Ga. Senate runoff has bitter closing
Warnock, Walker stay on the attack
WARNER ROBINS, Ga. — Ads with the candidates’ former wives. Cries of “liar” flying in both directions. Stories of a squalid apartment building and abortions under pressure. Questioning an opponent’s independence. His intellect. His mental stability. His religious faith.
The extended Senate campaign in Georgia between the Democratic incumbent, Raphael Warnock, and his Republican challenger, former football star Herschel Walker, has grown increasingly bitter as their Dec. 6 runoff nears. With Democrats already assured a Senate majority, it’s a striking contrast from two years ago, when the state’s twin runoffs were mostly about which party would control the chamber in Washington.
“Herschel Walker ain’t serious,” Warnock told supporters recently in central Georgia, saying that Walker “majors in lying” and fumbles the basics of public policy. “But the election is very serious. Don’t get those two things confused.”
Walker casts Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, as a “hypocrite” and servile to President Biden. Underscoring the insult, Walker calls the incumbent “Scooby-Doo,” complete with an impression of the cartoon hound’s gibberish.
The broadsides reflect the candidates’ furious push in the four weeks between the Nov. 8 general election and runoff to persuade their core supporters to cast another ballot. For Walker, it also means drawing more independents and moderates to his campaign after he underperformed a fellow Republican on the ticket, Governor Brian Kemp, by 200,000 votes.
Warnock led Walker by 37,000 votes out of almost 4 million cast in the first round, but the senator fell short of the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.
In many ways, the shift from his first runoff campaign is exactly what Warnock wanted: a straightforward choice between two candidates. Two years ago, then-President Donald Trump, fresh off his defeat, and Biden, then president-elect, made multiple Georgia trips to illuminate the national stakes of the races between Warnock and Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler and between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Senator David Perdue as control of the Senate hung in the balance.
This year, with Warnock vying for a full six-year term after winning the 2021 special election, Democrats have already guaranteed control of the Senate by flipping a seat in Pennsylvania. A Warnock win would give Democrats an outright majority at 51-49, meaning that the parties would not have to negotiate a power-sharing agreement.
Warnock’s preferred emphasis for most of his reelection bid has been his deal-making in Washington and the personal values he brings to the job. It took until the campaign’s final stages — only after two women accused Walker, an opponent of abortion rights, of encouraging and paying for their abortions — for the senator to ratchet up his attacks, arguing Walker is “unprepared” for the job.
“My opponent lies about everything,” Warnock said in a recent campaign stop, ticking off a litany of Walker’s repeated falsehoods and exaggerations. “He said he was a police officer. He’s not. He said he worked for the FBI. He did not. Said he graduated from the University of Georgia. He did not. Said he was valedictorian of his class. He was not . ... He said he had another business with 800 employees. It has eight.”
Walker has relished the jousting since he won the GOP nomination in the spring. Indeed, Walker takes his attacks right to Warnock’s strengths as the pastor of the famous church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached. Walker has criticized Warnock over an Atlanta apartment building, owned by a foundation of Warnock’s church, where residents have complained to The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative media outlet, of eviction notices and poor conditions.
Warnock, who says no residents of Columbia Tower have been evicted, incorporates Walker’s attacks into the list of the challenger’s documented exaggerations and falsehoods.
Both candidates’ former wives also loom in the campaign, though the two men avoid the topic themselves, leaving the discussion of their marriages mostly to paid advertising. In one ad, Warnock’s former wife tells Atlanta police that he ran over her foot. The Republican ad doesn’t note that a police report states that officers found no physical evidence supporting her claim. A Democratic ad features an interview with Walker’s first wife detailing that he threatened violence against her, circumstances Walker has confirmed in an autobiography.