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Loeffler does not concede in a brief speech on election night, says she has a path to victory and promises "we're going to get this done." #GASenateRaces

Robert Barnes @barnes_law Tonight ended the leadership career of Mitch McConnell.

ATLANTA - Democrats won one hotly contested U.S. Senate race in Georgia on Wednesday and pulled ahead in a second, edging closer to control of the chamber and the power to advance Democratic President-elect Joe Biden’s policy goals when he takes office this month. Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock beat Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler, TV networks and Edison Research projected. Democrat Jon Ossoff held a narrow lead over Republican David Perdue in the other race, with a final outcome not expected until later on Wednesday. With 98% reporting, Warnock was ahead of Loeffler by 1.2 percentage points, roughly 50,000 votes, while...

polls just started closing

More people cast ballots on the first day of early voting in Georgia’s Senate runoffs this week than those that did so when early voting opened ahead of the 2020 general election. Roughly 168,000 Georgians went to the polls on Monday, the first day to vote early in-person in the state’s two critical Senate runoff elections, according to numbers provided by the Georgia secretary of state’s office. By comparison, some 128,000 voted on the first day of early voting for the November general election. Another 314,000 people cast absentee ballots on the first day of the early-voting period. The first-day...

The Last Days with Jeb Bush: "Like a Funeral" (Video) NBC News Campaign Embed Jordan Frasier has been following the Bush campaign for seven months.

Mirroring the donor-backlash against Karl Rove after his American Crossroad/Crossroads GPS super PACs raised upwards of $300 million and produced a dismal 2012 success rate, Mike Murphy, the man in charge of the Jeb Bush Right to Rise USA super PAC is now in the crosshairs. Right to Rise's dismal results became painfully obvious when Bush dropped out of the race Saturday night after only three primary contests. CNN reports that donors are not happy: In the armchair quarterbacking following Bush's departure from the race Saturday night, Murphy is facing countless questions about the efficacy of the PAC spending tens...

After disappointing finishes in presidential nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Jeb Bush suspended his campaign for president Saturday night. It was the end of a run that had seemed doomed for months: countless gaffes, merciless attacks from the likes of Donald Trump, seemingly limitless spending from a superPAC he couldn't control with horrible returns from those investments and perhaps above all, a candidate who seemed uncomfortable on the trail at best, and at worst, frustrated and unhappy. Already, the post-mortems are almost writing themselves.

I'm feeling bad for Jeb Bush. I've never been a supporter of a third Bush presidency-having endured the highs and lows of the second up close-but I can't help but think about this coming Easter or Thanksgiving, or the next event when the whole Bush family is gathered around in one place. The Bushes may come across as kindly, low-key aristocrats. But have no doubt: They are ruthless competitors. When I worked for President George W. Bush, he was racing Karl Rove to see who could read the most books in a calendar year. His father used to challenge people...

Jeb Bush always remained optimistic. From the beginning of his candidacy last June, he pledged to run with "joy" and adopted a tortoise-and-the-hare strategy, earnestly believing that he would prevail in the end despite a crowded field of candidates. Even as his chances became grim over the past eight months, he started handing out tiny toy turtles from his pockets to children, telling them that "slow and steady wins the race." But in 2016, "slow and steady" was the opposite of what the country wanted. There's plenty of blame to go around for Bush's fall, but the central theme is...

For Jeb Bush's loyalists, the first moment of palpable panic - and there would be more than they ever expected in the months to come - built over four days last May when their not-yet-presidential candidate struggled repeatedly to utter a one-word answer - No - to an utterly predictable question: Should the U.S. have invaded Iraq? -snip- From the start, the campaign hired extensively and paid handsomely. That money, though, couldn't come from Right to Rise, which had pulled off a record $103 million haul in six months. The campaign needed to raise the cash itself. It couldn't keep...

For Jeb Bush's campaign, August was a cruel month. Donald Trump's attacks on the former Florida governor as a "low-energy" politician were beginning to stick, and the two were bickering over immigration. The issue before the Bush team was what to do about it. -snip- Mike Murphy, the chief strategist for Bush's super PAC, Right to Rise, explained what had happened this way on Sunday. "Our theory was to dominate the establishment lane into the actual voting primaries," he said. "That was the strategy, and it did not work. I think it was the right strategy for Jeb. The problem...

On a sweltering day in Miami last June, surrounded by a diverse group of supporters, Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for president of the United States. "My message will be an optimistic one," Bush promised. "I will campaign as I would serve: Going everywhere, speaking to everyone, keeping my word, facing the issues without flinching and staying true to what I believe." In a remarkable turn of events, eight months later, Bush -- the son and brother of presidents -- suspended his campaign, flanked by his tearful wife and youngest son. But in a race for the Republican nomination marked...

As former Florida governor Jeb Bush suspended his presidential bid Saturday night, new details were trickling in about the massive investments the Right to Rise super PAC made to prop up his candidacy. As of Saturday, the group had raced through at least $95.7 million out of the $118.6 million it had collected by the end of January, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Almost $87 million went into a barrage of television ads, online videos, slick mailers and voter phone calls. The group flew an airplane with a banner mocking Donald Trump over a rally of his supporters, produced...

It ended without an exclamation point. On a mild Saturday night in South Carolina, Jeb Bush took to the stage at his victory party (using those two words in the least literal sense) and told supporters that he was out. It wasn't supposed to be this way. When Jeb jumped in, Tea Partiers panicked and grassroots conservatives lit their hair on fire. He carried an air of inevitability after all-at its onset, his campaign practically drowned in shock-and-awe money and big name endorsements. But from its inception, there were cracks. When he spoke at CPAC a few months before his...

Jeb Bush, the Republican establishment's last, best hope, began his 2016 campaign rationally enough, with a painstakingly collated operational blueprint his team called, with NFL swagger, "The Playbook." On page after page kept safe in a binder, the playbook laid out a strategy for a race his advisors were certain would be played on Bush's terms - an updated, if familiar version of previous Bush family campaigns where cash, organization and a Republican electorate ultimately committed to an electable center-right candidate would prevail. The playbook, hatched by Sally Bradshaw, Mike Murphy and a handful of other Bush confidants in dozens...

To Mike Dennehy, Jeb Bush is a lost cause, an opinion expressed on a near-daily basis by political pundits and shared by many here in the Granite State. The state whose motto is "Live Free or Die" has quickly become do or die for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. The problem is, Bush may already be "dead" to most voters. "So what do you think about Bush?" I asked Mike Dennehy, a GOP strategist with two-plus decades of experience in New Hampshire, over coffee Thursday morning. "Boy, that's one of the saddest stories of the entire campaign," he responded.

Will the Bush family legacy be the primary victim of Jeb's campaign? There is another Republican debate tonight and Jeb Bush will participate despite his lagging campaign and poll numbers. The Real Clear Politics average of polls has Bush at 4.7 percent. Jeb's message never caught on despite plenty of media attention and financial backing. It didn't help that he is an establishment candidate or that he's viewed by many as a legacy candidate like Hillary Clinton. Bush has tried to jump start his campaign by attacking Donald Trump numerous times but that has backfired and worked in Trump's favor....

Jeb Bush is low in the polls but is experiencing something new: growing crowds. The former Florida governor drew his largest crowd in recent memory when he hosted a town hall in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Saturday night, with 530 people in attendance, according to the fire marshal. Bush typically draws between 100 and 200 people at his town halls so staffers had to search for extra seats. It was the fourth night in a row that Bush aides had to find more seats for a larger-than-expected crowd during a packed swing through New Hampshire and South Carolina -- two...

Donald Trump is now the choice of nearly one-in-three likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, while Jeb Bush, who once pledged that he would win in the state, plummeted to just 4 percent in the latest Monmouth University poll. With less than a month before the New Hampshire primary, the Republican polls are showing significant movement, and a competitive battle for second and third place within the margin of error. Trump jumped six points from the November poll, to 32 percent, followed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, both at 14 percent. For Cruz, the...