Warnock Beats Walker, Giving Democrats 51st
Senate Seat
In the last battle of the 2022 midterms, Senator
Raphael Warnock dealt another blow to former President Donald J. Trump, whose
handpicked candidate, Herschel Walker, was outspent and outmatched.
Published
Dec. 6, 2022
Updated
Dec. 7, 2022, 1:37 a.m. ET
Jonathan
Weisman and Maya King
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/12/06/us/warnock-walker-georgia-senate-runoff
Georgia
Senate Runoff Results ›
race
called.
Candidate Party Votes PercentPct.
Raphael
Warnock*incumbent
Dem.
1,817,465 +51.4%51.4%
Herschel
Walker
Rep.
1,719,868 +48.6%48.6
>95% of
votes in
*Incumbent
Source:
A.P.
Warnock Defeats Walker in Georgia’s Senate Runoff
ATLANTA —
Senator Raphael Warnock defeated his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, in
a runoff election on Tuesday that capped a grueling and costly campaign,
secured a 51-seat Democratic majority and gave the first Black senator from
Georgia a full six-year term.
Mr.
Warnock’s victory was called by The Associated Press late Tuesday evening as
the senator’s lead was expanding to 51 percent compared with Mr. Walker’s 49
percent. It ended a marathon midterm election cycle in which Democrats defied
history, as they limited the loss of House seats that typically greets the
party that holds the White House and now gain a seat in the Senate.
Throughout
one of the most expensive Senate races in American history, Mr. Warnock used
the cadences and lofty language he honed as the senior pastor of Atlanta’s
Ebenezer Baptist Church to ask Georgia voters to rise above the acrimony and
division of Donald J. Trump’s politics.
“I am
Georgia,” he proclaimed Tuesday night in Atlanta, invoking the martyrs and
heroes of the civil rights movement and the small towns and growing cities of
his childhood. “I am an example and an iteration of its history, of its peril
and promise, of the brutality and the possibilities. But because this is
America, because we always have a path to make our country greater against
unspeakable odds, here we stand together.”
He uttered
what he called the four most powerful words in a democracy: “The people have
spoken.”
The defeat
of Mr. Walker, who was handpicked by Mr. Trump, culminated a disastrous year
for the former president, who set himself up as a Republican kingmaker only to
watch his Senate candidates in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire
— as well as his picks for governor in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and
Georgia — go on to defeat in primaries or in last month’s general election.
Mr.
Walker’s loss will almost certainly lead to soul-searching for a Republican
Party that must decide heading into the 2024 election how firmly to tether
itself to a former president who has now absorbed powerful political blows in
three successive campaign cycles. An exhausted-looking Mr. Walker spoke only
briefly after his defeat, asking his supporters at an event at the College
Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta, “We’ve had a tough journey, have we not?” He
added, “God is good.”
The Georgia
result also holds a bold message about race in the rising New South.
Mr. Warnock
was the first Black person from Georgia to be elected to the Senate when he won
a 2021 runoff. Republicans chose another Black candidate to try to deny him a
full term — a former football star with no political experience and little
ideological depth — elevating the role of race and identity in a contest where
the Republican candidate denied the existence of racism and the Democrat spoke
of painful injustices that have yet to be remedied.
Now, with
six years ahead of him in the chamber, Mr. Warnock will remain part of a
stunningly small group: Of the more than 2,000 people who have served in the
United States Senate, only 11 have been Black. Of the Senate’s 100 current
members, just three are Black: Mr. Warnock; Cory Booker, Democrat of New
Jersey; and Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina.
Mr.
Warnock’s campaign officials said on Tuesday that they intentionally treaded
lightly on the racial dynamics of the matchup against Mr. Walker, understanding
that a heavy-handed message on race could alienate moderate white voters. Mr.
Warnock was also wary of running a negative campaign while maintaining his post
behind the pulpit of a high-profile church.
Instead, in
the final weeks of the general election campaign, the Warnock team segued to a
violent episode from Mr. Walker’s past. The campaign and allied groups poured
more money into advertisements highlighting the account of Mr. Walker’s
ex-wife, who said he had threatened her life.
In the
general election in November, Mr. Warnock, 53, finished ahead of Mr. Walker by
about 37,000 votes. But neither candidate cleared the 50 percent threshold
needed to win, sending the race into a runoff. Under Georgia’s new election
law, the runoff period was shortened to four weeks from nine, giving both
campaigns little time to regroup, adjust their strategies and mobilize voters
to return to the polls.
Mr.
Warnock’s aides also credited the lawsuit their campaign and other Democratic
groups filed against the state of Georgia to lift a ban on early voting on the
Saturday after Thanksgiving. They won the lawsuit and cleared the way for more
than two dozen counties — a majority of which favored Democrats — to open their
doors for voters.
To
Republicans who have said the strong turnout in the general election and the
runoff showed the absence of any voter suppression, Mr. Warnock disagreed.
“Just because people endured long lines that wrapped around buildings, some
blocks long, just because they endured the rain and the cold and all kinds of
tricks in order to vote,” Mr. Warnock said, “doesn’t mean that voter
suppression does not exist. It simply means that you, the people, have decided
that your voices will not be silenced.”
Mr. Warnock
and his Democratic allies funneled millions of dollars into the race,
outspending Mr. Walker by more than two to one in less than a month. By the
final week of the runoff campaign, Mr. Warnock had topped $53 million on the
airwaves, while Republicans had spent only $24 million. That was just a
fraction of the $400 million spent in total on the race by the candidates,
their committees and outside groups during the midterm election cycle,
according to OpenSecrets, a group that tracks money in politics.
Mr. Warnock
won with overwhelming support from Black voters, who make up one-third of
Georgia’s electorate and are integral to its Democratic base. Black voters in
Georgia expressed disappointment, even anger, on Tuesday at what they saw as an
effort to manipulate them to support a flawed Republican candidate who they
believed had been selected because of his race by political figures who would
dictate his actions.
“Herschel
Walker is a product of Georgia politics,” Aisha Horan, 47, said after casting
her ballot on Tuesday for Mr. Warnock at the Cobb County Civic Center in
Marietta. “Someone looked around and said: ‘We need to counter Warnock,
especially for those Black folks. Let’s just stack the deck against them a
little bit more.’”
But Mr.
Warnock also won a key slice of support from moderates in the state, a group he
paid extra attention to in the runoff campaign. Luke Maran, 23, an independent
voter and mechanical engineering student at Georgia Tech, said he agreed with
conservative economic principles of efficiency and low taxation, and had his
qualms about the extremes of liberal social policies. But ultimately, he said,
he voted for Mr. Warnock as the more qualified candidate.
Republicans
struggled to articulate a message to galvanize their voters after Democrats
secured Senate control during the general election. And while Mr. Walker, 60,
used his fame to vault to the top of the Republican candidate field, he made a
series of missteps and contended with a near-constant flow of damaging
headlines about his personal life and business career.
He did not
dispute his ex-wife’s previously aired accusations of domestic violence. But he
was also accused, for the first time, of fathering children he had not
previously disclosed, exaggerating and lying about his business prowess, and
urging women he was in relationships with to have abortions. His campaign
denied all of these claims.
Those
scandals and a series of nonsensical verbal diatribes — on the relative merits
of werewolves and vampires, China’s “bad air” and a bull on the wrong side of a
fence eyeing several cows — appeared to have a profound impact on his standing,
especially with Black men, some of whom saw Mr. Walker as the white power
structure’s mistaken idea of a candidate who would appeal to them.
“It was
embarrassing, and I heard other Black men in my circle talk about their
embarrassment,” Rachman Holdman, a 48-year-old information technology manager
in Sandy Springs, said after voting for Mr. Warnock on Tuesday.
An array of
Republican figures visited the state regularly to bolster Mr. Walker’s campaign
during the runoff period, including Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina,
Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida.
But in the
final days, Mr. Walker held few events — and he disappeared from the campaign
trail altogether during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, baffling his G.O.P.
allies who saw it as a crucial window. By Election Day, he appeared to be
unable to encourage a sizable portion of moderate voters, particularly those
who had supported Gov. Brian Kemp in the general election, to turn back out for
him.
Mr. Kemp, a
Republican, had to walk a fine line in the runoff, preserving his political
capital in a contest that was trending away from the G.O.P. while appearing to
lend enough support to Mr. Walker to maintain his reputation as a devoted party
leader.
Complicating
the issue for Mr. Kemp was Mr. Trump. The former president had urged a former
Republican senator, David Perdue, to challenge the governor in the primary in
May. Mr. Trump wanted revenge for Mr. Kemp’s refusal to back his attempt to
overturn his defeat in Georgia by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.
Mr. Kemp
easily defeated Mr. Perdue in the spring, only to be left propping up Mr.
Trump’s Senate candidate in the fall.
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