Just as young voters played a significant role in turning Georgia blue for president this fall, they may also be paramount in determining which party controls the Senate.
And with so much riding on the runoff elections in four weeks for both the state's Senate seats, civic engagement organizations and political groups have been firing on all cylinders to find and register new voters by Monday's deadline. They are particularly interested in the 23,000 Georgians who weren't old enough to vote this fall but will pass their 18th birthdays by Jan. 5.
That may seem like a relatively tiny number in a state with 5 million votes in the general election. But the number is twice as big as Joe Biden's margin of victory all three times Georgia's presidential ballots have been counted. And, in a contest with turnout sure to be way down from November, the import of each ballot will be greater.
And the stakes have also become even bigger than they appeared a month ago. Victories by both challengers, documentary filmmaker Jon Osoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, would allow the Democrats to control the Senate next year with 50 votes and the tie-breaking power of Vice President Kamala Harris. But Congress will remain under divided control, hobbling the chances of Biden's agenda, with the return of even one of the Republican incumbents, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
In November, Georgia had the highest participation by young people anywhere in the country, with one-fifth of all votes cast by people younger than 30, according to researchers who study the youth vote at Tufts University. Such people cast 16 percent of the vote nationally.
And the exit polls then suggest the youth vote was crucial to the Democrats' fortunes. Biden, the first of his party to carry the state since 1992, secured his razor-thin margin with 56 percent of the under-30 vote, his strongest showing among four age groupings. Ossoff bested Perdue among such voters by 11 percentage points and Warnock won the youth vote over Loeffler by 16 points. (Because there were other candidates, none of the four candidates cracked 50 percent of the vote, the requirement for all statewide contests in Georgia.)
Turnout in the Peach State increased more than 20 percent, with nearly a million more votes cast than in 2016. But participation in the second round seems guaranteed to be less, even though the twin contests may generate more political spending than any similar races in American history. Turnout declined at least 43 percent from November in each of Georgia's previous four runoffs.
The election's scheduling right after the holiday season, and during the worst projected phase for the coronavirus pandemic, will make it especially difficult to persuade Georgians to mail in another ballot or head to the polls again.
To inform voters of the timetable, national and regional partisan and ostensibly nonpartisan groups have returned to social media and revived their phone banks — a continuation of the robust digital campaigns they ran after Covid-19 made in-person efforts essentially impossible since last March.
To bolster Republican support in the runoffs, the conservative Faith & Freedom Coalition has been conducting registration efforts through the state's 5,000 evangelical Christian churches. The national and state chapters of the College Republicans have been focused on reaching young voters on the state's 75 campuses.
Their efforts may be hurt, though, by the intense GOP strife created by President Trump and his repeated efforts to delegitimize the state's results and his intensifying criticism of the state's Republican election officials
Democrat Stacey Abrams, one of the country's most prominent voting rights advocates, has been credited with registering 800,000 Georgians in the two years since narrowly losing the governor's race. Her organizations, Fair Fight Action and the New Georgia Project, are now at the heart of outreach and fundraising efforts for the Ossoff and Warnock campaigns.
The Southern Poverty Law Center announced last week it had donated $1.9 million to registering, educating and getting out the vote of Black, Latino and younger Georgians in the runoffs — bringing to $4.4 million its 2020 campaign investment in the state. The beneficiaries include Black Voters Matter, Fair Count, the Georgia branch of NALEO, Georgia Shift, ProGeorgia, Vote.org and the New Georgia Project.
"The American people turned out in record numbers before and on Nov. 3 to decide a new direction for the country," said SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang. "But in Georgia, the work of voters is still needed."
While the money can go a long way to mobilizing the vote, though, it's a drop in the bucket compared with more than $315 million already committed to television advertising across the state.
More than 1 million have already requested mail-in ballots for the runoffs. The deadline to do so is Jan. 1, while in-person early voting begins in two weeks.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.