Georgia's Republican Party once relied on votes in Atlanta's close-in suburbs, but today the GOP increasingly relies on the mountains of north Georgia for its votes.

Raphael Warnock's roots showed little promise of a future that led to the U.S. Senate. He grew up in Savannah in the Kayton Homes public housing project, the second youngest of 12 children. “Only in America is my story even possible,” Warnock told the cheering drive-in crowd Sunday. Warnock was arrested at the Georgia state Capitol in 2014 while protesting the refusal of state Republicans to expand Medicaid. Warnock recalled the Washington arrest during his speech Sunday in Savannah, as he looked ahead to his next trip to Capitol Hill.

An official counts ballots for Georgia's Senate runoff election at the Georgia World Congress Center on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Atlanta. Almost all the votes left to be counted statewide were mail ballots and early in-person votes. And most of the early in-person votes left to be counted were in DeKalb County; that method of voting in the county favored Warnock by about 70 percentage points. There were still some mail ballots and in-person early votes left to be counted statewide, the majority of which are in Democratic-leaning counties. Until Warnock, a Democrat hadn't won a U.S. Senate contest in the state since former Georgia Gov.