From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily.

Today, in the closely watched Georgia runoffs, the Democrats win one race and are heavily

favored in the second, putting Democratic control of the Senate within reach.

My colleague, Nate Cohen, on a historic night in Georgia. It's Wednesday, January 6.

Well, Nate, good morning. Good morning. I have to say this was not a telephone call or

a election call that we were expecting to have tonight. You know, I'm surprised to hear that.

Does that mean there was worse planning on your end than I typically expect from you guys?

I mean, we had it on really good journalistic authority that the Georgia Senate runoffs were going to take days to count.

And here we are, I guess, seven hours after the polls close. And we have real news from this race.

It's true. We have a projection. So Nate, tell us exactly where things stand at 2 30 am on Wednesday morning in these runoffs.

Well, there are two contests. And one of them we have a projected winner, the Democrat Raphael Warnat has defeated Kelly Lawfler in the Senate special election.

And in the regular Senate election between John Assoff and David Frodo, the Democrat, John Assoff has a slight lead of a few thousand votes with nearly all of the vote in and counted.

So help us understand how we can have one Senate race called the other not called because I'm having a little bit of trouble imagining in a race where two Democrats are on the ballot.

And two Republicans are on the ballot. Understanding how one Democratic Senate candidate gets ahead of the other.

I had long imagined that any Democratic voter who cast a ballot was going to cast a ballot for both.

That's certainly a reasonable expectation.

I think that there are a lot of people who vote based on personality, based on how much they like somebody. And as far back as the November election, it was clear that the Democrats were better positioned in the special election than they were in the regularly scheduled election.

So there are a couple of explanations. One is that the Republicans had a pretty brutal primary in the run up to the November special election. And Kelly Lawfler ran pretty far to the right in that primary.

You may recall that she ran a television advertisement claiming that she was further to the right than until the hunt.

In contrast, there was not a fierce inter-party battle on the right for the regularly scheduled election. David Prudu was a well established incumbent and who despite being very conservative still has a little bit of appeal to a traditionally Republican voter that maybe has swung over to the Democrats and recent cycles.

And we're talking about a very small number of voters to be clear at the moment. There's only about a percentage point that separates the two candidates.

So it doesn't take much to create this sort of seemingly significant difference.

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