Incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) has won reelection, according to CNN and the Associated Press, leaving all Democratic hopes of Senate control hanging on the Georgia runoffs.
The outlets called the state with its three electoral votes for President Donald Trump as well, though the presidential race has already been called for President-Elect Joe Biden.
While Sullivan had a significant lead after Election Day, the state didn’t start counting its mail-in ballots, as well as some of the early vote, until Tuesday. Democrat Al Gross’ campaign maintained that the path to victory lie in the uncounted ballots, as the absentee vote elsewhere in the country skewed blue.
Ultimately though, there was too much ground to make up, and Gross would have had to win the remaining vote by extremely high margins to pull off a win.
While the Alaska loss looked likely for the Democrats, it increases the pressure on the January Georgia runoffs. Those two races are officially Democrats’ last hope of getting to 50 seats and maintaining Senate control via Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote.
Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock will be taking on Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and David Perdue (R-GA) in a race that will bring organizers, attention and floods of money to the Peach State.
“I think these runoffs are going to get crazy,” Jeffrey Lewis Lazarus, a political science professor at Georgia State University, told TPM in a recent interview. “This state is going to be saturated with politics.”
