Democrats capture Senate seat in Georgia runoff

WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden celebrated the strengthening of his party´s majority in the Senate late on Tuesday after Democrat Raphael Warnock was declared the winner of a runoff election in Georgia.

The incumbent senator defeated Republican Herschel Walker, a former football star and protege of former president Donald Trump, according to projections by television networks. Warnock´s win confirms the very slim Democratic majority -- 51 to 49 -- in the upper house of Congress. “Tonight Georgia voters stood up for our democracy, rejected Ultra MAGAism, and most importantly: sent a good man back to the Senate. Here´s to six more years,” Biden tweeted.

The party´s electoral triumph does not change the balance of power in the Senate, of which Democrats had already secured control on November 8. But the win by Warnock, a pastor at the Atlanta church where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr once preached, hands Democrats greater control in committees and curbs the power of any individual Democratic senator to sink Biden initiatives.

“After a hard-fought campaign -- or should I say campaigns -- it is my honor to utter the four most powerful words ever spoken in a democracy: The people have spoken,” Warnock said in a victory speech.

“I often say that a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children,” he told a packed Atlanta ballroom. “You have put in the hard work and here we are standing together.”

The Republicans took back the House last month but with a much smaller majority than expected. Warnock, 53, and Walker, 60, both African American, faced voters after neither earned more than 50 percent in the November 8 midterm vote.

Democrats retained control of the Senate in that vote with 50 seats, Vice President Kamala Harris´s tie-breaking vote giving them the edge in the 100-seat chamber.