Why This Georgia Runoff Isn’t A Replay Of 2020

WARNER ROBINS, Ga. — The Rev. Raphael Warnock has been through this before. A few times, actually. And quite recently.

“In the course of the past two years, between primaries, general elections and runoffs, this will be the fifth time my name has been on the ballot,” Warnock told a crowd of military retirees and union members outside the headquarters of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 987, which represents non-military workers at the massive Robins Air Force Base. “Each of the first four times, I finished first. And I’m going to finish first again.”

Warnock, Georgia’s incumbent Democratic senator, is facing a Dec. 6 runoff election against GOP nominee and University of Georgia football legend Herschel Walker. Peach State voters, who may be tired of nearly three straight years of attack ads, have seen this all before.

This runoff, however, is taking place in a drastically different political environment than the one Warnock and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) triumphed in two years ago, handing Democrats a majority in the Senate.

The apocalyptic rhetoric the GOP deployed then has faded, replaced by efforts to portray Warnock as just another political hack. A Republican-led overhaul of Georgia’s voter laws has created additional confusion and cut the time to campaign for the runoff in half. And compared to 2020’s all-base-all-the-time faceoff, both Democrats and Republicans are still working to persuade the critical slice of the electorate that backed both Warnock and Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp in the first round of voting.

Warnock, having led Walker by about a single percentage point in the first round of voting, is a slight favorite in the runoff. The first public survey of the contest, conducted by a bipartisan duo of pollsters and released by AARP’s Georgia chapter, found the incumbent with a 51% to 47% edge over Walker.

Warnock’s edge, in both polling and in the first round of voting, was built on a delicate balance of wooing independent voters and turning out Black voters. The first was an unqualified success in Round 1, the second a mixed bag, with rural Black turnout lagging. Republicans, however, are going after both in hope of denying Warnock a full term.

As Warnock spoke in Warner Robins, a van with electronic billboards paid for by Walker’s campaign circled the event. It blared two messages: “BELIEVE ALL WOMEN, BUT NOT YOUR WIFE?” and “SLUMLORD MILLIONAIRE.”

The truck neatly illustrated how GOP attacks on Warnock have shifted. Two years ago, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called Warnock a “heretic” for supporting abortion rights. GOP ads suggested he was a Communist. A cavalcade of Republicans warned victories for Warnock and Ossoff would lead to the collapse of the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution.

While the apocalyptic rhetoric has not disappeared entirely, much of it has been replaced by efforts to instead portray Warnock as a disposable politician, someone who engages in the same self-enrichment and hypocrisy voters have come to expect from a member of Congress.

“He paid himself for child care, all that stuff — why don’t he keep his own kids? Don’t have nobody keep your kids,” Walker said at a campaign stop earlier this month, criticizing Warnock for using campaign funds to pay for a nanny for his children — a step that is entirely legal. (There’s also the matter of Walker having multiple children whose lives he has played minimal roles in, but we digress.)

The more potent version of this attack has focused on the conditions and treatment of residents at a housing complex owned by the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Warnock remains head pastor and where civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was co-pastor at the time of his assassination. The church gives Warnock a $89,000-a-year housing allowance, while some residents of the housing complex have received eviction notices — though none have actually been evicted so far.

Both Walker’s campaign and outside Republican groups have aired ads attacking Warnock on the issue, with one featuring a Vietnam War veteran threatened with eviction saying he could lose his apartments over $119. Talking to reporters after an event in Macon, Warnock was terse when discussing the issue.

“I’m proud of the work that my church does to feed and house the hungry,” Warnock said. “I don’t think anyone is surprised that Herschel Walker continues to lie.”

While these attacks can damage Warnock’s image with swing voters, they also look to tap into the cynicism many Black voters feel about politics. While those voters are unlikely to back Walker, they could stay home, Democrats warn, even as they note their internal polls show Black voters remain sufficiently engaged.

Warnock is a historic figure: When he was born in 1969, both of Georgia’s senators were avowed segregationists, and he’s the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate in the South since the passage of the Voting Rights Act. But combating the cynicism Republicans aim to engender about him requires regularly sounding like a more traditional pork-barrel politician.

In Macon, it meant the city’s mayor pro tem emphasizing how the American Rescue Plan, which Warnock voted for, helped the city hire more police officers. In Warner Robins, it meant talking about how he worked with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to help get money to widen a highway connecting military bases in Texas to those in Georgia.

“I’ll work with Ted Cruz for 15 minutes if it helps the people of Georgia,” Warnock said.

In 2020, the two Senate runoffs were entirely focused on motivating the party’s respective bases, with each party pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into field operations to reach voters during the heart of the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2022, persuasion is as big a part of the equation. At the center of it are the thousands of Georgians who split their ballots between reelecting GOP Gov. Brian Kemp by seven percentage points and giving Warnock a 1-point edge over Walker in the Senate race. Winning at least a portion of these voters back is critical to any chance Walker has. And what better messenger to reach them than Kemp himself?

“Herschel Walker will vote for Georgia, not be another rubber stamp for Joe Biden,” Kemp says in the 30-second ad paid for by Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC controlled by allies of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The super PAC has also transferred millions of dollars to Kemp’s political operation to keep the field operation he ran during the general election alive during the runoff.