramaphosa won his position as ANC leader and then as South Africa’s president following a wave of corruption charges against his party rival, the populist former president Jacob Zuma. Six months ago, a former South African intelligence chief (and Zuma ally) accused Ramaphosa of hiding the theft of $4 million from his farm to conceal the fact he had illegally stashed a lot of cash at home. In response, Ramaphosa said thieves had made off with just $580,000 he’d stuffed in a sofa, but said he earned the money on the sale of some buffalo and hadn't wanted to put it into a safe for fear that park employees might access it. A panel of legal experts appointed to report on these charges, expressed “substantial doubt” about the buffalo part of the story. But on Monday, ANC leaders instructed ANC members in parliament to vote against endorsement of the report, defeating a bid by the ANC’s leftist “radical economic transformation” faction to depose him from party leadership. Ramaphosa has now asked the country’s Constitutional Court to declare the report unlawful. Now backed by a majority of votes in parliament, Ramaphosa will lead the ANC into national elections in 2024.This comes to you from the Signal newsletter team of GZERO Media. Sign up today.
While you were watching the insurrection, Democrats won the US Senate
Earlier this week, we told readers to brace for a hellish week in US politics. As we saw Wednesday, when armed rioters, goaded by President Trump, stormed the Capitol building in a bid to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election win, this week's events turned out to be as infernal as billed — and then some.
But while we were (understandably) distracted, something else very big happened: Democrats won the US Senate, a political development with massive implications for Biden's legislative agenda over the next four years.
Georgia's nail-biter runoff elections. In winning runoff elections for both of Georgia's Senate seats Tuesday, Democrats succeeded in turning a historically-red state blue. Reverend Raphael Warnock will now make history as the first Black person from Georgia — and the first Black Democrat from the once-segregationist South — to be sworn in as a US Senator. Jon Ossoff, meanwhile, will be the first Jewish senator from the South since the 1970s.
But the results from Georgia will reverberate far beyond the Peach State. Democrats will now have control of the White House and both chambers of Congress for the first time in a decade.
A boost for Biden. The incoming president will now have a better shot at getting (parts) of his legislative agenda through Congress. In addition, Biden's picks for federal judgeships and cabinet posts will encounter little obstruction. It's even possible that there will be a Supreme Court vacancy during Biden's term.
One of Biden's early objectives will be passing a more robust COVID relief package, something Democrats have pushed for against Republican stonewalling in the Senate. That legislation, which would dole out more generous stimulus checks — a move supported by 65 percent of American voters — could also position Democrats well ahead of what will be the usual cut-throat midterm elections in 2022.
But there are limits to what Biden can do. While Biden will now have a good chance of passing legislation on issues like health care and climate change, the Democrats' razor-thin Senate majority (it's a 50-50 tie with Vice President Kamala Harris casting a tie breaker vote) means that Biden will need the support of moderates on both sides of the aisle to get things done (all non-budgetary legislation requires at least 60 votes to pass in the Senate).
This means that Biden will not be able to fulfill the wishlist of progressive Democrats, whose support helped him clinch the presidency. Indeed, this is likely to deepen fissures within an already fractious Democratic party.
Progressives with massive followings, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, will likely use their soap boxes to push for broader reform than is achievable given Biden's own centrist leanings and the limitations of a one-vote majority in the Senate. (The Democrats' majority in the House, meanwhile, is one of the slimmest in history.)
Reaching across the aisle? The dust needs to settle before we reach any meaningful conclusions about whether Trump's incessant rallying against "rigged" elections over the past few months depressed Republican turnout in traditionally-red Georgia, or what Wednesday's insurrection means for the Republican party's post-Trump future.
What we do know is that Biden plans to reach across the aisle, because he's told us — many times. But will he be able to find a handful of senators from both parties who believe that real compromise and bipartisanship is important for the country's future? And how will all that be affected by this week's events?
Biden in a bind. In a time of extreme partisanship, Biden is in a tough spot: the only way he can govern is from the center, but the center is increasingly under assault from both sides of the aisle.
Georgia Senate election is a game changer for Biden; Trump's effect on GOP's future
Jon Lieber, who leads Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, offers insights on US politics:
First question. What do the results of the Georgia Senate election mean?
Well, this is a real game changer for President Biden. He came into office with the most progressive agenda of any president in modern history and the Republicans controlling the Senate were prepared to block all of that. That meant no education spending, no healthcare spending, very little green energy spending and probably no stimulus spending, further COVID stimulus spending this year. Now the Democrats seem to have a majority in the Senate, as well as the House of Representatives. All of that can get done as well as tax increases in order to finance it. The concern now for the Democrats is overreach that could lead to backlash. They have very thin majorities in the House, and the trend has been that in the first midterm for a new president, you almost always lose seats in the House. Democrats can't really afford to lose too many. That may cause them to moderate some of their plans.
Second question. What's the future for President Trump and the Republican party?
Last night's Georgia elections were not good for President Trump. He really campaigned hard for the two Republican candidates. They really embraced him and ran as Trump Republicans in a state that's rapidly moderating and turning purple-ish, if not all the way blue. But the problem is for the Republicans is that President Trump has a strong base of voters who are very loyal to him. Many of them are here in Washington this week to protest the counting of the electoral college votes. Ultimately that will be a futile effort, but the fact that they're here, they're passionate supporters, they make up a big chunk of the Republican base, it's going to create problems the Republican party in the 2022 primaries. And you've got seats in the Senate in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, traditional swing states where they're going to have either vulnerable Senate Republican incumbents or open seats. And the primaries there are going to be quite competitive. If a Trump backed person emerges from those primaries, they're probably going to lose in the general election the way Loeffler and Perdue did in Georgia. It's going to be hard for Republicans to take back the majority in the Senate as long as that dynamic persists.