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Ossoff Widens Lead Over Perdue, CNN Projects Warnock Wins. Aired 5-5:30a ET

Aired January 06, 2021 - 05:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: We want to welcome our viewers in the United States and all around the world. This is NEW DAY. It is Wednesday, January 6th, 5:00 here in New York.

And we begin with breaking news. A dramatic and history-making night in Georgia.

[05:00:03]

CNN projects Democrat Raphael Warnock will beat Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, becoming the first black senator to represent Georgia. Warnock at this moment has 53,430 votes more than Loeffler.

As for the other Senate race between Republican David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff, Ossoff is leading Perdue at the moment by 16,370 votes, which is more votes than Joe Biden won the state by in November. The votes are still being counted so this race remains too early to call.

The balance of power in the United States Senate is now within reach for Democrats. They are one seat away from winning back the majority in the U.S. Senate which would change the course of Joe Biden's presidency.

And, John Berman, I know you've been tracking this all night. What are you seeing?

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: It's been changing all night. Just to be clear, if Jon Ossoff does win this race, the Democrats will control the Senate. Right now he leads by more than 16,000 votes. Democrats believe that lead very well might grow. Why? Because it's where the remaining votes that they know of still is at this point.

Let's talk about that. Chatham County, this is where Savannah is. We believe there are about 3,000 votes left in Chatham County to count. And you can see Jon Ossoff is winning by 16,000 votes. So, his vote could very well expand from Chatham County.

Look in the Atlantic area. This is where Jon Ossoff has run up the score to a certain extent. Gwinnett County right here, you can see Jon Ossoff getting 67 percent of the vote. 4,800 votes left to count there. More room for Jon Ossoff to grow, talk about Fulton County. He's getting 71 percent of the vote there, 4,000 votes left to counts. Another opportunity to grow.

Why do I keep saying there's an opportunity to grow? DeKalb County is where we've seen the most votes come in from overnight. You can see Jon Ossoff, he's leading David Perdue by more than 200,000 votes. Let me tell you what the last batch of votes were from DeKalb County?

There were 3,706 votes in DeKalb County, OK? Jon Ossoff got 98, that's a bad 8, got 98 percent of that vote and he was able to expand his lead by some 3,000 votes. Now, I'm not saying that all the votes that come back from these other counties will have an Ossoff lead quite that much, but there is reason to believe he will be expanding his lead over the coming hours, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: OK, John.

Some of the campaigns are already reacting to these results.

CNN's Ryan Young is live in DeKalb County, Georgia. What's happening there?

RYAN YOUNG, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, Alison, what an exciting night. They didn't stop counting until 4:00 a.m. this morning. They tell us they'll start again around 10:30.

There is one update though. There was a memory card malfunction and they started to have to hand count. Like you said, campaigns are starting to have reactions.

Jon Ossoff's campaign told us they believe they fully expect Jon Ossoff will have won the election and will represent Georgia in the United States senate. Perdue's campaign says they plan to mobilize every available resource and exhaust everybody legal recourse to ensure all legally cast ballots are properly counted, switching back to the other campaign. Loeffler talked to her supporters, she believed there was a path to victory.

So, all of the campaigns speaking what they want to come to fruition, but Warnock also gave a campaign speech from his house late last night. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REV. RAPHAEL WARNOCK (D), GEORGIA SENATOR-ELECT: So to everyone out there struggling today, whether you voted for me or not, know this -- I hear you. I see you. And every day I'm in the United States Senate, I will fight for you. I will fight for your family.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

YOUNG: Alisyn and John, when we joined you yesterday, we weren't sure how this was all going to work out. We know the numbers in terms of people showing up to vote were high. Look, the wait times weren't high at all. The average wait time was in some places two to three minutes. We watched people go in by the hundreds to cast their vote.

So, so far, it seems so good. Let's not forget, you still have military ballots that can come in until the 8th. That still has to be counted as well. But once again, they will start counting here again at 10:30. They plan another upload probably around 4:00, from what we're told. That could always change.

BERMAN: We'll see more votes coming in. No doubt.

Ryan Young, thanks so much for that reporting.

Joining us now, CNN political commentator Errol Louis, CNN senior political analyst John Avlon, and CNN senior political writer and analyst, Harry Enten.

And, look, there's so much to talk about -- the historic nature of Raphael Warnock's victory, the first black senator from Georgia. That's huge. The pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

[05:05:00]

Jon Ossoff, 33, young Jewish man likely we think at this point to be elected senator from there. A lot of the storylines.

But, Harry, the top story line is this, which is it looks like the Democrats may very well win two Senate races in the previously red state of Georgia that by all accounts they had no right to win. You know, on November 3rd, if you told me the Democrats would win both of those races, I would have said, I doubt it. That's not the way it works here, Harry.

So, what happened here?

HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL WRITER AND ANALYST: It was the backup plan, right? What happened was two months of the president of the United States bashing Republican state elected officials in the state of Georgia. You had Kelly Loeffler going after Raphael Warnock in the black church in the state of Georgia. Just horrible politics. Horrible politics happened.

The Democrats ran behind the Republican Senate candidates in Georgia back in November even as Joe Biden won the state. So something shifted.

And I think the big thing that shifted was very high African-American turnout. We saw that in the early vote continuously where they were making up a larger share versus the same point back in the November election and it followed through on election day and it's not just the metro Atlanta, it was from Augusta, all the way down to the southwest portion of the state, the Black Belt in the rural areas. We also saw it there.

So, I think if there's one big take away, it was that black voters decided to turn out and vote which traditionally hasn't happened in runoffs in the state of Georgia.

CAMEROTA: For people who are just waking up and joining us, let's just look at the leader boards again. Reverend Raphael Warnock has beaten Kelly Loeffler it appears by 53,430 votes. CNN has called this race for Warnock.

And then Jon Ossoff, it's still too close to call but he is leading Senator David Perdue at the moment by 16,370 votes.

Errol, give us the big picture. What do you see here?

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, the big picture is that you have the cradle of the civil rights movement, which is basically not just Atlanta but also rural Albany Georgia. You know, they've spent decades, literally generations preparing for this moment, registering against great odds, building an entire culture that's church based.

So, in Raphael Warnock, you have the perfect candidate to take it forward. He has in fact been the pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church so it all came together. That's on the Democratic side.

On the Republican side, you had confusion and division and multiple agendas that did not necessarily mesh well together. You had the president of the United States coming to Georgia to talk about himself rather than the candidates, and to discredit the entire process of voting, which is not a great way to try and mobilize one's base.

And so, you've got a changing south here. You've got a changing Georgia here, but you've also got, right, some really bad politics on the Republicans side. They couldn't make up their mind about what this race was about.

So if you have a consolidated, energized, motivated Democratic effort going on and you have a confused and dispirited Republican effort to hold on to two seats, the outcome is not all that surprising.

Very close race. It could have gone either way obviously, but that is how I see the politics playing out here, Alisyn.

BERMAN: And now, for the Democratic Party in Joe Biden, John Avlon, they flipped the White House and on the precipice of flipping the United States Senate. It's a big deal.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: It's a huge deal. This really is a political earthquake for all reasons that have been said. Nobody thought the Democrats would be able to flip Georgia in the presidential. It was initially was a swing. It was seen as a stretch. Let alone two Senate seats in a runoff where runoffs in the South have traditionally rolled Republican in the last several decades.

To put this into perspective, not only does this deprive Mitch McConnell of the majority, it means he has a 50-50 split, that race is being called and very close, where Vice President Kamala Harris would be the tiebreaker. That changes the balance of power and the dynamic of power in the Biden presidency potentially.

Also, just to put this in historic perspective, Raphael Warnock will be the first black Democrat to represent the United States South in the Senate in American history. That's extraordinary. That's the kind of history we're watching with this unbelievable vote. And as Errol and Harry both said, this is about a unified, motivated Democratic base in Georgia, taking on what has proven to be a divided Republican Party because of Donald Trump's constant attacks on the governor, calling this race illegal at one point. That didn't work, it appears.

BERMAN: Because of Donald Trump. Such an interesting sentence to use and one that I think we've said quite a bit over the last four years. Harry as we sit here this morning with just a few days left in the Trump presidency, any Republican that you get a text from, any Republican you see an honest tweet from who has anything to do with Georgia this morning is basically blaming the president.

[05:10:14]

ENTEN: With cause. With cause.

I mean, the president of the United States it almost seemed like he was doing everything to lose the race down in the state of Georgia. Runoffs are mostly about turnout and when all of a sudden, you're attacking the vote mechanisms in the state, oh, it's fraud, it's this, that, the other, going back to the general election, well, maybe then some Republican voters might not want to turn out.

And while part of the story for sure is that black voters turned out in this election, part of the story is that rural white voters did not turn out. Those are the voters most strongly for Donald Trump. You see it in the northwest portion of the state. You see it in the southern portion of the state.

The Republican base did not turn out and vote. One of the real questions going forward even though Donald Trump is leaving the White House in about two weeks, the fact is he is still going to be a main stage figure in the media, within the Republican Party ,where does the Republican Party go to from here? I think it's a question we'll have to really delve into over the next weeks and months to come.

BERMAN: Where do they go today? I mean, I swear. I think there's a today angle to this whole thing.

ENTEN: Yes, absolutely. I think that's true as the Electoral College count gets counted in Congress.

CAMEROTA: Yeah, we'll see how that plays out and how this, the findings, results here in Georgia affect that if at all.

Let's look at the total votes cast, Errol, 4.4 million in this Senate runoff which obviously shows huge enthusiasm. The 2020 presidential race had 4.9, 2016 presidential had 4.1.

And so, as you were saying, you see this as the culmination of all of the bootstrapping efforts, the get out the vote effort was underway in the South, and in Georgia and Stacey Abrams and everybody else who were working towards this moment.

LOUIS: Oh, sure. I mean, one lawsuit after another. One effort after another, early voting sort of souls to the polls. This whole by now cultural tradition of shepherding people to voting after a church service in the Bible Belt, it's a huge motivating factor. It has been a long and bitter road. There are literal martyrs who were shot and killed and imprisoned along the way to make this happen.

That all by itself creates a gigantic sort of narrative, a deep cultural narrative that the candidate really sort of stood on top of, Raphael Warnock. I mean, he sounds like a preacher. He is a preacher. He's part of the tradition that people understand was that the only way that black folk are going to have literal survival and a political participation.

And so, yeah, this glittering prize at the end of it, which is that he gets to sit in the U.S. Senate, is a huge achievement, but it really builds on other huge achievements. You know, the turnout, by the way, black voter turnout was never higher than in 2012 for the re-elect of Barack Obama. And Stacey Abrams came and did her thing right after that.

You know, they're really on a roll. They have figured out how to turn to out the vote and do it consistently with growing and impressive numbers. And the future, you know, they have a certain kind of infectious confidence that comes with it. Maybe we can start to see some changes in what have been a really troubled region for sure in Georgia in particular.

BERMAN: John, hold that thought for one second. I know you want to jump in here.

Harry, we're going to let you take a quick nap.

John, Errol, you're going to come back with a lot more to discuss, including what does this mean for President-elect Joe Biden? It changes a lot on day one.

Also, as we were discussing, what does it mean for today? The shenanigans Republicans were planning to pull to try to undermine democracy and overthrow the election. So much to discuss, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:18:14]

CAMEROTA: OK, breaking news. Democrats are one seat away from regaining the majority in the U.S. Senate. Jon Ossoff is widening his lead over David Perdue at 16,370 at the moment but that is still too early to call because votes are still being counted.

CNN can project Raphael Warnock will defeat Senator Kelly Loeffler. All of this will have an impact on president-elect Joe Biden's agenda and his cabinet nominations and everything.

Back with us, Errol Louis and John Avlon.

So, John, tell us the significance of this from federal judgeships to possible Supreme Court seat to health care, the future of Obamacare. I mean, what would this mean if Jon Ossoff were to hold this lead?

AVLON: All of the above. That's because Democrats would control the Senate and run the committees. Even though it would be a 50-50 split, that is tie breaks would be done by the Vice President Kamala Harris who would be spending a lot of time up on Capitol Hill.

But it makes all the difference in terms of just controlling the process. If Republicans control the Senate, Mitch McConnell can block basically any item of business that he wants to do. He can be Dr. No and really derail or block almost all of Joe Biden's agenda even as an incoming president.

So this makes all the difference particularly for issues like climate change. It doesn't mean there is a blank check for a hard core progressive agenda. There are red states who made it clear they're not going with some of the folks wish-list on the more progressive left, but it does mean that Biden is still going to need to deal with Senate right senators.

But it means that Mitch McConnell can't be a Dr. No.

[05:20:01]

It means Biden and Democrats have control of the House, the Senate, and the White House. That means everything when it comes to that.

BERMAN: Yeah, and the very first thing it means is nominations. It means nominations for cabinet. It means nominations for all courts, potentially one day for the Supreme Court.

Look, if the Democrats had the situation when Barack Obama were president, Merrick Garland would have had a hearing and will be sitting on the Supreme Court.

AVLON: Sure.

BERMAN: It's that much of a difference. It's the difference between Merrick Garland being on the court and not being on the court. That's the difference.

And, Errol, it may very well shape some of the decisions that Joe Biden makes now. I'm talking about the next ten days. He still has to nominate an attorney general. It may change who he nominates because they will have an easier time in a Democratic Senate of them being confirmed.

LOUIS: Yeah, no question about it. I mean, there were a number of names and the thought was if it was a Republican Senate they wouldn't get through. Some of that would change, in fact, if there's a Democratic Senate, just the ability to bring it to the floor, the flow of the conversation on certain policy issues.

We know that the Biden administration like any incoming administration is going to have a 100-day sort of game plan, 100 is a random number in some ways but essentially the first budget the first year and the order in which they bring things up and the legislative agenda, you know, you've got to believe that the administration is going to sit down with the Senate leadership, whoever it may be, and say, look, this is the order in which we're going to do this.

We're going to tackle climate change. We're going to tackle the pandemic. We're going to fund the vaccination campaign. We're going to do all kinds of different things.

Yeah, he's got a lot more possibilities if he's got a cooperative Senate and a vice president who may have to go there and break some tie votes from time to time.

CAMEROTA: John Avlon, how about the stunt today? How does this affect what these 13 or so senators are going to do in terms of trying to gum up the works for Joe Biden to actually -- the votes to be counted from Josh Hawley to Ted Cruz? Does this affect their thinking today?

AVLON: It takes some of the wind out of their sails. I mean, they've already been facing a lot of pushback increasingly from their colleagues, from Mitch McConnell who warned that this is destructive not only to the republic, but it creates a dangerous precedent.

You saw Tom Cotton who typically walks in lock-step with those folks penning an op-ed, explaining his decision not to do so.

Now they need to confront the fact that they appear to have lost two seats in Georgia, something nobody thought was on the menu and that Donald Trump, their hero, is almost certainly to blame. It doesn't mean it's going to change it. You have up to 140 House Republicans that are going to push. That's a stunningly unprecedented and disgraceful number.

And you got enough senators to move that forward to debate. But they're not surfing a wave of confidence in the wake of Georgia last night. Instead the fundamental weakness of their position has been revealed in a very uncomfortable way for them.

BERMAN: Just to talk a little bit more about what the next few weeks will be like for president-elect Biden and President Biden in the nomination process, Errol. I'm fixated on the Supreme Court because of what we've been through over the last few years.

AVLON: Why would you be fixated on that, John?

BERMAN: Exactly, Stephen Breyer is 82 year old. It has to be a different calculation for him today than it was yesterday when he went to sleep. Maybe he would feel more comfortable retiring because Biden could more easily nominate someone who the Democrats might like more, someone who's 17 years old. That's what the Democrats want. The Democrats want a 14-year-old nominated to the bench who can serve there for the next 85 years, but it makes it more likely that that happens more quickly, doesn't it?

LOUIS: Well, you're talking about a level of strategic movement on the Supreme Court and with regard to nominations that Democrats traditionally have not shown. There was some discussion years ago of asking Ruth Bader Ginsburg, hey, maybe it's time for you to step down so we can make sure President Obama gets a new pick and so forth and so on and Democrats have just generally not done that. They don't have the kind of farm team screening and vetting process the way on the right you have the Federalist Society.

So, yes, maybe some of that was change in light of what they saw. That a president voted out after one term, who was impeached, who lost both the House and apparently also the Senate, also got three Supreme Court picks. It's got to really weigh on people's minds and don't think that Justice Breyer isn't going to hear it from some liberal progressive groups that maybe this is a good time to, you know, go teach for a while, maybe write a couple of books, otherwise let the Supreme Court come back to some kind of centrist politics if that's what Breyer wants to do.

Now, this is the thing about a lifetime appointment, John. Nobody can make them do anything they don't want to do.

BERMAN: Alisyn Camerota knows that well.

[08:25:01]

CAMEROTA: Yeah, this is a throne but it is no way you're going to get off of.

BERMAN: Can't make her do a damn thing.

CAMEROTA: Exactly.

Guys, thank you both very much for all of the analysis on this pivotal --

BERMAN: They're coming back.

CAMEROTA: See you guys in a minute.

Pro-Trump protesters clashing overnight with police, OK, as Congress prepares to confirm Joe Biden's victory today. What is happening in the streets? We have new details on what Vice President Mike Pence told President Trump about what he will do today. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: Obviously, the breaking news is the big night in Georgia from Democrats already picking up one Senate seat. They're poised perhaps to pick up another.