My mom just asked me if I think Warnock and Ossoff are going to win. Well, I think they’re going to receive more votes, let me put it that way.
Warnock has it more or less in the bag, I don’t think it will be easy for Republicans to deny him his seat (though they will sure as shit try), but Ossoff is too close to call. With the predominantly Democratic Atlanta counties remaining, he will almost certainly get more votes than Perdue, but it will be within the 0.5% recount margin. If it goes to a recount, you KNOW the Republicans are going to throw as much sand in the gears as is legally, or extralegally, possible. I say extralegal instead of illegal because they control the laws down there and can say whatever they want is and isn’t “legal” for themselves.
There will be unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, there will be lawsuits, there will be bureaucratic fuckery. Republicans will never concede, they will deny certification, they will try their damnedest to slow down the process for as long as possible, up to and including rejecting the results entirely and calling for new special elections. They don’t need to win tonight, they just need Democrats to lose. If they reject the results and declare that neither candidate won, then the Republicans still maintain the majority 50-48 in the Senate; 52-48 actually, because then Brian Kemp can appoint two Republicans to fill the vacancies (probably Loeffler and Perdue themselves) until 2022. Warnock’s seat would be up again in 2022 anyway, so it will just be a regular election, but Ossoff’s seat would be a special election, the reverse of what is happening this year.
Think about this from a Republican perspective; their entire goal is to win by any means necessary. Ignore rules, ignore laws, ignore the constitution, just focus on winning; they can win even without Loeffler and Perdue, just so long as they stop Warnock and Ossoff. Right now, they are headed towards a 50-50 loss, so what can they do to turn that into a win? That is their entire motivation; if they think they’re going to lose, they will cheat and declare victory on a technicality. Warnock and Ossoff received more votes, but they can claim irregularities that do not exist, and some no name state level officials have full discretion on whether or not to certify the results. Look at what happened in Michigan, where a couple Republicans almost prevented Joe Biden from winning. The Georgians will do the exact same thing; it is not technically illegal for them to say nobody wins, so they’ll do it, and if nobody wins then they still win in the long run.
The Secretary of State was okay letting Biden win, but he’s not going to sit idly by and let the Democrats flip the entire senate. From a Republican perspective, it is his prerogative, his duty to party and country, to stop the Democrats from winning by any mean necessary. In the long run, a Republican senate will hurt Biden more than it would have helped Trump; he’s looking forward to 2022. If Congress has been split for the last two years, then Democrats have gotten nothing done and are in a very weak position going into the midterms, giving the Republicans an advantage to take back the House and grow their senate majority, stopping Biden from doing ANYTHING until 2024, riding a red tide back into the White House behind someone like Tom Cotton or Nikki Haley. By refusing to seat Warnock and Ossoff now, he can guarantee a Republican win in 2022 and 2024, so that’s what he’s going to try to do, mark my words.
I wish Democrats were as conniving and weasely as Republicans are, then maybe they could get some stuff accomplished and learn from their past mistakes. Democrats don’t learn, they just cross their fingers and hope everything remains the same as it was before. If the aim of the game is to keep the party in power, one party clearly has more motivation than the other. 2008 was a once-in-a-generation landslide, but Democrats did nothing and squandered everything going into 2010, the worst reversal of fortune in modern American history, leading to the rise of Bitch McConnell in 2014. This party needs to start playing hardball, they need to start kicking Republican ass the way Republicans always end up kicking theirs!