Live Coverage: Georgia Senate runoff elections

Judging by the comments threads, a few of you aren’t ready to go  to bed yet, eh? Well, then, neither will we!

Here is where we stand as we come up on 1 AM on the East Coast, and a mere 10 PM here in DKE’s Western HQ in Southern California:

• Democrat Raphael Warnock has declared victory in his special election against appointed Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler. With about 97% of the vote counted, Warnock holds a lead of 36,000 votes, which lies well outside the recount margin.
• In the runoff election that was forced in November when incumbent Sen. David Perdue (R) failed to reach 50%, Perdue holds an extremely thin 919 vote margin over Democrat Jon Ossoff. But Democrats are already cautiously optimistic (if not giddy), because the bulk of the 60,000-90,000 votes remaining are on decidedly blue turf, with the single biggest set of outstanding votes coming from DeKalb County, which thus far has given 82.5% of its votes to Jon Ossoff.

David Perdue gets a little help from a red county (looks like it might have been Coweta), and that pads his small lead just a hair: he is back into the four digits (1322 votes).

This is all kinds of cool:

The numbers we see suggest the same, of course, but here is the head of the Ossoff campaign expressing high optimism in the eventual outcome: 

The update that many of you have waited hours to hear:

JON OSSOFF HAS MOVED INTO THE LEAD.

About 6200 early votes counted in DeKalb County, won overwhelmingly by Ossoff (he took nearly 90%), has moved Ossoff into a lead of 3560 votes.