Meanwhile, In Georgia

As you can probably imagine, living here in Georgia, I'm currently subjected to a lot of advertising telling me how to vote in the upcoming Senate run-off elections.  I'm subjected to even more appeals for campaign contributions.

As a quick reminder, now that most of the smoke has finally cleared from the November 3 general election, Republicans have won 50 of the 100 seats in the Senate to the Democrats' 48.  Only two seats remain open, and they're both here in Georgia.  If the Democrats win both, the Senate will be tied and Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris will have the tie-breaker vote.  If the Republicans win either one of the two seats, they will have the Senate majority, and Moscow Mitch McConnell will continue to be the majority leader and effectively strangle any legislation Biden and the House of Representatives propose.  It will be four more years of the congressional stalemate and legislative gridlock we've been experiencing for a decade now.  It will be four more years of bitter partisanship.

I'm not optimistic about the Democrats' chances.  Both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are fine men and good candidates, but despite the fact that Georgia finally flipped blue and elected Joe Biden over you-know-who in the presidential race, it's still a pretty red state with a solid Republican majority. Biden got the lead because you-know-who is such a rotten, deplorable candidate that a sufficient number of Georgia Republicans just couldn't get themselves to vote for him, despite their party affiliation.  They voted against the incumbent, not for his challenger's policies and legislative agenda.

In one race, Awful Kelley Loeffler is running against the Rev. Raphael Warnock.  The wealthy Loeffler is the very picture of vested interests and corruption, the personification of what was supposed to have been drained from the swamp.  The Rev. Warnock is a humble and direct man of the people, and the head preacher of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s old job.  Based on personalities alone, it should be no contest and Warnock got the most votes in the general election.  But Republican votes were split by a contentious race between Awful Loeffler and the clownish Doug Collins, who combined got 46% of the vote compared to Warnock's 33%.  Assuming that most people who voted for Collins will vote for Loeffler in the run-off election, you can see the gap that Warnock has in front of him.

In the other race, Jon Ossoff is running against Republican incumbent David Purdue.  Purdue has his own ethics and corruption issues to deal with, but he's nowhere near as cartoonish a villain as Awful Loeffler.  Purdue managed to get 49.7% of the vote, just short of the 50% he needed to win outright, while Ossoff got 48%. In order to win, Ossoff needs some combination of the following three things to happen: 

1. A significant percentage of the Republicans who voted for Purdue change their minds and party affiliation and vote for his Democratic opponent; 
2. Despite record turnout and Stacey Abrams' heroic voter-registration drive, Ossoff can find enough additional voters to make up the difference; or 
3. A sufficient number of Republicans are so sick of politics, burned out from you-know-who's shenanigans to Moscow Mitch's obstructionism to Purdue's own corruption, that they don't bother to show up and vote.

It's not impossible but it's a tough road for Ossoff.  Still, if I were a betting man, I'd favor Ossoff's chances over Warnock's.  

The Democrats' pitch to us Georgia voters is we have to turn out and elect their candidates to give President-Elect Biden the Senate majority he needs to accomplish the legislative agenda we elected him to achieve.  The Republicans' pitch is we need to prevent a Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress in addition to the White House to prevent, um, socialism?  One appeal is based on hope and the other on fear.

It will say a lot about us as a state and as a nation which appeal resonates the most with voters.