Democrats wrested control of the Senate …

Democrats scored a narrow victory in the Georgia runoff and they ensured control of the Senate, where Republicans have been in the majority since 2015. In the conservative southern state, Democrat Raphael Warnock quickly won the first of two seats at stake and his party partner, Jon Ossoff, ultimately won the second ballot, after the small difference forced Democrats to delay the celebration. The second round of elections in Georgia determined the balance in the United States Senate where Democrats and Republicans now have 50 seats each, although the tie-breaker remains with the vice-president-elect, Kamala harris. The Democratic victory will make it easier for President Joe Biden to implement his government program.

“We show that with hope, hard work and people on our side, anything is possible,” Warnock said. to his followers in a speech broadcast on his social networks. His opponent, outgoing Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, continues to admit defeat.

Warnock, 51, won 50.7% of the vote, becoming the first African-American senator to represent the state of southern Georgia., after pastoring a church in Atlanta where civil rights leader Martin Luther King, assassinated in 1968, preached.

For his part, Jon Ossoff positioned himself with 50.3% of the vote against the outgoing Republican senator, David Perdue. Ossoff, a 33-year-old audiovisual producer, claimed victory before the result was even official. “Georgia, thank you very much for trusting me”, assured who will be the youngest Democratic senator since Joe Biden took a seat in 1973.

Biden he called on the two Democratic candidates to congratulate them on their “tight campaigns” and also thanked “the Georgian people who came to vote again in unprecedented numbers as they did in November, to elect two new senators, demand action and demand that the elected leaders break the deadlock”. With this double victory in Georgia, the Democrats obtained 50 seats in the Senate, just like the Republicans. But future vice-president Kamala Harris will have the power to break the tie, and thus tip the scales on the Democratic side.

More than three million voters, 40% of those registered in the state, voted early, a record for a second round of the Senate in Georgia. According to Dave Wasserman, analyst for the Cook Political Report, participation in these elections is reminiscent of the Democratic wave in the lower house elections two years ago. “This is what we saw in 2018: Many Trump voters just don’t speak out when Trump is not on the ballot.”, he said.

Preliminary results from an exit survey conducted by consulting firm Edison Research show that Young voters, Hispanics and blacks backed Democratic Senate candidates in January by a wider margin than in the general elections of November last year.

Biden will assume the presidency on Jan. 20, and control of both houses of Congress will allow him to advance his legislative agenda. “After the past four years, after the elections and after the electoral certification procedures on Capitol Hill, it is time to turn the page,” he said. the former veteran senator by a declaration. “The Americans demand action and want unity,” he added.

In Georgia, a traditional Republican stronghold, Biden won around 12,000 votes in November, one of the victories Trump has sought to challenge without luck or evidence in recent months. The outgoing president’s efforts to reverse the election results included an appeal to the Georgian Secretary of State in which he asked him to “find” the votes to reverse the triumph of the Democratic president-elect. He also called for a White House mobilization that ended in unprecedented chaos, with protesters storming Congress as a special session voted to validate Biden’s electoral victory.