“Warnock! Ossoff! … Wow,” said the Daily Kos blogger, whose pseudonym is Chloris Creator. “Comparing them to Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum of Independence Day, the black & the Jew who saved the world … I’ll leave it at that.”
Of course, Ossoff and Warnock came to be nominees not by design, but by fending off others in the primaries. Ossoff faced incumbent Republican David Perdue in a conventional challenge: Perdue was ending his freshman six-year term in the Senate. Neither man got a majority and, according to Georgia law, that triggered an automatic runoff on January 5.
Similarly, Warnock faced Kelly Loeffler, a Republican whom Gov. Brian Kemp named as interim senator a year ago, when neither secured 50 percent of the vote in the November election.
For Jewish Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are a heroic new Black-Jewish duo
January 22, 2021
(JTA) Two days after his election to the Senate helped tip the balance of power in Washington, Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff found another historical echo in his victory.
In a Twitter thread, Ossoff described his trajectory from a teenage intern for John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and civil rights hero who died last year, to U.S. senator.
“And now a Jewish man he mentored and a Black man who was his pastor have been elected to represent the State of Georgia in the U.S. Senate,” Ossoff said. “I know Congressman Lewis is looking down on us today beaming with optimism.”
They represent a relationship between two communities that has been revived in recent years, according to Jewish organizers in the state. And they could help realize Biden's agenda.