Washington: US President Joe Biden celebrated Democrat Raphael Warnock strengthened his party’s majority in the Senate on Tuesday after he was declared the winner in a runoff election in Georgia.
Television networks polled the incumbent senator to beat Republican Herschel Walker, a former football star and supporter of former President Donald Trump.
Warnock’s win confirms the slimmest. Democratic majority – 51 to 49 – in the upper house of Congress.
“Tonight Georgia voters stood up for our democracy, rejected ultra-megaism, and most importantly: returned a good man to the Senate, here’s to six more years,” Biden tweeted.
The party’s election victory did not change the balance of power in the Senate, which Democrats had already taken control of on November 8.
But the victory for Warnock, a pastor at the Atlanta church where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, gave Democrats more control in the committees and curbed the power of any Democratic senator to sink Biden’s measures. gave
Republicans took back the House last month but with a smaller-than-expected majority.
Warnock, 53, and Walker, 60, both African-American, faced voters after earning more than 50 percent in the Nov. 8 midterm vote.
Democrats retained control of the Senate with 50 seats in that vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote giving them the upper hand in the 100-seat chamber.
Warnock’s victory significantly curbs the power of centrist Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who has already blocked many of Biden’s major initiatives in the first two years of the president’s term.
With 700 days to go before the 2024 presidential election, Republicans hope to halt Biden’s momentum after his party performed better than expected in November.
Obama to the rescue
Determined to win the race, Democrats touted their top gun: charismatic former President Barack Obama, who campaigned with Warnock last week in Atlanta.
And in another sign of how high the stakes were, $400 million was spent on the Georgia race to make it the costliest midterm campaign.
About 1.9 million people cast early ballots, many of them likely Democratic voters, while Republicans were expected to take effect Tuesday.
The polls were too close to call.
Georgia, a historically Republican state, surprised America when voters chose Biden over Trump in the 2020 presidential election and then sent two Democrats to the Senate in another runoff two months later. .
Polar opposites
Both candidates are from Georgia this time, but the men are opposites.
Warnock grew up in poverty, the 11th of 12 children to a former soldier and preacher father and a mother who worked in the cotton fields.
He remained as senior pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church after his election and earned a doctorate in theology.
Walker is a latecomer to politics with a Senate run in 2022.
The 60-year-old conservative is considered one of the best players in the history of American college football — the closest religious institution in the South — and went on to a stellar career in the National Football League.
Walker, a staunch opponent of abortion even in rape cases, has been the subject of several recent scandals, accused of paying for abortions for two women with whom he had affairs.