Travis Waldron reports:

David Dreyer just needed a nap. The morning of Jan. 6, Dreyer, a Georgia state representative, had spent most of the last 24 hours in the Georgia World Congress Center watching local officials tally absentee ballots in the two runoff elections that had taken place the day before. The outcome would determine majority control of the U.S. Senate.

Overnight, The Associated Press had projected both Democratic candidates, the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, as the winners. But Dreyer was concerned. Since his defeat in Georgia in November, President Donald Trump had sought to overturn the state’s election by falsely claiming that the Atlanta area — the most populous, diverse and Democratic region of Georgia — had been home to widespread ballot fraud. As the election center in Atlanta buzzed with Republican lawyers and conservative poll watchers, Dreyer worried that legitimate votes might get tossed aside. And the margins were razor thin.

Finally, around 11:30 a.m., Dreyer convinced himself that the AP was right: Warnock and Ossoff ― a Black Baptist minister and a 33-year-old Jewish former congressional staffer ― had won Senate races in the heart of the Deep South. He drove home, turned on the TV for a bit of ambient noise and tried to rest for the first time in what felt like months.

“And that’s when the insurrection at the Capitol started,” Dreyer recalled during an interview at an Atlanta co-working space his law firm calls home.

Georgia Democrats, and the coalition of voters who propelled them to a trio of major victories in November and January, have not had time to relax since. [Continue reading…]