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The two U.S. Senate runoff elections that will be held in Georgia Tuesday will determine whether the Senate will work in partnership with President-elect Joe Biden to build a better future for Americans, or whether Republican obstructionists who put politics ahead of patriotism will be empowered to do everything possible to oppose our new president.

Recall that McConnell famously stated in 2010: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."So McConnell’s goal 10 years ago — in his own words — was not to serve the American people. Not to create jobs, improve health care, strengthen education, protect national security, or fight for equal rights. No, he admitted that his top priority was to do everything humanly possible to hurt President Obama’s reelection prospects, regardless of the harm inflicted on the American people. You can bet every penny you have that McConell feels the same way about our incoming president.

The demonization of this pastor who now preaches in Dr. King’s church is part of a long and disgraceful history in Georgia of hostility to its Black residents. In fact, Georgia has never elected a single Black U.S. senator, governor, lieutenant governor, or secretary of state. And yet the Census Bureau estimates that 32% of the state’s population is Black.

American evangelicals broke their own records as well. They demonstrated overwhelming support for President Trump, all while showing up to the polls in the largest numbers in American history. In total, evangelicals made up 28% of the electorate in 2020, ensuring a tidal wave of support for faith-based concerns and Christian values.

As we approach the Tuesday Senate runoff elections in Georgia, where 79% of the population identifies as Christian and 38% identifies as evangelical, these same voters will decide who will represent Georgia in the Senate.

First and foremost, one of the biggest issues for American evangelicals is abortion. Evangelicals are decidedly pro-life; Pew research has found that a whopping 77% of evangelicals support making abortion illegal in all or most cases.

“I just want to make it very simple,” he said. “If you socially distanced and you wore a mask, and you were smart, none of this would be a problem. It’s all self-imposed. It’s all self-imposed. If you didn’t eat the cheesecake, you wouldn’t have a weight problem.”

They’ve increasingly decided to treat the pandemic as an issue of personal responsibility — much as our country confronts other social ills, like poverty or joblessness.

“We’re putting a lot of faith in individual actions and individual collective wisdom to do the right thing,” Rachel Werner, the executive director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me, “but it’s without any leadership.”

The coronavirus death toll in the United States surpassed 350,000 early Sunday, as experts anticipate another surge in cases and fatalities stemming from Christmas and New Year’s holiday gatherings. Data compiled by Johns Hopkins University showed the U.S. passed the threshold early Sunday morning. More than 20 million people in the country have been infected.

Top officials in charge of the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed had set a goal of vaccinating 20 million Americans by the end of 2020. But according to a count by Bloomberg News, as of Saturday night nearly 4.3 million vaccines had been administered in the U.S. to 1.3% of the population.

Additionally, three states -- Florida, Colorado, and California -- have reported cases of the new COVID-19 variant first seen in the United Kingdom. The strain is said to be more contagious and prompted travel bans and further restrictions in Britain.