Georgia’s Runoff Races Are Usually Disasters for Dems. This Time Is Different.
The Mother Jones Podcast
Mother Jones
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2020
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
You might be breathing a deep sigh of relief that the 2020 elections are finally over. But spare a thought for our friends in Georgia. Voters there are still being bombarded with political ads, national attention, and oodles of fresh campaign cash because they are about to decide, in two contests on January 5, who controls the US Senate. Runoff elections like these in Georgia are typically disasters for Democrats, explains our voting rights reporter Ari Berman. But organizing against voter suppression and high turnout in November are giving Democrats hope that these Senate races could be different this time around. Democrats have believed for some time that a rapidly diversifying electorate would allow them to be competitive in Georgia, but repeated voter suppression efforts had kept that electorate from fully forming. Now, two years of activism have created the conditions for Joe Biden to carry the state by just under 12,000 votes, making him the first Democratic presidential candidate in 28 years to win Georgia, amid record turnout. That electorate is now giving Democrats hope that Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff can win runoff elections that would have seemed almost unwinnable in past years. While Republicans are melting down over Trump’s false allegations of voter fraud, Democrats and Black organizers are now focused on electing a majority in the US Senate that can pass Biden’s legislative agenda. They might just make history.
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Mother Jones podcast. I'm Jimmy |
| 0:03.0 | King in Brooklyn. |
| 0:04.4 | On today's show, |
| 0:11.9 | on today's show, did you breathe a big sigh of relief when you flipped your calendar from November to December? |
| 0:20.0 | Did you think to yourself, at last, the 2020 elections are over. Well, not so fast. |
| 0:28.4 | For our friends in Georgia, the 20- 2020 elections are very much not over. |
| 0:35.0 | They're getting bombarded with political ads and national attention because they are about to decide who controls the US Senate and just how much |
| 0:44.8 | president-elect Biden can get done. Run-off elections like these in Georgia are |
| 0:51.1 | typically disasters for Democrats, but organizing against |
| 0:56.3 | voter suppression and high turnout in November are giving Democrats hope. |
| 1:02.3 | Why this time might be different. Stick around. Ari Berman is a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering voting rights and a friend of the |
| 1:19.9 | Mother Jones podcast. Ari welcome back to the show. |
| 1:24.1 | Hey, Jamila, thanks for having me back. |
| 1:26.2 | Okay, so let's start with a really basic question. |
| 1:30.5 | What is a runoff and why do they happen and when did they start? I guess that's three questions but go for it. |
| 1:38.0 | Good, good questions. |
| 1:40.0 | Basically Georgia has these election rules that if you don't get a majority of the vote |
| 1:46.4 | in a general election. |
| 1:48.5 | So if you didn't get a majority of the vote in November, you go to a runoff where the candidates that got the two most votes will face off, |
| 1:57.5 | usually a month or so after the election. |
| 2:00.5 | In this case, it's on January 5th, so about a month and a half after the election. |
| 2:06.7 | And these runoffs have been going on for a long time in Georgia, but one of the things that really surprised me when I dug into the history here was that runoff elections were instituted in Georgia in 1963 just before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which led to a huge expansion of black |
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