By Katie Goss ’23
Staff Writer
Joe Biden was announced the projected winner of the state of Georgia on Friday, Nov. 13. Leading by 0.3 percent in the state, the win pushed Biden to 306 electoral votes, leaving President Donald Trump with 232. Biden is the first Democratic nominee to win Georgia in 28 years after Bill Clinton last did so in 1992.
“I think we were all really surprised. I feel like it’s kind of an assumption that southern states are normally red. … When Georgia flipped [blue], I was kind of like, ‘Is it real? What's going on?’,” Syd Williams ’23, who was involved with MHC Votes!, said. “I’m happy, but I feel like there is still so much that is in the air.”
Trump had originally been leading in the typically red state. As mail-in ballots were counted, especially in major cities like Atlanta, there was a gradual shift in the votes from red to blue. Because the vote was so close, Trump asked for a recount in the state.
FairVote, an organization that studied about 30 statewide recounts in recent election history, concluded that only a few hundred votes are typically flipped in favor of the other candidate. According to Adam Hilton, a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke, it is unlikely that Georgia’s recount will produce a victory for Trump, as Biden is ahead in the state by almost 15,000 votes.
Williams commented on this topic, saying, “15,000 votes is a lot, and one thing we are all forgetting, in general, is just how much stress the poll monitors [and counters] have been under.”
Even if Georgia’s electoral votes went to Trump, it would still not give him the numbers needed to win the Electoral College. Williams does not believe that Trump will ever accept losing this election.
“I find it kind of funny because I am seeing all over social media and on the news, like in 2016 when Hillary [Clinton] was calling for some recounts and all of the Republicans were like ‘She just needs to accept it, [she] lost. … Move on,’ and now here we are four years later, and they’re not accepting it, they’re not moving on, and they’re calling for recounts,” Williams said.
Although the Trump administration has claimed a “stolen” election since the night of Nov. 3, they have yet to show evidence of one. Now that Republican-leaning states like Georgia and Arizona have voted in Biden’s favor, the fraudulent claims have only become more persistent.
“When you lose, the first thing you start doing is planning how to win next time,” Hilton said. “If, instead, the stakes are so high and so important to you that losing is not an option, then you don’t prepare to play the game again. Instead, you just destroy the game.”
There are two Senate seats in Georgia waiting to be decided in a runoff election in early January. Georgia has “unique rules,” according to Hilton: If no person running for Senate clears a 50 percent threshold in the race, the two candidates with the most votes proceed to a runoff race in January. Since none of the top four voted officials in the two Senate races reached that threshold, a runoff will be held. Furthermore, two of the officials are Republicans, and the other two are Democrats.
“I would bet some money that these will be the two most expensive Senate elections in history,” Hilton said.
The Senate is currently sitting at 48 Democrats and 50 Republicans, so the Georgia Senate runoffs are critical for the Democrats. Should the Democrats win both seats in January, the Senate would become equally split between the two parties. If this split led to a tie, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would be the tiebreaker. If both open Senate seats go to Republicans, the Biden administration will likely have a tough time passing legislation. A similar situation happened during Barack Obama’s presidency when he lost control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Hilton said that Trump’s behavior until the runoff elections could be critical. “On the ‘positive’ end — positive for the Republican Party — is that Trump’s behavior, his continuing insistence that the Democrats are an existential threat to the republic, … I see that becoming a galvanizing message for Republican voters in Georgia,” he said. “Control of the Senate will, to a very large degree, shape the Biden presidency. Any ambitious legislation will have a tough time getting through a Republican-controlled Senate.”
Even if Democrats do not gain majority control of the Senate, there are methods that Biden can use to advance legislation and make headway on major issues, such as climate change and COVID-19.
According to Hilton, Obama similarly “expanded the powers of the presidency” when he realized the split government would not work with him.
“In terms of acting independently from Congress, there is still quite a lot the Biden administration will be able to do through regulations,” Hilton said. “I think we can actually expect them to do most of their climate-related [legislation], which I know is something a lot of Mount Holyoke students care about.”
The Georgia Senate races will not be decided until right before Biden’s inauguration. Georgia residents have until Dec. 7 to register to vote in this runoff election.
Georgia’s secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, has also received backlash from many Republican politicians over the outcome of the state’s presidential election. Since Raffensperger serves as the state’s chief elections officer, he has received considerable criticism from his party after Georgia flipped blue. Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue called for Raffensperger to step down from his position, as they alluded to their runoff elections being attributed to illegal ballots. However, they have not provided any evidence of these “illegal” ballots. Raffensperger has refused to step down and insists that he has not done anything but count legal ballots.
In a CNN article, he said, “The voters of Georgia hired me, and the voters will be the one to fire me. … Obviously, this is a very close race, and people that were on one side of the aisle don’t like the results. I get that. I’m a Republican. … But the results will be the results.”
“I think that’s ridiculous, calling for him to lose his job. He didn’t do anything at the end of the day,” Williams said. “America prides itself on being a democracy [and] we’ve been a ‘democracy’ for centuries now. If that’s how the people vote, then that is how the people vote.”
According to Hilton, it was one thing for Trump and other Republicans to blame Democratic state governments for having “fraudulent” ballots due to their positions “against” him. However, now that Republican states like Georgia have flipped, it is harder to make such claims.
“This is disturbing stuff,” Hilton said. “I think this is a great confirmation that what we feared all along seems to be confirmed in that [the] Trump Republican Party is a cult of personality where loyalty to a particular person, the party leader, is the litmus test for everything.”
Starting on the same day Biden was announced as the winner in Georgia, the hand recount of about 5 million ballots began, and the state had until Nov. 18 to finish. The Senate runoff elections will take place on Jan. 5, 2021.
Williams concluded that “I just want to stress the importance of voting in these down-ballot races. I think people kind of assume the presidential election is the biggest one because the president, that’s who we [primarily] see. But it’s just really important to vote in every single election that you can.”