Several news outlets called the U.S. Senate race in favor of her opponent hours after her speech.
Author: 11Alive Staff
Updated: 10:21 AM EST January 6, 2021
ATLANTA — Despite trailing by tens of thousands of votes with a dwindling number of precincts left to be counted in the race for U.S. Senate, Republican Kelly Loeffler struck an optimistic tone in comments to supporters early Wednesday morning.
"There are a lot of votes out there, as y'all know, and we have a path to victory and we're staying on it," Loeffler told a room of supporters shortly after midnight.
At the time she spoke, Loeffler trailed her Democratic challenger, the Rev. Rafael Warnock, by more than 35,000 votes with 2,619 out of 2,656 precincts reporting. At that same time, a little more than 1,200 votes separated Republican David Perdue from Democrat Jon Ossoff in Georgia's other U.S. Senate runoff (and Ossoff later took a slight lead with more votes to be counted). Republicans need to win at least one of the seats to maintain control of the U.S. Senate.