Warnock wins in Georgia, AP projects. Here are three reasons why that matters.
Warnock #Warnock
The moment that Democrats secured their Senate majority weeks ago, the stakes went down dramatically for the Senate runoff election in Georgia.
But that doesn’t mean the nation hasn’t been scrutinizing the race, with Republicans seeking some kind of momentum after a disappointing midterm election, and both parties analyzing every contest in the swing state for clues about the 2024 presidential race.
Since neither Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock nor his Republican challenger Herschel Walker received 50 percent of the vote during the general election, Georgia law required a runoff a month later. Finally, Tuesday night, the moment was at hand.
The runoff continued the same themes as the general election: Walker, a former football star and buddy of former president Donald Trump, has been been a deeply flawed candidate. Warnock, elected in 2021 as the first Black senator in Georgia, had been quite popular, at least according to the polls. But overall the race remained extremely tight, with Warnock leading the final polls by 1.9 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average.
For all the national attention on the last contest of the 2022 election cycle, the two biggest national players notably avoided campaigning in the state. Trump stayed away from Georgia as did President Biden. In fact, the closest Biden got to the contest was last week in Boston when he attended a fund-raiser and visited a phone bank at a South Boston union hall where they were calling Georgia voters.
But while the runoff didn’t turn out to be the most closely watched Senate contest in modern history, there are three ways Warnock’s win, projected by the Associated Press, does have several critical impacts:
Democrats can move an agenda, especially when it comes to judges
The most significant impact of Warnock’s win is that making the Senate a 51-seat Democratic majority, versus a 50-50 split with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking a tie, changes the entire committee process and how legislation passes.
Under the 50-50 makeup of the past two years, Democrats needed to have a power-sharing agreement with the GOP for how all bills run through committees. Under Senate rules, a 50-50 Senate means that each committee must also have equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats. Structurally, this has allowed Republicans to use legislative maneuvers to slow down bills, even if they couldn’t prevent them from getting passed.
Now that it will be a 51-49 Senate, that won’t be the case any longer. Democrats are now allowed to have an additional Democrat on every committee. And while a lot of bills are expected to be stopped by a Republican-led House of Representatives over the next two years, presidential nominations, like federal judges, can move more easily toward confirmation.
Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are slightly less powerful
Biden has quipped often over the past two years that when there’s a 50-50 Senate, every Senator is the president. While that’s not actually true, of course, it feels true when it comes to legislation. After all, if just one senator from the majority party votes no, they can effectively veto a bill.
Now there’s projected to be one additional Democrat in the Senate to create a buffer should one those Democratic senators, like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin or Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, go rogue.
Kamala Harris just got her schedule freed up
Not even two years into her tenure, Vice President Harris now ranks third in US history for the number of times she has cast a vote in the Senate to break a 50-50 tie. She has done it 26 times now, which puts her just three votes behind John Adams and six behind John C. Calhoun, both of whom served two terms in the job.
This has meant that Harris has been forced to spend a lot of time in Washington, not just to vote but waiting just to see if she’ll be needed at a moment’s notice.
While that might not be a big deal to the average citizen, the fact Harris won’t be needed to cast as many tie-breaking votes may become very important as the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway.