Democrats secure 51-49 Senate majority with Warnock's runoff win

The final total for ad spending on the Georgia Senate race – including the primary, November general election and runoff – totaled $338.5 million, according to AdImpact data.

It was the most expensive contest of the 2022 cycle, ahead of the Pennsylvania Senate race, which saw $272.8 million in ad spending. 

Over the course of the entire Georgia race, Democrats outspent Republicans, about $194.4 million to $144 million. Incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock led all advertisers by a significant margin, spending just over $100 million alone on the campaign. 

Democrats have now secured a slim 51-49 majority over Republicans in the Senate.

The party will have significant governing advantages compared to the 50-50 split in the current Congress, during which a power-sharing agreement gives Republicans considerable leverage over Democrats despite being in the minority.

The results of the 2022 midterm election point toward a 2024 presidential contest that will likely be decided by a tiny sliver of voters in a rapidly shrinking list of swing states realistically within reach for either party.

With only a few exceptions, this year’s results showed each side further consolidating its hold over the states that already lean in its direction. And in 2024, that will likely leave control of the White House in the hands of a very small number of states that are themselves divided almost exactly in half between the parties – a list that looks even smaller after this month’s outcomes.

Five states decided the last presidential race by flipping from Trump in 2016 to Joe Biden in 2020 – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Democrats have already won six of the eight Senate and governor races decided across them this month and could notch a seventh victory if Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock defeats Herschel Walker in a Georgia run-off in December.

Still, the results also showed Republicans tightening their grip on Ohio, Iowa and Florida: though Democrats won all three in both of Barack Obama’s presidential victories, each now appears securely in the GOP’s column for 2024 (and likely beyond).

These offsetting and hardening partisan strengths could, once again, provide the power to decide the White House winner to a few hundred thousand voters in a very few closely balanced states. That’s a windfall for the owners of television stations who will be deluged with television advertising in states such as Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona

But it’s also another reason for the prodigious stress in our fraught modern politics. Each side in an intensely polarized nation of 330 million recognizes that the overall direction of national policy now pivots on the choices of a minuscule number of people living in the tiny patches of contested political ground – white-collar suburbs of Atlanta and Phoenix, working-class Latino neighborhoods in and around Las Vegas and the mid-sized communities of the so-called BOW counties in Wisconsin.

GOP senators were noticeably upset about their 2022 problems in the aftermath of their loss in the Georgia Senate runoff, calling for better candidates and contending that former President Donald Trump caused a problem on the trail.

Here's how some Republicans are reacting after last night:

Senate GOP Whip John Thune said Trump’s presence on the campaign trail created a contrast when they party wanted to keep the race focused on President Joe Biden and his policies.

Asked if Trump was a problem for their party, Thune indicated he was.

“Well, he was of course very active in the primaries and even in the general election because he was a presence out there and in an election year where it should have been a referendum on the current admin and their policies. The Dems were in many cases able to turn it into a choice election because of Trump’s presence out there — so was he a factor? I don't think there's any question about that,” he said.

Thune added that candidates shouldn’t have campaigned on the bogus notion the election was stolen.

“A lot of the candidates who had problems in these elections were running on the 2020 election being stolen, and I don't think independent voters were having it,” he said.

Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of GOP leadership, told CNN there’s a basic problem for Republicans: “We need better candidates.”

Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said, “We didn’t get our vote out for sure.” 

Sen. Lindsey Graham told CNN that the GOP needs to improve its online fundraising and stop demagoguing early voting. 

Graham also said that Trump has to prove he can win if he’s to clinch the nomination for 2024.

“He's still very popular in the party. People appreciate his presidency. They appreciate his fighting spirit. But there's beginning to be a sense, 'can he win?' So his number-one job, I think, in these early primary states is to put together a team — a winning team — and convince people that he can close the deal in the general election. He's still the odds-on favorite, because there's a lot of goodwill in the Republican Party about Trump, but the question is about winning, we want to win. Time will tell,” he said.

Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said GOP Georgia candidate Herschel Walker’s loss on Tuesday is “just one more data point in an overwhelming body of data that the Trump obsession is very bad for Republicans.”

“It’s just one more data point in an overwhelming body of data that the Trump obsession is very bad for Republicans but normal Republicans are doing extremely well,” he said.

Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah lambasted the former president's involvement in GOP primaries, warning that the party should learn that a Donald Trump endorsement "can be the kiss of death" 

 "I think President Trump has had a very substantial impact on who's going to win a primary and it hasn't worked out well," he said.

"Hopefully we'll recognize that his endorsement can be the kiss of death," Romney said.

Sen. Rick Scott, the National Republican Senatorial Committee chair, told CNN that the election losses were “frustrating” and said the GOP needs to do a better job of explaining their message. He said they need to have a “good national message” as he pushed a national agenda that Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell resisted. He said Republicans also need to improve their performance on early voting.

He defended the committee’s decision not to intervene in primaries. And even as other Republicans have been critical about their candidate quality, Scott said their candidates were “good, quality people.”

Asked if they should have engaged in primaries when the NRSC stayed out of it, he said they shouldn’t.

Scott also steered clear of criticism of Trump and said this when asked if candidates should avoid claiming the election was stolen. “When I talked to voters, and I didn't run this time but it's good getting out there to talk to people. What they wanted to know is their votes never gonna be diluted.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke Wednesday morning to congratulate Raphael Warnock on a "great" win in Georgia.

Schumer pointed out that with Warnock's win, it is the first time since 1934 that "every Democratic incumbent won with the party, and with being the party in power."

On why the Democrats performed so well in this midterm cycle, Schumer praised the "great candidates" in his party but also said he believed their success came in part because of several negative things about "MAGA Republicans" that turned off voters.

"First, in May and June, the public began to realize how far right these MAGA Republicans had gone," Schumer, citing the Dobbs decision in the Supreme Court on abortion — as well as decisions by SCOTUS on concealed carry and on "limiting what we could do to stop coal plants from poisoning" communities.

Schumer added that he believes the Jan. 6 hearings led to a positive effect for Democrats in the midterm elections.

The highly touted red wave in last month’s midterm election failed to develop largely because it hit a wall of resistance among independent voters, especially across the key battleground states. And that presents difficult questions for Republicans looking forward to 2024.

The GOP’s disappointing showing among independents this year marked the third consecutive election in which the party has underperformed with those critical swing voters. Although Donald Trump ran competitively among independents in his first presidential race in 2016, since he took office, the GOP has consistently faced broad opposition among them, especially those who are women or hold four-year college degrees.

The GOP’s 2022 struggles with independents were especially striking because they came even as most of those voters expressed negative views of both President Joe Biden’s job performance and the state of the economy – sentiments that typically cause most swing voters to break for the party out of the White House. To many analysts in both parties, the reluctance of so many independents to support Republican candidates despite such discontent underscores how powerfully the Trump-era GOP has alienated these voters.

“There’s a huge lesson here, which is if you talk like Trump or remind voters of Trump, particularly at a personality level, it’s pure poison to independent voters,” John Thomas, a GOP consultant, said flatly. “It might have been effective in 2016 because voters were looking for something new and a change, but it hasn’t been useful since then.”

For Republicans, the results underscore the electoral risks of the party’s continuing refusal to repudiate Trump, even as he has openly associated with two antisemites who praised Adolf Hitler, praised the January 6, 2021, US Capitol rioters and publicly called for the “termination” of the US Constitution to restore himself to power.

Here are some numbers from midterm exit polls:

Most importantly, the exit poll showed Democrats winning independents in the national vote for the House of Representatives only by a narrow 49% to 47% margin. That was a significantly smaller advantage than the double-digit lead among independents Democrats enjoyed in both the 2020 presidential race and the 2018 contest for the House.

“These results weren’t necessarily an endorsement of Democrats,” says Democratic pollster Matt Hogan. “But they disliked Republicans and viewed them as even more extreme.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said there was "no truth" to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock's claims of voter suppression.

"Well, there's no truth to voter suppression. Yesterday, we had 1.6 million people show up to vote. That's more than we had a month ago. It's also more than we had in November 2020. We had record turnout. But then the total turnout we had for a runoff, that's the largest turnout we've ever had for a midterm election. And so yesterday, the average wait time was about two minutes. The longest wait times we saw typically were 12 to 14 minutes," he told CNN Wednesday.

Raffensperger pointed to Republican weakness in the suburbs as an area to improve in order to win elections going forward. 

“Honestly, as Republicans, if we want to do soul searching. We have to win back the suburbs. We're really strong in the rural area, farming communities, hard-working people like that, but people work hard in the suburbs, too,” he said.

Raffensperger also weighed in on President Biden's proposal to move Georgia up in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary. 

"I like the idea that Georgia is moving up in the rankings because we're continuing to grow in population and ... it increases our importance and our significance as a state," he said, adding that whatever be the action, it should come from both political parties. "And whatever we do, it's going to be based on what is in state law."

President Joe Biden and his advisers had already breathed a big sigh of relief upon learning last month that Democrats would maintain control of the Senate. Now, four weeks later, they are celebrating once more: a victory for Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in his runoff race against Republican Herschel Walker in Georgia that hands Democrats a 51-49 majority in the upper chamber. 

Biden and his advisers have been keenly aware of what a significant difference that single extra seat can make – a valuable “cushion” that means Democrats can afford to lose one vote in the Senate and still have simple majority, and which spares Vice President Kamala Harris the need to cast a tie-breaking vote if all senators that align with Democrats fall in line. 

Biden called the victorious senator after arriving back in Washington, and tweeted: “Tonight Georgia voters stood up for our democracy, rejected Ultra MAGAism, and most importantly: sent a good man back to the Senate. Here’s to six more years.”

Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain also congratulated Warnock and tweeted that Biden becomes “the first President since FDR 1934 to see every Senator in his party re-elected (who was seeking re-election.). 51!” 

Heading into Tuesday’s runoff, party leaders and officials were sensitive to the unpredictable nature of a runoff race. White House officials believed that in a race that could potentially be very close, operating with the assumption that “every little bit counts” was the right way to go. Letting voters know that there is another election happening – particularly around the holidays when people might be less engaged — was a top priority for party operatives.