Republicans controlling the agenda and the committees in the House for the next two years is indeed a victory, but it certainly doesn’t feel much like one, considering the polling letdown and high expectations going into Election Day. By the time last Friday rolled around, and Adam Laxalt in Nevada saw his lead shrink to under a thousand, then go negative, and the race called a nanosecond later, all hope for the Republicans controlling the Senate ended. The only question now was whether it would remain a 50-50 tie, or whether the Democrats would be in the outright majority 51-49.

As was the case two years ago, all eyes, lawyers, and money are now on Georgia until December as the libertarian in the race has been voted off Survivor island and it’s now a two-man race between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock.

Over the weekend, I got an honest question on Twitter from a dejected Georgia listener/voter who asked me, “Any good reason why I should bother to vote in the GA run-off?” Not really being in the mood to have an intelligent debate about it, I naturally replied in my Twitter voice. “Yes, unless you’re an idiot.”

He responded. “What’s the difference between 50 and 51 Dems in the Senate?” I took a deep breath and gave him the short answer. I’ll explain it here, too.

One of Joe Biden’s closing message speeches he gave to the DNC was that if voters gave him 52 votes in the Senate, they’d codify Roe. Now that’s not exactly true, because the House under GOP leadership will certainly have something to say about that. Democrats, including Chuck Schumer, have also expressed a desire in the Senate to use the broken filibuster to change the makeup of the Supreme Court, and add D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, a naked attempt to add four extra Democrats to the Senate, ensuring their majority is not in peril anytime soon. Again, assuming the GOP holds its current lead in the remaining House races not called, that’s not going to happen. So why is Georgia important? Here’s why.

We don’t know what the final margin in the House will be. Smart money says it’ll probably be somewhere around 222, meaning a four-seat edge for soon-to-be Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But a lot of the seats in play are in California, where they count votes like the sloth DMV workers in Zootopia. Ballots can be turned in by anyone, and they can be postmarked well after Election Day. So God only knows what’s still out there and when they will be dumped into the final results. I’m not taking anything for granted. It seems likely, with a few races called this weekend, that the coming Republican majority is safe. But what if it’s at 219 when all the shouting’s done? Or 218? Yes, still a majority, but let me tell you a story about my first experience in radio and politics back in the spring of 1995.

I was working for Salem’s Christian powerhouse in Los Angeles, KKLA, producing an Orange County-based afternoon drive talk show that was a hybrid between Christian social issues and politics. In the California State Assembly, the Golden State’s version of the House of Representatives, there had been a decades-long run of control by Democrats. But the election of 1994 brought the Republicans to within one seat of control in the 80-seat chamber. Following a resignation in early 1995 necessitating a special election, which the Republicans eventually won, Curt Pringle was about to take over as Speaker of the Assembly, ending the 14-year reign of terror by Willie Brown. (Yes, the same Willie Brown that benefitted from the “services” of future Vice President Kamala Harris and in return helped get her political career started.)

In May of 1995, on the eve of Pringle taking over as Speaker, Willie Brown, needing only a one-vote swing, made a deal with Republican back bencher Doris Allen, who represented the city of Huntington Beach. In fact, in what was an interesting detail making the next few weeks and months pretty surreal for me, her district office was literally two doors down and across the hall from our Huntington Beach radio studio. We saw her and her staff literally dozens of times going in and out of the building and up and down the hall. The deal Brown struck was that Doris Allen would become Speaker, and she wouldn’t have to change parties, but she would caucus with the Democrats, leaving them in charge of the committees and agenda. She agreed to be the puppet of Willie Brown. He wouldn’t be called Speaker anymore, but he would still be running the Assembly.

Assembly terms are two-year terms in California, and we were already four-plus months into the new session, but a caller to our radio show called in and discovered that the filing deadline if you wanted to do a recall was literally within 24 hours of when she pulled this stunt, and to qualify, X number of signatures of voters in her district had to be collected and filed by the next day. We went wall to wall with the petition drive that afternoon for three hours, and actually got the signatures collected. The recall was on, and the recall was successful. She was removed from office a couple months later, and Scott Baugh, yes, the same Scott Baugh who currently is a few thousand votes behind Katie “Batgirl” Porter in one of the California House races yet to be called, took over her district. I still have somewhere in my pile of mementos a picture of Allen forlornly looking up into the back of a U-Haul at the remaining pieces of her office before driving off for the last time.

The moral of this story? If the new House majority is within four, or three, or two, or God forbid one, do you trust that every single member of the House Republican caucus would resist the siren song of what the Democratic Party would offer them to switch and jump ship? I don’t. Anyone remember Jim Jeffords? Arlen Specter? I know, both of those examples are senators, but anyone remember Justin Amash? How about Paul Mitchell? Both of those Congressmen left the Republican fold just in the last 3 years.

The reason to fight like hell for Herschel Walker in Georgia is three-fold. The Republican Party is right on the issues, and the issues are worth fighting for. Period. There is never a good reason to vote for a Democrat. Not as radical as they’ve become, and not on the issues they’re championing. We have to stay engaged with the American people, and clearly have to improve in articulating that the issues Republicans care about resonated more with Georgia voters.

The second reason to go all-in on Herschel in Walker, and the reason 50-50 is better than 51, is because the thing about having firewalls is not having to rely on them. Yes, Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have both publicly committed to not breaking the Senate filibuster. Do you want to spend the next two years trusting their commitment? I don’t. The firewall disintegrates if the Democrats get 52 in the Senate, and that last time I checked my math, 50 is further away from 52 than 51 is. 50 held the firewall for the last two years, and I’d rather not tempt Sinema or Manchin to have a rethink, especially with the probable House majority being that razor thin.

The final reason to fight for every seat we can is forward-looking. Kirsten Sinema will be up in Arizona. Debbie Stabenow will be up in Michigan. Jacky Rosen will be up in Nevada. Jon Tester will be up in Montana. Sherrod Brown will be up in Ohio. Bob Casey will be up in Pennsylvania. Tim Kaine will be up in Virginia. Joe Manchin, should he run, will be up in West Virginia. Tammy Baldwin will be up in Wisconsin. Those are 9 Democrats in states in which Republicans have won at least once since 2016. Some of those states voted Republican twice in presidential years. Candidates obviously matter, a painful lesson we hopefully are learning this cycle, but these nine are winnable seats. Every seat you win now, and every one you win in 2024 gets you closer to 60, which should be every Republicans’ goal. Quantity is a quality all its own.

There will be plenty of time for the obligatory bloodletting amongst the Republican faithful. We can discuss who’s fault this cycle was, who needs to be purged, and from whom we’ve heard enough forever. All that can and will be discussed in due course. But for the time being, can we all agree that elections do matter, and while we can’t do anything right now about what just happened, we all can have a positive impact on the outcome of the election squarely in front of us? Save the negativity and pity parties. It’s not useful or helpful. It’s time to rally around Herschel and close the deal in Georgia.