Georgia’s Senate runoffs are one week away. Here’s where the candidates stand in polls
Candidates in Georgia’s runoffs for two U.S. Senate seats remain in tight races with the election one week from Tuesday, polls show.
None of the candidates received more than 50% of the vote in the Nov. 3 election as required by state law, so runoffs are Jan. 5.
First-term Republican Sen. David Perdue faces Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff for one seat, and first-term Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler faces Democratic candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock for the other. If he wins, Warnock would be Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator.
The outcome of the two races will determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the Senate in 2021.
A Democratic-controlled Senate would give Biden a clearer path toward implementing his agenda, while a Republican-controlled Senate would likely create roadblocks for his policies, Cabinet selections and other appointments.
Early voting kicked off Dec. 14. Here’s where the polls stand with one week remaining.
Perdue vs. Ossoff
Poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight’s average shows Perdue leading Ossoff by a razor thin margin as of Tuesday morning: 48.1% to 47.3%.
The two have been neck and neck in the site’s average since late November, with the lead switching multiple times. Perdue pulled ahead of Ossoff on Dec. 23 and has stayed narrowly ahead since, the average shows.
RealClearPolitics, a polling data aggregator, shows Perdue leading Ossoff by an average of 0.2 percentage points as of Dec. 22.
But poll aggregator 270toWin’s average shows Ossoff with a 0.2 percentage point lead.
Perdue was elected to the Senate in 2014, winning 52.8% of the vote, according to Ballotpedia. Ossoff is the CEO of an investigative media company and ran for a U.S. House seat in 2017. The race went to a runoff that Ossoff eventually lost to Republican Karen Handel.
In the Nov. 3 election, Perdue received 49.73% of the vote compared to Ossoff’s 47.95%.
Loeffler and Warnock
Warnock is leading Loeffler by 0.1 percentage points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average.
Warnock has been narrowly leading in the site’s average since Dec. 22 after Loeffler briefly pulled slightly ahead in the middle of the month.
The 270toWin average shows Warnock up by 0.2 percentage points.
RealClearPolitics’s average, however, shows the two candidates tied.
Warnock won 32.9% of the vote to Loeffler’s 25.91% in the Nov. 3 special election, according to the AP.
Loeffler was appointed to her Senate seat by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, after former Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson stepped down for health reasons in December 2019.
Warnock is the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and chaired the New Georgia Project, a voter registration effort founded by Stacey Abrams, from 2017 until 2020.
Loeffler has attempted to paint Warnock as a radical, which a group of Georgia pastors slammed as a broader “attack against the Black Church.”
Determining the balance of the Senate
Democrats will have 48 seats and Republicans will have 50 seats in the Senate next year with the two Georgia seats yet to be decided.
If Democrats win both runoff elections they will gain control of the chamber as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will serve as a tie breaker. If Republicans win either of the seats they will control the chamber.
President-elect Joe Biden and President Donald Trump have both visited Georgia to campaign for their respective parties, and Trump plans to hold a rally in the state Jan. 4.
Some Republicans, however, have been concerned that Trump’s continued baseless claims that the election was fraudulent could hurt GOP turnout in the Georgia runoffs.
Additionally, the president’s delay in signing the $900 billion COVID-19 relief package passed by Congress last week put Perdue and Loeffler in a tough spot, CNN reports. Trump signed the bill Monday after his delay caused a lapse in unemployment benefits for millions of Americans.
More than 2.3 million people have voted early in the runoffs as of Tuesday morning, according to the U.S. Elections Project, which tracks early voting data.
Georgia has historically been a Republican stronghold, and Democrats haven’t won one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats in 20 years
But Biden carried the state in the Nov. 3 election with 49.5% of the vote — marking the first time a Democrat has won the state since former President Bill Clinton in 1992.
This story was originally published December 29, 2020 at 7:48 AM with the headline "Georgia’s Senate runoffs are one week away. Here’s where the candidates stand in polls."
