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Analysis
Warnock’s win in Georgia is a bad omen for Trump
– but there’s no room for complacency
David Smith
Washington
bureau chief
Walker’s Senate runoff loss might be viewed as the
last nail in Trump’s political coffin, but 2024 will reveal the rebirth or the
death of Trumpism
Wed 7 Dec
2022 03.36 GMT
Sanity
strikes again.
Raphael
Warnock’s victory over Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff caps an
election season in which the normal, the sensible and the fans of fact regained
their voice and gave hope that, after long years in which American democracy
was feared to be at death’s door, the patient is rallying.
In simple
mathematics, the win gives Democrats 51 seats to Republicans’ 49 in the Senate,
speeding up confirmation of Joe Biden’s administrative and judicial nominees
and starving the conservative West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin of some of the
oxygen he enjoys as the swing vote.
But more philosophically,
it serves as another corrective to the notion that all America suddenly went
mad on 8 November 2016, the day Donald Trump was elected instead of Hillary
Clinton. Looking back, it’s pertinent to recall that Trump lost the popular
vote by nearly three million and benefited from a unique cocktail of
circumstances that included entrenched misogyny and running against the
ultimate establishment politician.
Since then,
election after election has demonstrated that Trump’s brand was never what the
majority of Americans wanted. Admittedly he improved his vote total in 2020,
but he still lost to Joe Biden by seven million. The rout of Trump-endorsed
election deniers in last month’s midterms has made even some Republicans
understand that the man who despises “losers” is the biggest loser of all.
In a normal
political universe, then, Walker’s defeat on Tuesday would be the final nail in
Trump’s political coffin. The former American football star was the ultimate
Trumpian candidate: a political neophyte famous for something entirely
unrelated to politics; braggadocious claims of business acumen; scandals over
abusive behaviour towards women and hypocrisy over abortion; weird and wild
statements on random topics.
Visiting
Georgia while Biden and Trump stayed away, Barack Obama observed: “Since the
last time I was here, Mr Walker has been talking about issues that are of great
importance to the people of Georgia. Like whether it’s better to be a vampire
or a werewolf. This is a debate that I must confess I once had myself. When I
was seven. Then I grew up.”
In the
Trump era it has become a commonplace that “nothing matters”. Tuesday’s result
suggests that some things do matter after all. In particular, candidate quality
still matters.
This
explains why, even though Republicans won every statewide election in Georgia
last month, Biden beat Trump here in 2020 and Democrats won both Senate seats
in 2021 thanks to Warnock and Jon Ossoff. (When primaries are thrown in,
Warnock has now won six elections in just two years.)
Candidate
quality is a two-way street. Walker did not just lose the election. Warnock won
it, outworking and outraising his opponent, touting his work on issues such as
maternal mortality, highlighting his record in helping propel Biden’s
legislative agenda through the Senate and deftly choosing when to ignore Walker
and when to put the boot in.
At a rally
at a church in Gainesville on Sunday, Warnock asked: “How do you tell your
children to tell the truth – and vote for Herschel Walker, who won’t tell you
the truth about the basic facts of his life? I’m in church, so that’s all I’m
going to say about that.”
Warnock,
53, the first Black senator from Georgia, has now secured a full six-year term
and a place among the Democrats’ rising stars. Every candidate needs a story
and he has one, telling how his octogenarian mother used her “hands that once
picked somebody else’s cotton” to “cast a ballot for her youngest son to be a
United States senator”, adding: “Only in America is my story possible.”
He is also
a powerful orator, a skill honed as senior minister of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist
church, where Martin Luther King Jr used to preach, and joins faith-driven
liberals such as Pete Buttigieg and the Rev William Barber in challenging the
Christian right’s dominance of the moral agenda. Warnock is fond of saying:
“I’m not a senator that used to be a pastor. I’m a pastor who happens to serve
in the Senate.”
Even so,
after Thursday it is still a case, as EM Forster put it, of two cheers for
democracy rather than three. Trump arguably remains the favourite for the
Republican nomination in 2024. His party has just regained a majority in the
House of Representatives and is teeing up partisan investigations aplenty. In
more ordinary times, it would have seemed unthinkable that a candidate such as
Walker could come anywhere close to a runoff in the first place.
Which means
there is no room for complacency and everything to play for. The next election
could spell the rebirth or the death of Trumpism. And nowhere will do more to
tip the scales towards hope or despair than Georgia.
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