The New Yorker Radio Hour - Democrats Take the Senate, and a Mob Storms the Capitol

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

On January 6th, pro-Trump fanatics stormed the Capitol, galvanized by the President’s claims that the 2020 election had been stolen. That day, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were declared the victors of their respective Senate runoff races against Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, two champions of Trump’s incendiary theories. Charles Bethea, a New Yorker staff writer based in Atlanta, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss whether this is the end of an era or just the beginning. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

January 6th was a day that will be remembered in the history books as a day of insurrection incited by the president himself. But there was another piece of political news that day. Both of Georgia's Senate seats went in a runoff election to Democrats. Reverend Raphael Warnock's victory was declared early in the morning, followed by John Offsuff's win in the afternoon. And those Georgia seats will give the Democratic Party control of both houses of Congress, as well as the presidency. We've been checking in throughout this election with our Atlantic based correspondent Charles Bethay. And the day after the news broke, he spoke with Dorothy Wicenden on our podcast, Politics and More. Here's Dorothy. Welcome back, Charles. Thank you so much.

Especially in an incredibly busy week for you. I really appreciate it. Let's start with Georgia, your home territory. You are a seventh generation Georgian I just discovered and a close watcher of state politics. So I wanted to hear how the election looked from your perspective. Early voting began on December 14th. What do we know about how that went? And what was the state of the race going into Election Day? Well, the early voting numbers were really, really huge, and they favored Democrats. There was a margin for the Democrats of something like 250 to 300,000 votes going into Election Day.

That was a huge margin, a huge cushion that they'd created. there had been a real push to get Democrats out early and knowing that Republicans tend to show up on election day and also knowing that Republicans tend to do better in runoffs in this state, the Democrats. I think Republicans had won something like the last 14 out of 15 runoffs in this state. So there was a huge amount of energy and effort put into changing that from happening again.

So Georgia, as we know, has a long, very long history of voter suppression targeting communities of color. But I haven't heard any reports of egregious irregularities at voting sites this time. Are there stories we missed or did things go pretty smoothly? Things went very smoothly, as they did in November, despite what, you know, you're hearing from Trump and his, his acolytes about the election in Georgia. Gabe Sterling and Secretary of State Raffinsberger, two Republicans and Trump supporters have been very effectively debunking.

a lot of the rumors and claims otherwise since November and have been doing the same thing since the runoffs as well. One of the most incredible stories coming out of the numbers which are still emerging from the runoffs is that it looks like we may have seen that this election had the largest number of African-American voters voting in any election in a single state in history. Let that sink in for a second.

Yeah, I hadn't heard that. It may fall just short of that record number, but it could also eclipse it. We won't know for maybe a week or two, but, you know, it's just incredible because this state doesn't have as many black voters as New York or as California, but they're just incredibly motivated this time. Yeah, and we also know that a vast majority of black voters supported the two Democrats and that most white voters weren't Republican, so that is no surprise. But it does show what you're talking about, about.

the power of the black vote and about Georgia emerging as a purple state. And on the other hand, Trump seems to have sown so much confusion and cynicism that he actually helped Warnock and Ossoff win. So maybe help us understand that a little bit. Is Georgia bluer than we thought, or was the result the outcome of this bizarre moment in American politics? I think it's worth pushing back a little on the knee-jerk sort of response in some liberal corners that Georgia is now a blue state. Even Nse Uffat, who is the CEO of the New Georgia Project, this voter registration group founded by Stacey Abrams, pushed back on that notion when I presented it to her. It's really too soon to call Georgia anything but a battleground, which is itself

new and notable. Going into the runoffs, there really was a 50-50 electorate here, which is why getting out the vote was really the name of the game. In the state, there's this rule of thumb that holds that if black voters make up more than 30% of the total electorate and they get support from 30% or more of the state's white voters than Democrats win. And while Democrats didn't get quite hit that 30% number with black voters quite in November, which I think partly explains the narrowness of Biden's win, they did exceed 30% in the runoffs, which was critical in which we're seeing in headlines that the black vote really. carried the runoffs for Democrats.

And you also mentioned that a lot of the credit has rightly gone to Stacey Abrams. And also it's worth mentioning other grassroots organizers, many of them also black women who have been building this broad, multi-ethnic, democratic coalition in Georgia. Could you just talk a little bit about what specific efforts those groups have undertaken for these Senate runoffs? Well, I mean, none of them are reinventing the wheel. They've just done them in great force. knocking on something like three million doors in the last month.

I mean, that's more than more doors than we're knocked on for the presidential race here. Two million text messages. There's a Latino group that apparently knocked on the door of every single Latino voter in the state. We do hear rightfully about a lot of the groups that have been targeting black voters, but Latino voters also were contacted as were Asian American voters. with figures like Andrew Yang showing up here. I walked around with him one day. I mean, it's just been no corner, I think, has been left unvisited in this state.

The media talked about Warnock and Ossif as a pair. Same with Lufler and Purdue. That made sense since Democrats couldn't become the majority party in the Senate without a dual victory. But Warnock's race against Loughler was decided by a wider margin than Ossoff's against Purdue. What made Warnock, who is a black preacher, a more attractive candidate than young white Loeffler? Well, I think it's worth looking at the difference between Purdue and Leffler.

First of all, Ossoff was running against in Purdue a much more well-known and well-liked Republican. The Purdue name has clout here in the state, both because he's been a senator for two terms, but also because Sonny Purdue, Trump's Secretary of Agriculture, was governor here not long ago and pretty well-liked. Leffler, meanwhile, was from the start view to something of a latecomer and an opportunist. One Republican described her to me as a political hobbyist. She didn't have the same bona fides here, which is why she tacked so far to the right, I think, with some of her messaging and her ads. She was saying she was more conservative than Attila the Hun.

That got a lot of attention rightfully. So this put, I think, a few moderate Republicans, along with her stock scandal that emerged before Purdue. that I think it turned off a few moderate Republicans, this sort of extreme right fringe messaging from her. But I think Warnock, also, to your question, also had an obvious appeal to a lot of Black Georgians that Biden and Ossoff, frankly, didn't. Not that Biden and Ossoff weren't liked by Black Georgians,

but one Black Democrat actually told me that he felt Warnock had gone through a lot of the same things in life that he had. And that perception, I think, is very powerful and helps lead to the huge turnout, black turnout in these races. So Leffler and Purdue did enthusiastically embrace President Trump. They sort of had no choice. Gun to the head, yeah. They took up his claim that the election in Georgia had been stolen from him.

And before the events at the Capitol, Leffler had planned to object to the certification of Georgia's electoral votes. Did that strategy prove to be a benefit or a liability? I'm not sure I can say with certainty, but it's, it, What I can say with certainty is that it was a desperate 11th hour move from her, I think, realizing that she was behind Warnock, I mean, most polls showed in the last few days before the runoffs that she was behind him by some margin. And she, you know, continuing to make the extreme rightward swerve that she did throughout her campaign did the most extreme thing she could to try to bring any sort of fence dwelling Republican to vote for her. So she, she jumped on board this,

you know, undermining democracy move from the dozen or so senators that had planned to, to object to the certification. When I was, I will say, I was at a Trump rally in Dalton, Georgia, the night before the election. And it was not a very well-attended affair compared to others that I'd been to and seen. He was sort of low energy. It was cold. For these and other reasons, about half the hardcore Trump followers who were there left before he was done and before Leffler had even spoken. So I'm not sure that, you know, those who were there who were really excited about Trump and maybe still curious to learn more about Lefler, they weren't even around to hear her final

message about objecting to certification. So I'm just not sure that it really got through to that many people either in person or through other avenues. Tell us about, you've talked to a lot of Georgia officials, tell us about Gabriel Sterling, whose title, I believe, is the voting system implementation manager. You know, sounds like a pretty bureaucratic position, but since November, Sterling's received many death threats. I think a website showed a picture of his house with a gunside over it. The threat of political violence is more potent than ever in Georgia, and as we saw yesterday in Washington and across the country. what are the forces driving that violence from where you're sitting?

Well, first, about Sterling, I mean, he's a guy who voted for Trump not once but twice, but he's also a guy who has really been very clear in his messaging about debunking, and he's gone through in these press conferences he's held in the last month or two. He's just gone through almost every conceivable insane notion that's been put forward about the election in Georgia and just clearly and efficiently debunked each and every one in these press conferences and also on Twitter. Yesterday on Twitter, as he's done at press conferences quite notably and I guess bravely, he's laid at the feet of Trump the blame for both the death threats that were coming into his office and Secretary Raffensberger's office weeks and weeks ago. And also what

happened at the Capitol yesterday. And that's pretty rare among Republicans, frankly, anywhere in this country, but especially in Georgia. To the rest of your question, you know, the San Diego woman who was killed as she tried to enter the Capitol yesterday had last posted, apparently, on Twitter about Georgia lawyer Lynn Wood, a truly deranged Trump attorney here in Georgia, who I've spoken to a few times, who I think can be thought of is sort of the opposite of a Gabe Sterling Republican. He's a guy who's been fanning the flames of misinformation, who's been taking up the stop-the-steel banner. And so, you know, I think there's a pretty clear line we can draw between at least one protester yesterday who was killed and the rhetoric coming from a noteworthy

Georgia GOP person in Lynn Wood. I've also spoken to, it. Atlanta's Tea Party leader, who I personally find to be actually a quite amiable woman, Debbie Dooley, I was shocked yesterday to see her post on Twitter, Burn Baby Burn. I mean, I know that she supports Stop the Steel, but it still stunned me that a person who's, I think, caring and compassionate in her own way, saw the drama at the Capitol through a completely different lens. And also it's worth pointing out a former leader of the KKK showed up at Georgia's capital yesterday looking for Secretary Raffensberger. I guess the point is that while Georgia Democrats did something really historic yesterday, which was below the fold on the front pages of the Atlanta paper today, the state still is a huge number of Trump supporters who really aren't going anywhere anytime soon. And as is the case nationally, it's going to be very hard.

to forge compromise and to de-escalate here in the coming days. So I am interested, too, in a text that you got from another contact of yours, John Cowan, who lost his race for Congress to Marjorie Green. And he texted you on Wednesday morning about Warnock's triumph, calling it a rejection of Republican populism. And he said that the Georgia GOP needs to return to compassionate Christian conservatism to inspire people. And it just struck me that this is the conundrum of the party in Georgia and across the country. So it just, given what you've been saying, it seems increasingly implausible. Yeah, it really does. There just aren't a whole lot of John Cowans that I've run across in my reporting. He's, he's the minority. I mean,

and to give a little bit more about him and maybe why it's so wild that a figure like Marjorie Green beat him. He's an Ivy League educated doctor who, you know, was saying the right things about the pandemic, who's intelligent, who's well-spoken. He still upholds a lot of the core Republican values of gun ownership and, you know, the border wall being important, et cetera, but he speaks rationally. And yet he couldn't get through in his primary against Green to the vast majority of voters in Northwest Georgia who supported her, someone who basically at every turn has been saying nonsense about the pandemic, about the elections. So I see Marjorie Green, unfortunately, for Republicans and I guess all Americans, as more the face of the future of the Republican Party here in Georgia

rather than John Cowan. Thanks so much, Charles. You're welcome. Charles Bethay is a staff writer based in Atlanta. He spoke on Thursday with Dorothy Wickedon on our podcast, Politics and More. Dorothy is executive editor at The New Yorker.