Georgia’s blue turn a boost for Joe Biden

Joe Biden’s presidency gets enormous boost with the voters of Georgia handing control of the Senate to the Democrats.

Jon Ossoff will become the youngest Democrat senator since Mr Biden entered the chamber aged 30 in 1973. Picture: AFP

Joe Biden’s presidency received an enormous boost a fortnight before his inauguration with the voters of Georgia handing control of the Senate to the Democrats.

After he is sworn in on January 20, Mr Biden’s party will control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, a sweep Democrats have achieved for only four of the past 40 years, most recently from 2009 to 2011. At a stroke, fears that Mr Biden’s cabinet nominees would be obstructed and his legislative agenda circumscribed have vanished.

In the first sign of Mr Biden’s expanded clout, he chose Merrick Garland, an influential appeal court judge, to be his attorney-general. He was aware that a Democratic-controlled Senate would agree to replace Mr Garland on the bench with a liberal jurist.

The selection of Mr Garland, 68, was especially pointed because it was the Republican Senate majority that denied a hearing for him when president Barack Obama nominated him to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court in 2016.

The Democratic victories in Georgia take the Senate to a 50-50 party split. Kamala Harris, as vice-president, will have the casting vote in any ties, giving Democrats control. The Senate has been evenly split only three times in its history, most recently in 2001.

Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat who will now become Senate majority leader, celebrated a “brand new day”. He promised that Mr Biden and Ms Harris “will have a partner who is ready, willing and able to help achieve a forward-looking agenda and deliver help and bold change” to America.

Raphael Warnock’s victory over Kelly Loeffler was declared on Wednesday. On Thursday, Jon Ossoff, his colleague, was confirmed as the winner of his contest with David Perdue, handing both seats to the Democrats.

Mr Warnock, 51, the pastor of Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, will become the first black senator to represent Georgia as well as the first black Democrat senator from a former slave state. When he was born, Georgia was represented in the Senate by two segregationists.

“I am going to the Senate to work for all of Georgia,” Mr Warnock said. “My mother, who was a teenager growing up in Waycross, Georgia, used to pick somebody else’s cotton. But the other day, because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States senator. So I come before you tonight as a man who knows that the improbable journey that led me to this place in this historic moment in America could only happen here.”

Senator Loeffler, 50, who was appointed to fill the vacant seat a year ago, did not concede the election, insisting that she saw a “path to victory”. The multimillionaire financial executive and basketball team owner cleaved far to the right during her campaign, boasting in one advert that she was “more conservative than Attila the Hun”.

The other contest, between Mr Ossoff, 33, a former documentary-maker, and Senator Perdue, 71, the Republican incumbent dogged throughout the campaign by allegations of insider trading, which he denied, was closer.

Mr Ossoff will become the youngest Democrat senator since Mr Biden entered the chamber aged 30 in 1973. No Democrat had won a Senate race in Georgia since 2005. The last person to do so became a Republican supporter.

Analysis of the Republican setback zeroed in on President Donald Trump’s claims that elections were fixed against his party. “It turns out telling voters the election is rigged is not a good way to turn out your voters,” Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate, said.

Mr Trump told his rally outside the White House that the Georgia vote was “a set-up”. He said: “Last night was a little better because we had a lot of eyes watching just one state but they cheated like hell anyway.”

The Times