In Georgia, the winner has to get a majority of votes. If no candidate gets 50%+1 of the votes. They have a run off election between the two candidates receiving the most votes. The run-off will be on Jan 5. 2021
Article:
Election Day 2020 has come and gone, and we still don’t know which party will control the Senate next year. As of Tuesday at 10 p.m. Eastern, it looks as though Democrats will have 48 seats1 in the next Senate, while Republicans will have 50. (We don’t yet know who won Alaska, but at this point, it will be very difficult for Democrats to make up their current vote deficit there.) So that leaves the two Senate seats from Georgia to determine control of the chamber in a rare double-barreled runoff election nearly two months from now.
So how did one state with fewer than five million voters throw the entire race for control of the Senate into overtime? Georgia has an unusual requirement that candidates must receive a majority of the vote to win an election, and if no one does so, the top two finishers advance to a runoff. We were expecting this to happen in Georgia’s special election for Senate, in which 20 candidates were on the ballot. (In that race, the top two vote-getters were Democrat Raphael Warnock, who has received 32.9 percent of the vote so far, and Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who has received 25.9 percent.) But it also happened in Georgia’s regularly scheduled Senate election: Returns currently show Republican Sen. David Perdue at 49.7 percent of the vote and Democrat Jon Ossoff at 48.0 percent. (Libertarian Shane Hazel took the remaining 2.3 percent.)
So now both races will be decided in a runoff election on Jan. 5.
If Democrats win both seats, they would take control of the Senate starting on Jan. 20, as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would have the power to break ties in the chamber. But just how likely is a double Democratic victory? Until recently, it would have looked like a pipe dream, as Georgia went into 2020 with a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean2 of R+13. But the state may be undergoing a transformation. Democrats came within 1 or 2 percentage points of winning more votes than Republicans in the first round of both elections. (In the special election, if you add up all the candidates’ vote shares by party, Republicans got 49.4 percent of the votes cast, while Democrats got 48.4 percent.) And at the top of the ticket, Joe Biden appears to have become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Georgia since 1992.3
What’s more, pollsters — expecting a runoff in the special election — have been asking voters their preference in a Warnock-Loeffler runoff for months, and Warnock has consistently led in those polls. (We haven’t yet seen any polling of the Perdue-Ossoff runoff.) And while it’s true that the polls were significantly off in some states this election, they were actually quite accurate in Georgia.
Can anyone explain to a foreigner what a runoff is?
In Georgia, the winner has to get a majority of votes. If no candidate gets 50%+1 of the votes. They have a run off election between the two candidates receiving the most votes. The run-off will be on Jan 5. 2021
Article: Election Day 2020 has come and gone, and we still don’t know which party will control the Senate next year. As of Tuesday at 10 p.m. Eastern, it looks as though Democrats will have 48 seats1 in the next Senate, while Republicans will have 50. (We don’t yet know who won Alaska, but at this point, it will be very difficult for Democrats to make up their current vote deficit there.) So that leaves the two Senate seats from Georgia to determine control of the chamber in a rare double-barreled runoff election nearly two months from now.
So how did one state with fewer than five million voters throw the entire race for control of the Senate into overtime? Georgia has an unusual requirement that candidates must receive a majority of the vote to win an election, and if no one does so, the top two finishers advance to a runoff. We were expecting this to happen in Georgia’s special election for Senate, in which 20 candidates were on the ballot. (In that race, the top two vote-getters were Democrat Raphael Warnock, who has received 32.9 percent of the vote so far, and Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who has received 25.9 percent.) But it also happened in Georgia’s regularly scheduled Senate election: Returns currently show Republican Sen. David Perdue at 49.7 percent of the vote and Democrat Jon Ossoff at 48.0 percent. (Libertarian Shane Hazel took the remaining 2.3 percent.)
So now both races will be decided in a runoff election on Jan. 5.
If Democrats win both seats, they would take control of the Senate starting on Jan. 20, as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would have the power to break ties in the chamber. But just how likely is a double Democratic victory? Until recently, it would have looked like a pipe dream, as Georgia went into 2020 with a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean2 of R+13. But the state may be undergoing a transformation. Democrats came within 1 or 2 percentage points of winning more votes than Republicans in the first round of both elections. (In the special election, if you add up all the candidates’ vote shares by party, Republicans got 49.4 percent of the votes cast, while Democrats got 48.4 percent.) And at the top of the ticket, Joe Biden appears to have become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Georgia since 1992.3 What’s more, pollsters — expecting a runoff in the special election — have been asking voters their preference in a Warnock-Loeffler runoff for months, and Warnock has consistently led in those polls. (We haven’t yet seen any polling of the Perdue-Ossoff runoff.) And while it’s true that the polls were significantly off in some states this election, they were actually quite accurate in Georgia.