RUNOFF FOR GEORGIA SENATE IS TODAY
Bitter race between Walker and Warnock will close midterm
ATLANTA
In the final day before Georgia’s Senate runoff, Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, pleaded with supporters to tune out pundits predicting his victory and instead vote “like it’s an emergency” in a bitterly contested race that is closing out the midterm election cycle.
His Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, a former football star recruited into the race by former President Donald Trump, made a circuit of north Georgia counties he won easily a month ago, urging Republicans who have avoided early voting to hit the polls today. “Got to get out the vote,” he said.
The two men are competing in an election with major symbolic as well as practical ramifications. A Warnock victory would deliver Democrats a 51st vote in the Senate, where the party has for the past two years relied on Vice President Kamala Harris to break 50-50 ties.
If Walker wins, Republicans would maintain joint control of Senate committees, and two centrist Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, would maintain effective veto power over all legislation in the chamber.
But the broader political stakes are just as significant. Democrats believe a victory would deliver proof they have transformed Georgia into an indisputable battleground, heralding
a new era of Sun Belt politics and reshaping their strategies for winning the White House.
A Walker victory, after his deeply troubled campaign and the Republican Party’s clean sweep in statewide races this year, would reassert Republican dominance in the state.
And for Trump, who three weeks ago began his third presidential campaign, today’s contest represents his last chance to claim victory in a battleground for one of his closest political acolytes.
More than $380 million has been spent on the race, the most of any election this year, according to OpenSecrets, a group that tracks
money in politics. The runoff was prompted when neither candidate received 50 percent of the vote in last month’s general election.
The number of early votes cast has topped 1.89 million, about half the turnout on Nov. 8. Both campaigns believe that group skews heavily Democratic.
Republicans involved and allied with Walker acknowledged that tilt left the candidate needing to win about 60 percent of the inperson vote today to catch up. He won 56 percent of the Election Day vote in November, according to data from the Georgia secretary of state’s office.
“There is still a path for Herschel Walker to win this
race — he still could win,” Warnock told reporters after speaking to supporters at Georgia Tech on Monday. “We had a massive lead during the general. And so we know that there are differences in how people show up when they vote in this state. And so if there’s anything I’m worried about is that people will think that we don’t need their voice. We do.”
In some ways, Walker was running a final-day getout-the-vote campaign ripped from a generation past, when the vast majority of votes were still cast in person on Election Day.
Warnock, who also won a runoff election two years ago, had adjusted to modern
voting patterns and Georgia’s voting rules, which allowed for a week of early voting.
At Warnock’s recent events, it was difficult for him to find supporters who are waiting until today to vote.
Asked who had voted early, nearly every hand went up at stops at colleges and Black churches the past two days.
“I’ve been preaching long enough to know that I am preaching to the choir,” Warnock, pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, said Sunday at a Black church in Athens.
On Monday, when a fooddelivery-app driver dropped off sandwiches for the
Warnock campaign at its event at Georgia Tech, a pair of energetic volunteers pressed him about whether he had voted already. (He hadn’t and said he wasn’t sure he would today.)
“This final push is all about building enthusiasm and momentum into Election Day,” Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., a close Warnock ally who has appeared at many of his campaign stops, said during an interview Monday. “We want to mobilize as much energy as possible to get out the vote to reach folks who might not otherwise hear from campaigns.”
In November, Warnock finished 37,700 votes ahead of Walker out of nearly 4 million cast. Warnock consolidated Democratic voters, while Walker struggled to rally his party behind him.
While his advisers and allies quietly lowered expectations, Walker on Monday said he was feeling “pretty good” as he shook hands and took photos with voters at a popular diner in Flowery Branch, an Atlanta exurb in a county where he took 71 percent of the Nov. 8 vote.
He later delivered unusually short remarks — free of his signature long tangents — to about 75 supporters at a vineyard in Gilmer County, another Republican stronghold.
“Tomorrow is a big day,” he said, asking the group who had voted. Two-thirds of the crowd raised their hands. “This is what we’ve got to do — we’ve got to vote.”
Walker’s supporters Monday brushed off worries that poor weather — rain is in today’s forecast for the Atlanta area and north Georgia — or low energy would diminish today’s turnout.