Today is about more than the Senate.
By Ezekiel Kweku Politics Editor, Opinion |
Control of the Senate — and with it, the legislative agenda of the incoming Biden administration — is riding on two elections today. Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler is up against Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock, and Republican Senator David Perdue is facing off against Democrat Jon Ossoff. |
But as Jason Sokol writes, the Georgia runoffs aren’t just about the Democrats’ national agenda — they also signpost a slow shift in the state’s internal politics. Republicans have long been able to ride the vote in the white, rural areas of the state to victory, relying on a muscular combination of racism and anti-government rhetoric. This strategy, employed by the state’s governor Eugene Talmadge, a Democrat, in the ’30s and ’40s, can be seen as a prototype of the modern Republican Party’s appeal in Georgia and elsewhere. |
But Talmadge’s strategy may be approaching obsolescence. While Bill Clinton was able to win the state in 1992 by performing well with rural whites (and aided by Ross Perot’s third party campaign), future winning campaigns by the Democrats will rely on a very different coalition. “The state’s politics have since been reshaped by demographic change,” Sokol writes. “Democrats now perform poorly in white rural areas but rely on the expanding suburbs.” It might now be possible for Democrats to assemble a victorious urban-suburban alliance and upend the state’s racial politics for good. The ballots in the runoff elections today will tell us if that time has come. |
Here’s what we’re focusing on today: |
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