“There are no excuses in life, and I’m not going to make excuses now because we fought,” Walker said.
Warnock prevailed with a strategy that mobilized both reliable liberal Democrats and in-between voters, including many in this latter bloc who split their ticket in the first round by also voting for Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.
Throughout the campaign, he highlighted his efforts to walk the aisle, and he did so again in his victory speech, saying he would continue to work on issues such as criminal justice and reducing prescription drug costs.
“I want all of Georgia to know, whether you voted for me or not, I will continue to work for you,” Warnock said.
The senator pushed back on Walker’s attempts to turn the race into a referendum on Biden, whose low approval rating has complicated his campaign.
Instead, Warnock defined race as a contrast of skill and character. Walker’s violent history, personal baggage and pattern of lies and exaggerations that frustrated even staunch Republican allies made him unfit for the Senate, Warnock said.
The Democrat was helped in the home stretch by inexplicable blunders from his rival. The Republican disappeared from the campaign trail for five days as early voting began over the Thanksgiving holiday, and it drifted into attacks on his former football coach and off-script discussions of horror movie villains.
The gaffe-prone Republican refused to speak to reporters covering his campaign for the final two months of the race, and his staff routinely ignored questions about his policy stances. In the last few days, his collaborators have put a buffer at its stops to avoid shouting questions from the media.
A GOP push to ban early voting on Saturday backfired, triggering a surge in polls that helped Warnock gain an advantage ahead of Election Day. And Democrats retained a huge fundraising advantage, outpacing Republicans by a more than 2-to-1 clip in the four-week runoff.
Warnock led Walker with support rising in 146 of Georgia’s 159 counties since November’s midterm, including both in rural Republican-leaning areas and in Democratic strongholds in metropolitan areas.
He also held a huge fundraising advantage over Walker, raising more than $167 million this election cycle, nearly three times more than Walker had raised.
Democrats were also helped by narrow victories in Arizona and Nevada that clinched the party’s majority in the Senate – and robbed its challenger of an argument to skeptical Republicans that a vote for Walker was a vote for control of the GOP on the Senate.
Even so, the runoff stakes were monumental. Democrats have sought the 51st seat to give the party breathing room if a more moderate member breaks ranks, as well as leverage to advance legislation and Biden’s nominees. A loss would have put the Republicans on the verge of taking over.
Walker, an iconic Georgia soccer player recruited to lead by former President Donald Trump, was dragged into a runoff with Warnock after neither got a majority of votes in the Nov. 8 election. Warnock finished ahead of Walker by approximately 38,000 ballots in that contest.
Their rivalry dates back to the days shortly after Warnock narrowly defeated US Senator Kelly Loeffler in a January 2021 runoff, in a Democratic sweep with Jon Ossoff that toppled control of the chamber and allowed Biden to pursue a more aggressive agenda.
Fresh off a special election victory to fulfill the final two years of the late Johnny Isakson’s term, Warnock pivoted to campaigning for six years. It became clear he could take on Walker when Trump predicted that Walker would be an “unstoppable” candidate, scaring many other GOP figures with the early endorsement.
When Walker crushed his lesser-known GOP rivals in the May primary, he staged a star-studded race that pitted a sports legend against the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. .
It also made history, marking the first time Georgia voters nominated two black candidates for the U.S. Senate. The color of their skin was one of the only similarities between the rivals, who had widely divergent political positions, personal styles and campaign strategies.
Warnock cast a deciding vote for major Biden administration initiatives, including a federal climate and health care bill that included his provision to cap insulin prices for those on Medicare. .
But he was far more likely to highlight his disagreements with the president, such as his lobbying efforts to persuade Biden to endorse student debt relief and his opposition to White House plans to shut down a military facility on the Georgian coast.
When asked if he wants Biden to run for a second term — or even if he wants the president to campaign for him in Georgia — Warnock routinely dismissed the question as “expert” talk that doesn’t made no difference to ordinary voters.
Instead, he has spoken so much about his work across parties with the likes of U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, sometimes to the shock of leftist voters at his rallies. It was a calculated pitch to win over swing voters – around 200,000 of them who backed Kemp but not Walker in the November election.
Walker made no such call in the middle. His rallies featured the same stump speech favorites that energized a conservative crowd: anecdotes from his playing days, scathing criticism of transgender athletes and attacks on the use of gender pronouns.
“Democrats want to talk about pronouns?” was a favorite line of applause at rallies. “I’ll tell you what, Raphael Warnock’s new pronoun is ‘former senator.’ ”
Throughout the campaign, Walker provided almost no details about what he would do in the Senate, nor did he take a position on key issues.
Instead, he launched sweeping attacks on wasteful government spending, pledged support for the police, and blamed inflation and other economic problems on Warnock and the Democrats.
Warnock said his opponent didn’t understand the issues and didn’t care enough to learn.
“You actually have to know things to do this job,” Warnock repeated during campaign stops.
But political disagreements have often trumped Walker’s personal baggage, which has emerged in a deluge of news stories implicating his businesses, his charity work and claims he worked in law enforcement.
And past incidents of violence against women, including his ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, were featured in campaign ads and media coverage throughout the campaign.
Media coverage intensified after two women accused Walker of pushing them to have abortions, allegations he denied but nonetheless became evidence to his critics that he was a hypocrite for calling for a total prohibition of the procedure. Her adult son responded by calling on her to “wear a condom”.
His personal troubles alienated even high-ranking Republicans. Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, the state’s No. 2 official, waited in line for an hour at an early voting site before leaving his ballot blank to protest the two candidates.
“Like many conservatives across Georgia, I was waiting for Herschel Walker to give me a reason to support him,” he said. “Unfortunately, he didn’t.”
Republicans have tried to shine the spotlight on Warnock’s background, highlighting his ongoing custody battle with his ex-wife, who claimed he ran over her foot with his vehicle during an argument in March 2020 He denied the allegation, and authorities responding to his 911 call found no evidence of injury.
During the second-round campaign, high-profile substitutes flocked to Georgia to boost each of the rivals. Cruz and US senses Lindsey Graham and Rick Scott rode through Georgia with Walker, while former President Barack Obama headlined a rally with Warnock.
Kemp, who had kept his distance from Walker in the build-up to the general election, stepped in to lend resources and his own cachet to Walker’s campaign. He vouched for him in advertisements and at rallies and ordered his army of campaign workers to knock on doors for Walker.
The country’s mainstream political figures were notably absent from the track. Trump, who encouraged Walker to run, avoided an in-person rally in Georgia because polls showed he would do more harm than good. The former president hosted a “tele-rally with Walker the day before the election in a last-ditch effort to get the GOP base to vote.
Biden limited his aid to Warnock to one tweet, instead heading to Massachusetts during the final days of the race.
Warnock’s victory cements his position as one of the nation’s leading Democrats, and a crowd of supporters chanted “six more years” as he took to the stage to celebrate his triumph.
“After a hard-fought campaign, or should I say campaigns, I have the honor of speaking the four most powerful words ever spoken in a democracy: the people have spoken.”
