Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) retains a slim but steadfast advantage over Herschel Walker in Tuesday’s Georgia Senate runoff, according to polls and interviews with top strategists in both parties.
Why it matters: Turning out your base twice is usually about runoffs. However, both in Georgia aim for a crucial group of swing voters: the independent-minded suburbanites who live just outside Atlanta.
What’s happening: Walker has proven to be particularly unsuited to win over independent voters, who have made a big difference in recent highly contested Georgia elections, due to his ties to former president Trump and his difficulties explaining his beliefs on the campaign trail.
- Walker is seen talking about pregnant cows, vampire flicks, and how “our good air decided to float across to China’s bad air” in the final Warnock campaign advertisement.
- The advertisement features voters’ shocked facial expressions next to Walker’s remarks.
By the numbers: In Cobb County, a wealthy and rapidly-diversifying county in the Atlanta suburbs, Walker didn’t perform well in the rest of the Georgia Republican ticket on election day, finishing 7 points behind Gov. Brian Kemp.
- According to the Edison Research exit poll, Kemp won 63% of the votes from white voters with college degrees, giving him a 5-point lead over Walker among this typically Republican voting group.
Between the lines: To convince Republican voters to follow their partisan preferences, the Republican strategy for the election is to deploy Kemp as Walker’s top advocate on the airways.
- About 203,000 voters supported Kemp for governor in November but not Walker for senator.
Trump’s meal with antisemitic rapper Kanye West (now known as Ye) and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes undercut that broad-reaching agenda.
- Kemp issued a full-throated rebuke of the event before other top Republicans: “Racism, antisemitism and denial of the Holocaust have no place in the Republican Party.”
- Walker’s campaign declined to react simultaneously and hasn’t spoken anything since, despite public condemnations of antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and white supremacy by prominent GOP politicians like Mike Pence and Kevin McCarthy.
Walker frequently uses Kemp in television advertisements and mailers, but she hardly ever brings up the governor when campaigning, according to our thought bubble with Emma Hurt of Axios Atlanta.
