Democrat Wins Senate Runoff Election

The Democrats have secured one net U.S. Senate seat pickup for a 51-49 majority after incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia defeated deeply flawed Republican candidate Herschel Walker, in a runoff election that concluded today in a roughly 51.3% to 48.7% race with 99% of the vote counted (a 2.6 percentage point margin of victory), which are results significantly better than in the first round race, which Warnock won by a 0.9 percentage point margin with about 2.1 percentage points going to a Libertarian candidate. Warnock apparently won about 90% of the third-party vote in the runoff election (holding all other things equal).

In the races of the U.S. House, taking the last outstanding race, CO-3, in which deeply flawed Republican incumbent Lauren Boebert is almost sure to survive the automatic recount currently underway, by roughly 0.16 percentage points, the closest federal election in the country this year (in which should have been a safe Republican seat). 

Democrats have lost a net ten seats and their majority in the House. Republicans will have four more seats than they need for a bare majority in the U.S. House (almost exactly 51% of the total number of seats outstanding in a mirror image of the Senate).

The marginal seats in both chambers were resolved in elections with less than two percentage point margins of victory in a nation poised on a knife edge of equal support for the two major political parties in the context of the current rules of the game.

So, with a Democratic President and Vice President, and a 6-3 conservative majority in the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal government will spend the next two years in a gridlock even deeper than the current one in which the lack of a Democratic filibuster-proof majority in the Senate has prevented almost all significant legislation from being passed. But Democrats will have an easier time getting President Biden's appointees confirmed.