Georgia has been a hotspot for political drama over the last few years. This year will be no different; neither Democratic senate candidate Raphael Warnock nor GOP candidate Herschel Walker hit the requisite 50 percent threshold to win the election outright. Accordingly, the two candidates will face a runoff election on December 6th.
The dust is still settling on the election. Battleground states like Arizona and Nevada are still being counted. Depending on which direction the votes fall, Georgia may be set up for a must-win for Democrats if they wish to maintain a 50-50 split in the Senate. So, Georgia, the formerly Republican stronghold, is now a contested battleground. Both parties recognize the state as vital to majority control, which may well determine the outcome of the majority.
Georgia’s incumbent, Raphael Warnock, won in a runoff election last year, becoming Georgia’s first-ever black senator. Now, Georgia football legend Herschel Walker, a Trump-endorsed Republican, is challenging Warnock for his seat. Warnock earned 49.42 percent of the votes (1,1941, 502), edging out Walker, who amassed 48.52 percent of the votes (1,906,252). Clearly, the election was close; only 35,000 votes separated the two candidates. Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver took in 2.07 percent of the votes (81,175), likely siphoning votes away from Walker.
Although Herschel Walker’s biggest problem throughout the campaign was not a third-party candidate, it was Herschel Walker.
For starters, Walker said some zany stuff. Like when he criticized the Inflation Reduction Act, saying that “a lot of the money is going into trees. You know that don’t you? It’s going into trees. We’ve got enough trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?” As far as I can tell Walker was criticizing the $370 billion that the IRA allocated towards climate change, energy, and an urban forestry assistance program.
Walker had another zinger on mental health. “They told me I had a mental problem … I remember sitting here in this hospital and going, ‘Whoa, these people here are crazy, and I’m not like them.’”
And here’s Walker on the Green New Deal: “So, what we do is we’re going to put, from the ‘Green New Deal,’ millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. So, all of a sudden China and India ain’t putting nothing in there – cleaning that situation up. So, all with that bad air, it’s still there. But since we don’t control the air, our good air decide to float over to China, bad air. So, when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So, it moves over to our good air space. And now we’ve got to clean that back up.”
But the gaffes and the quotes were peripheral troubles for Walker’s campaign. Irritations, really. The prime-time, front-and-center, stop-traffic trouble for Walker was the revelation that he, a pro-life Republican, had pressured two separate women into having abortions, that he himself paid for. In a less polarized, partisan climate, the revelations may have annihilated Walker’s campaign. But Georgia was in play and as one Republican observer put it: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”
Herschel Walker.
Georgians will have their chance to decide which man they send to the Senate; the runoff is on December 6th and works rather simply. Two choices: Warnock or Walker. Whoever gets more votes wins. And whoever wins Georgia may determine which party controls the Senate. Expect the money and the endorsements to begin rolling into Georgia. Expect Democrats to beatify Stacy Abrams, who lost the gubernatorial election, again. Expect Biden, Obama, Beyonce in Atlanta. Expect Walker to say some wild stuff without consequence. It should be a heated month between now and December 6th.
Harrison Kass is the Senior Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, he joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. He lives in Oregon and listens to Dokken.
