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If you’ve been following the Georgia Senate race this midterms cycle, you might be asking yourself a haunting question right about now: Are we back in 2020? Two years ago, voters were left waiting until Jan. 5, 2021 to know the winner of Georgia’s Senate races and, as a result, which party would take control of the chamber. Back then, the news was good for the Democrats; both Sen. Jon Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock won their runoffs, giving Democrats the slightest majority in the Senate. Now, the nation will once again have to wait to know the results of the 2022 Georgia Senate election. This is how we got here.
What happened in the Georgia midterm elections?
In the 2022 midterms, Georgia’s Senate race came down to Republican former football player Herschel Walker and Democratic incumbent Warnock. After a closely watched race that featured scandal after scandal for Walker, neither candidate ended up receiving more than 50 percent of the vote. According to Georgia law, this means the race must go to a runoff between the top two vote-getters. (But if you’re curious how the exact numbers came out, per The New York Times, Warnock received about 35,000 more votes than Walker with more than 95 percent of the vote in.)
What’s a runoff election?
Per the Washington Post, state law requires that a candidate receive a simple majority of votes in order to claim an “outright victory.” If no candidate does, then the two candidates who received the most votes go to another election, called a runoff, where Georgians will have another chance to vote for their candidate of choice. In this instance, whoever receives the most votes in that race will then head to Congress in January.
Georgia and Louisiana are the only two states in the U.S. that require runoffs in general elections, and per the Post, the practice is “a legacy of Jim Crow-era politics” intended to give white Southerners “unchecked power over Black Americans in the region.”
How long until we know the results of the Georgia midterms?
The runoff for the Georgia Senate race will take place on Dec. 6, meaning we’ll have to wait a few weeks to find out the exact breakdown of the incoming Congress.
Madison is a senior writer/editor at ELLE.com, covering news, politics, and culture. When she's not on the internet, you can most likely find her taking a nap or eating banana bread.
