The Strangest Election Scenario Runs Through Georgia

The Strangest Election Scenario Runs Through Georgia

Election officials, journalists, and even Facebook have been busy preparing Americans for the likelihood of having to wait days or weeks after November 3 to know who won the presidency. Remarkably, the fate of another branch of government could take even longer to be settled. There’s a small but real possibility that the country won’t know which party controls the Senate until January. The reason? Georgia.


Georgia is the only state in the country with both Senate seats on the ballot this fall, thanks to a special election for the successor to Republican Johnny Isakson, who resigned last year for health reasons. It’s also one of only two states (the other is Louisiana) that require candidates to hit 50 percent of the vote in order to avoid a general election runoff—a relic of the Jim Crow era, when Southern Democrats schemed to prevent Black voters from uniting behind a candidate and winning with a plurality of the vote. In neither race is any candidate polling above 50 percent right now. Should that pattern hold through the election, both races would head to a runoff, to be held January 5, two days after the new Congress is sworn in. (The rest of it, anyway.)



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In one race, Democrat Jon Ossoff is challenging incumbent Republican David Perdue. Ossoff may be best known for losing the most expensive House race in US history, in 2017, but he has an outside ..

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