Will Georgia need a US Senate runoff? In years like this one, it never did.
Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff faces Republican Mike Collins in the US state of Georgia on 3 November. Without over half the votes, there is a runoff.
What happened
Donald Trump campaigns in Georgia ten days before the US Senate election.
Donald Trump was due to speak in Georgia on , ten days before the US elections. He was expected to announce that the car company Audi will build a factory there to make 200,000 large cars a year.
The day before, at a rally in Dalton, Georgia, Trump compared Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, with his Republican rival Mike Collins, and asked people to “really get out there“ and vote. At another Georgia rally he said: “You have to pretend I’m on the ballot“.
At their debate on , Ossoff asked Collins again and again to explain his votes for Trump’s tariffs, which Ossoff said have “crushed Georgia families“. Collins, who is trying to cut into Ossoff’s lead, blamed rising prices on the policies of the Biden administration.
By almost 1.5m people in Georgia had already voted. That is more than 40% of all votes cast in Georgia in the 2022 midterm elections, the elections held halfway through a president’s term.
In Georgia a candidate needs more than half of the votes to win. If no one gets there, the top two meet again in a runoff. In 2022 a third candidate took enough votes to send Senator Raphael Warnock and Walker to a runoff on .
Sources: theguardian.com
The Pattern
We looked for cases where a sitting Georgia senator ran again while his party did not hold the presidency, in a year with no presidential election. We found five such races from 1974 to 2010 in the official results. Each time one candidate won more than half the votes on election day, and there was no runoff.
Show the other 3 cases
The Read
Ossoff is in the same position as the five senators before him: his party does not hold the presidency, and no president is elected this year. Four of those five senators won more than half on election day. The one who did not, Max Cleland in 2002, lost on election day to Saxby Chambliss, who won 52.7%. In October the Guardian described Collins as still behind Ossoff.
There are reasons for doubt. The most recent of the five races was in 2010, and in 1990 Sam Nunn had no opponent at all. In 1996 Cleland won with 48.9% and no runoff, so the more-than-half rule may have worked differently in 1998 and 2002. Georgia also had Senate runoffs in , a presidential year, and in , when the senator was from the president’s party.
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