The U.S. Senate race in Georgia between Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker will head to a runoff after neither candidate secured the 50% wanted to go straight to Congress.
The Georgia seat is important to each events as they battle over management of the U.S. Senate. Warnock gained a runoff election in 2021, giving the Democrats a slim majority.
Walker, a former soccer star, was considered one of a number of flawed Senate candidates Republicans coalesced behind this 12 months. He lacked political expertise, had a historical past of home abuse allegations, embellished his file, made a number of gaffes and was accused of urgent a number of girls to have abortions regardless of campaigning as being staunchly against abortion.
However none of that appeared to matter to GOP voters who acknowledged Walker’s flaws however backed him anyway if it meant taking again the Senate. The race was neck-and-neck all the way down to the wire.
“We’re all sinners,” one Georgia lady in a suburb outdoors Atlanta told HuffPost last month, in protection of Walker’s previous. “We’ve all performed some issues we’re not pleased with.
Republicans centered extra on kitchen desk points. Inflation and crime had been among the largest themes in GOP adverts this election cycle, and Democratic candidates had bother providing efficient responses.
Like different Democrats this 12 months, Warnock sought to blunt GOP assaults over rising inflation and the excessive value of dwelling by touting his help of Democratic laws reducing the price of prescribed drugs and capping the price of insulin at $35. He additionally pushed proposals to cut back gasoline costs.
Of their solely debate final month, Warnock and Walker sparred over different hot-button points, together with abortion and immigration. Walker didn’t face-plant, as Democrats had hoped, and largely held his personal. In a single notable change, although, a moderator reprimanded the GOP candidate for flashing a “prop” police badge after Warnock dinged him for pretending to be a police officer.
Warnock made historical past in 2021 by defeating Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and changing into the primary Black senator from Georgia. The senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, the place Martin Luther King Jr. as soon as preached, owed his success largely to Black voters, who turned out in robust numbers in 2020 and 2021.
Throughout his time within the Senate, Warnock voted largely in lockstep together with his fellow Democrats and President Joe Biden. He put a ways between himself and the chief of his occasion by refusing to weigh in on the query of a Biden presidential run in 2024 and whether or not he needed the president to marketing campaign for him in Georgia. However he was by no means a thorn in his occasion’s aspect.
Democrats pulled out all of the stops of their efforts to save lots of the Georgia seat. Within the closing days of the race, former President Barack Obama appeared with Warnock at a rally the place he argued that Walker’s success at soccer didn’t make him certified to serve within the U.S. Senate.
“Does that make him one of the best particular person to characterize you?” Obama said on the occasion. “Let’s say you’re on the airport and also you see Walker and also you say, ‘Hey, there’s Herschel, Heisman winner. Let’s have him fly the airplane!’”
“You’d in all probability wish to know, ‘Does he know learn how to fly an airplane?’” he added.