FLIPPED

A political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution follows the hard-fought Georgia Senate campaigns that broke the Republican stranglehold on a bright-red state.

In his first book, Bluestein shows how grassroots efforts by Stacey Abrams and others helped lead to runoff elections that sent two Democratic trailblazers to the U.S. Senate: Jon Ossoff, who “entered the race to muted fanfare as an unknown, ‘make Trump furious’ candidate”; and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the first Black senator from Georgia. In 2020—buoyed by 1.5 million new voters and Abrams’ narrow loss in her 2018 race for governor—Democrats mostly stopped trying to regain power by posing as “Republican-lite” candidates. “Instead,” the author writes, “leaders energized the party’s core constituencies—including many who rarely cast ballots—with policies that just years prior would have seemed unthinkable: Gun control. Decriminalization of marijuana. An end to crackdowns on illegal immigrants. Progressive social and economic initiatives. An expansion of abortion rights.” Against the backdrop of the pandemic and the racially motivated murder of Ahmaud Arbery, Bluestein gives a closely observed and well-reported account of how the Democratic winners mobilized new voters—Ossoff’s aides courted Gen Z by playing into viral memes on TikTok—and survived the November election. Then both faced runoffs complicated by Trump’s bitter and unrelenting efforts to invalidate the presidential vote in Georgia. It’s a brisk and colorful story, full of twists: Ossoff’s opponent, former Dollar General CEO David Perdue, had to self-quarantine after exposure to Covid-19; Warnock faced WNBA franchise co-owner Kelly Loeffler, who boasted of being “more conservative than Attila the Hun”; and “proud Trekker” Abrams enlivened an online forum called “Star Trek: The Next Election.” Bluestein’s portrayal of Warnock is thin and largely unilluminating—events such as his contentious divorce get skimpy notice—but an otherwise rich cast keeps the book engaging even if it reveals less about him than about some of its minor figures.

A savvy account of two of the most consequential U.S. Senate elections in recent history.