The race was a test of candidate quality in an era of fierce partisanship , and it remained , until the end , extremely close .
How Raphael Warnock Defeated Herschel Walker in Georgia ’ s U . S . Senate Runoff
The race was a test of candidate quality in an era of fierce partisanship , and it remained , until the end , extremely close .
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells Guest Columnist
From the beginning , the U . S . Senate election in Georgia , which the Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock finally won , in a runoff on Tuesday , had unfolded as if it were a laboratory experiment to test whether the quality of a candidate had any effect in this era of fierce partisanship . This had something to do with Warnock , a charismatic politician and preacher who has long occupied Martin Luther King , Jr .,’ s pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta , and who ultimately won in an election in which Georgians picked Republicans for every other statewide office , from Governor on down , often by large margins .
But the lab-test quality of the race had more to do with Herschel Walker , the former football star whose chances of victory remained stubbornly buoyant despite a historically disastrous campaign . On the trail , Walker endured revelations and allegations of domestic violence ; stories broke that he had fathered secret children , in addition to those he acknowledged ; two women he ’ d had sexual relationships with said that he ’ d paid them to have abortions ( allegations he denied ), despite taking a hard-line prolife stance on the stump . In the small gaps between scandals , Walker was bad , too . His speeches wandered ( there was a memorable viral riff about zombies ) and he made batty statements , questioning , at one point , why apes still existed if human beings were really descended from them .
If the election had been a dark farce for months ( it was hard to remember a worse political candidate than Walker , and still forty-eight per cent of Georgians voted for him in November ), it turned openly comical in its last , runoff phase . For five days over Thanksgiving , Walker did not hold a public event , even as early voting opened and his allies warned that his Democratic opponent was advertising on the Christian radio stations that should have been the Republican ’ s home turf . Walker declined to condemn Donald Trump ’ s meeting at Mar-a-Lago with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes , but he also had his staff ask Trump not to appear in Georgia in the last phase of the election . “ We ’ re trying to hold together a fragile coalition ,” a Walker adviser told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution , sounding not too sure that it would work .
Premature recriminations leaked to the political press . Mediaite reported that the National Republican Senate Committee had been carpet-bombing its e-mail donor lists with urgent requests for funds for the Walker campaign , but that the fine print revealed that ninety-nine cents out of every dollar was going to the N . R . S . C . itself , and just one penny to the Walker campaign . The story ’ s headline captured its spirit : “ ‘ A Bunch of Vulture and Hyenas ’ Have Hamstrung the Herschel Walker Campaign .”
These assorted scavengers may have had some help from the candidate himself , who often seemed , at best , a semi-interested participant . On the eve of the election , Atlanta ’ s Fox affiliate ran the headline “ Herschel Walker Says He Has ‘ No Regrets ,’ Also Predicts Georgia-Ohio State Score .”
The Democrats knew where they wanted to be . On Friday night , having kept Joe Biden away from the runoff campaign , they flew in Barack Obama for a rally on the east side of Atlanta . Warnock addressed the crowd , but Obama closed . The ex- President ’ s critique of Walker ’ s candidacy and his case for Warnock ’ s mattered less than his call to vote , and his insistence that the same civil-rights tradition that ran through John Lewis ’ s career , and Obama ’ s own , now ran through Warnock ’ s , too .
Obama hit his final riff with a familiar crescendo : “ If the men and women who had to endure the sting of discrimination , the smack of billy clubs , weren ’ t tired , if the folks who had to fight those early fights — those were the tough fights , for voting rights , and union rights , and gay rights , and women ’ s rights . If those folks weren ’ t tired , you can ’ t be tired .”
Winners get to write history , in political campaigns as in military ones . When Walker conceded , just before 11 P . M . on Tuesday , the crowd at Warnock ’ s victory rally — watching the Republican on a big screen — waved goodbye to him . The counties around Atlanta had delivered big margins for the Democrat ; the idea that nominating a Black conservative would peel off African American votes for Republicans didn ’ t work this time .
When Warnock took the stage and settled the crowd , speaking slowly and cerebrally , he described his family ’ s past ( a mother who had grown up in segregated rural Georgia picking “ someone else ’ s cotton and someone else ’ s tobacco ”) and his own rise , from a childhood with eleven siblings in a Savannah housing project to his present station , as Georgia ’ s first Black senator . “ I am Georgia ,” Warnock said . “ I am an example and an iteration of its history .”
How much difference did these individuals , Walker and Warnock , make in the end , against the tectonic forces of partisanship ? Some . They made some difference , and in the most consequential ways . Warnock ’ s win means that the Democratic majority in the Senate will be 51 – 49 come January ; it means a state that had long been a stronghold of Southern conservatism will be represented in the Senate by two progressive Democrats for at least the next four years ; it means that the Party ’ s reputation for electoral incompetence is out of date .
But not even the most optimistic liberal has reason to think that the page has turned , after an election in which Republicans nominated a historically terrible candidate and still only barely lost to a talented and well-funded incumbent . For several years , partisan politics have been on a knife ’ s edge , and what matters most is how much you despise the other party . The Georgia Senate election was an example and an iteration of this history , too .