Loeffler’s reputation has been burned. Appointed to her office to help the GOP compete in the suburbs, she failed in her first election. Yet today, she’ll take the anti-democratic step of voting against Biden’s Electoral College win, sealed with millions of lawfully cast ballots in Georgia and across the nation. Loeffler’s money helped finance a brutal campaign against Warnock that provoked Black voters, including the players on the WNBA team she owns.
Perdue’s troubles are a testament to the perils of embracing Trumpism. A one-time free-trading establishment Republican, he received 88,000 more votes than Ossoff on Nov. 3, forced into a runoff because he failed to break 50%. He then felt the need to tie himself to Trump even tighter, although Biden had defeated the president in Georgia. As he ran harder right, he ceded the center to Ossoff.
While Perdue donned regular-guy denim and Loeffler began dressing as if she drove an 18-wheeler, Democrats made sure to highlight just how rich the two senators were. They were
savaged for privately trading stocks after receiving briefings on coronavirus, the threat of which they publicly downplayed.
Senate Majority Leader MITCH MCCONNELL won’t escape the conflagration, either. He refused to allow a clean vote on sending Americans $2,000 Covid stimulus checks, putting Loeffler and Perdue in a bind as the two (a billionaire and millionaire, respectively) fumbled to explain why they were against “
stimmy” checks before they were for them. Warnock, Ossoff and Biden had an easy response: Vote for us and you’ll get help.
Now, Warnock is about to make history as the first elected Black Democratic senator from the South and the seventh elected Black senator. Including appointed senators,
10 Black Americans have served in the chamber. Warnock helped drive strong Black voter turnout, which was one of the four key ingredients needed for a Democratic win that we
outlined yesterday in Playbook. Schumer is poised to become the first Jewish Senate majority leader, assuming Ossoff, who’s also Jewish (and, at 33, would be the youngest senator since Biden was elected to the Senate in 1973), wins.
Yes, an African-American man and a Jewish man just won (or are on the cusp of winning) two elections in the Deep South.
Finally, McConnell will be 79 next month, and as he likely returns to the minority, we may be witnessing not just the end of the Trump era but the beginning of the end of the McConnell era as well.
Gikk litt i surr der....
