Cohen: Warnock’s narrow U.S. Senate victory opens doors for the Democrats

On a crisp night in December five years ago, Alabama sent Douglas Jones, a crusading civil rights prosecutor, to the United States Senate. He was a Democrat.

It was a miracle of Hanukkah in a special election in a red state in the Deep South. Like the candles on the menorah, though, his went out when he failed to win a full six-year term three years later.

This December, we bear witness to another supernatural phenomenon from a Democrat in the Deep South. This is less miraculous but more enduring. Having unseated the incumbent Republican in a special election in Georgia two years ago, Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, also sought a full term. Unlike Jones, though, he has won, a Roman candle streaking across the Washington sky.

Warnock’s narrow victory on Tuesday closes this political season and opens another. This is the way in the United States, which goes from one election to the next — mid-terms, off-year, presidential — in what has become an endless campaign.

You know the next round has begun when pundits are already calling Warnock a presidential prospect. He does have star quality, a charisma and confidence that was on display in his victory speech. His remarks to his ecstatic supporters were honeyed with the cadences of the southern clergyman — Rev. Warnock preaches Sundays in in Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta — with hopes, prayers and vows evoking Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis and Barack Obama.

His election has consequences for Democrats, as well as Republicans, for the Senate and the presidency.

The obvious: As their 51st senator, Warnock assures the Democrats of a working majority. It means they can control committees and conduct business free of the obstructionism that has defined Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader.

It means Joe Biden can continue his record-setting pace of appointments to the federal courts, one of the unsung successes of his productive presidency. It means an easier time confirming other appointments, such as ambassadors. It means an insurance policy if the Democrats lose a senator over the next two years.

Politically, it’s more than that. With a one-seat majority, the Democrats no longer rely as heavily on the votes of senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Had both agreed to suspend the filibuster, the Democrats would have passed voting-rights legislation.

Indeed, for Manchin and Sinema, there is an irony. Either can now vote against their party — at least one at a time — when it suits them, with impunity. This will be particularly important for Manchin, who represents rock-ribbed Republican West Virginia. Manchin has survived as a Democrat by bucking his own party. Now he can do more of that, with his party’s encouragement, without sinking its agenda.

The biggest dividend of the election is Warnock himself. His stature strengthens the bench of the Democratic Party. Defeating Herschel Walker — a dumb, troubled former college football star who was exploited, as a Black man, by white conservatives — vaults Warnock into the stratosphere.

He joins a new cohort of Democrats elected to state and national office in the last three elections. They include Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, John Fetterman, Wes Moore, Maura Healey and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, who defeated a hard-right conservative in the House, the biggest upset of 2022. They are the new face of the party.

The Democrats will need all of them to weather the assault on democracy from Donald Trump and his army, who remain an existential threat. For all the triumphalism of Democrats this year, the House of Representatives will be controlled by radical Republicans, whose agenda is revenge and disruption.

While the Democrats dominate one chamber, this means nothing legislatively if the House passes bills the Senate cannot support. The Republicans will launch investigations, deny funding to Ukraine, try to shut down the federal government and threaten to impeach cabinet secretaries, and perhaps Joe Biden.

These volleys will die in the Senate. But they will create noise, poison the climate and fuel the fire burning in the house of American democracy. Stopping this insanity, finally and fully, will take another miracle of Hanukkah.

Andrew Cohen is a journalist, a professor at Carleton University and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.