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      After Georgia Senate Loss, Republicans Stare Down Their Trump Dilemma

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      ATLANTA — The Democrats’ capstone re-election victory of Senator Raphael Warnock forced Republicans to reckon on Wednesday with the red wave that wasn’t, as they turned with trepidation to 2024 and the intensifying divisions in the party over former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Warnock’s two-and-a-half percentage point win over Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate runoff left Democrats with a 51-49 seat majority in the upper chamber, a one-seat gain. That came despite dire predictions for a blood bath for President Biden’s party.It quickly had Republican fingers pointing every which way: at Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader accused by detractors of abandoning or belittling embattled Republican Senate candidates; at Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, who many feel badly mismanaged the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm; and at Mr. Walker himself, for hiding and lying about his past, only to see the details stream out steadily over the course of his campaign.But for a handful of Republicans, newly emboldened by re-election or retirement to say so aloud, the biggest culprit was Mr. Trump. In increasingly biting terms, they slammed him for promoting flawed candidates, including Mr. Walker, dividing his party and turning many swing voters against the G.O.P. for the third election cycle in a row.“I think he’s less relevant all the time,” Senator John Cornyn, a Republican of Texas, said of the former president, who has begun a third bid for the White House.“It’s just one more data point in an overwhelming body of data that the Trump obsession is very bad for Republicans,” said Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, a retiring Republican whose seat was flipped to Democrats by Lt. Gov. John Fetterman.Trump campaign aides responded with defiance, in a back-and-forth likely to be on repeat for the foreseeable future. Steven Cheung, a senior communications adviser for the former president, said they “are not going to be lectured by political swamp creatures who are already looking to find ways to make a quick buck in 2024 by running to the media and providing cowardly quotes.”The midterm losses like Mr. Walker’s not only squashed the G.O.P.’s high hopes of retaking control of the Senate but also signaled the party’s steep climb ahead. Voters in several presidential battleground states resoundingly rejected candidates aligned with the former president, handing Republicans losses in winnable races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New Hampshire and, finally, Georgia.Mr. Trump’s influence was indisputable in the suburbs, said Rusty Paul, the Republican mayor of Sandy Springs, a booming suburban city on Atlanta’s northern edge.Mr. Paul allowed that the once almost-wholly affluent, almost-wholly white community had become more diverse ethnically, racially and economically, tipping it in Democrats’ favor.Herschel Walker giving his concession speech on Tuesday night.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesA scorecard with election results left at Mr. Walker’s election night party.Nicole Buchanan for The New York Times“All of those are factors, but the greatest factor is Trumpism,” he said.“There’s a very strong conservative streak in the northern suburbs, Cobb, North Fulton — if Trump’s not engaged, they’ll still vote Republican,” he continued, speaking of the northern edge of Atlanta’s main county and Cobb County, just to the west. “But if they feel Trump’s influence, they’ll vote against him.”Trump loyalists in Georgia and beyond disputed that assessment. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who represented many of those suburbs for years as a House Republican, blamed a list of factors beside Mr. Trump, down to the mockery by “Saturday Night Live” of Mr. Walker three days before the runoff election. It’s the G.O.P. versus the media, Big Tech, Hollywood and the nation’s social power structures, he said.Understand the Georgia Senate RunoffNew Battlegrounds: Senator Raphael Warnock’s win shows how Georgia and Arizona are poised to be the next kingmakers of presidential politics, Lisa Lerer writes.A Rising Democratic Star: Mr. Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, is a pastor and politician who sees voting as a form of prayer.Trump’s Bad Day: The loss by Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate, capped one of the worst days for former President Donald J. Trump since he announced his 2024 bid.“We underestimate how big the mountain is that we’re trying to climb,” he said.But Mr. Gingrich also raised the prospects of a disastrous 2024, as Trump’s supporters split acrimoniously with its anti-Trump wing of the party the way conservatives in 1964 backed Barry Goldwater and moderates sided with Nelson Rockefeller.“My greatest fear is that we’re going to end up in a 1964 division” that left Republicans crippled in Congress, he said in an interview Wednesday. “I can imagine a Trump-anti-Trump war over the next two years that just guarantees Biden’s re-election in a landslide and guarantees that Democrats control everything.”Senator Raphael Warnock visited students at Georgia Tech on Monday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Warnock speaking to reporters on Tuesday in Norcross, Ga.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesEmerging from the midterms, the anti-Trump wing has plenty of ammunition to make its case for a break. Two of Mr. Trump’s most prominent Republican foils in Georgia, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, won re-election easily, in part because of their refusal to back the former president’s lie that the state had been stolen from him in 2020. Their resistance confirmed to Republican-leaning swing voters that they were not in Mr. Trump’s thrall.In contrast, Mr. Walker, who was urged to run by the former president and has already said he intends to vote for Mr. Trump for president, lost ground among almost every type of precinct in the four weeks between Election Day on Nov. 8 and runoff day on Tuesday, according to a New York Times analysis.The Republican fared worse in the runoff at precincts that initially backed Mr. Warnock and Mr. Kemp, at precincts dominated by college graduates, at urban and suburban precincts, affluent precincts and at Black precincts and Hispanic precincts. The only precincts where he held his own were in rural areas and areas with white, noncollege voters.Mr. Walker, a first-time candidate and former football star, had plenty of troubles that had nothing to do with Mr. Trump. His campaign was repeatedly hit with damaging revelations that might have knocked other candidates out of the race, including accusations of domestic violence, unacknowledged children and hypocrisy on abortion.And beyond Mr. Trump, there are other factors changing Georgia’s political hue: the in-migration of voters of color from around the country, the movement of politically active Black voters from central Atlanta to suburbs near and far, where they carried on their organizational activities, and the activation of white women like Jennifer Haggard, a real estate agent and lifelong Sandy Springer, who cast aside reflexive conservatism for a more open-minded politics.“I’m the white Republican who turned swing voter for sure,” Ms. Haggard said after voting for Mr. Warnock. She cited Mr. Trump as easily the biggest factor, but happily voted for Mr. Warnock.In the face of trends favoring Democrats, Georgia Republicans failed to nominate a Senate candidate who could galvanize both the party’s hyper-conservative base and its moderate factions — a group that many in the G.O.P. believe still makes up a majority of the state’s electorate.That failure extended beyond Georgia. Republican candidates in the primary season reached into Mr. Trump’s ideological milieu to capture his voters, moving so far that they could not credibly swing to win back the center in the general election.“Even if you capture all of the Trump voters, you may be able to win a primary but you’re not necessarily going to win a general election and in this business, you have to win an election before you can actually govern,” said Mr. Cornyn, who for years dodged questions about Mr. Trump. “It’s not like coming in second and getting a trophy like you did in junior high school for participation.”For many Trump-loyal voters, the question may come down to whether they are willing to make a cold-eyed assessment of electability or follow their hearts. The chorus of Republican voices arguing for electability is growing louder.“More strings of defeats delivered to us clearly by Donald Trump is enough for our party to realize we’ve got to move on if we want to win,” Paul D. Ryan, the former Republican Speaker of the House, said in a SiriusXM interview. “We should not just concede the country to the left by nominating an unelectable candidate like Donald Trump.”Even Mr. Walker’s team seemed to acknowledge Mr. Trump was a drag on the candidate in the final weeks of the race. As the former president teased a visit to Georgia, Trump aides worked with the Walker campaign to agree to scrap an in-person rally and instead hold the event via phone. Mr. Walker did not frequently mention Mr. Trump in his campaign speeches. And in his final concession speech, he did not say the former president’s name.Jack Kingston, a former House Republican from the Savannah area, argued that Mr. Trump’s influence was overblown. In 2021, as two Georgia Senate races headed to a runoff, Mr. Trump, then the president, was railing against a rigged election, signaling to Republicans that their vote wouldn’t count, he noted. This time around, he was far less present.“I would not say the invisible hand of Donald Trump was telling Herschel Walker what to do,” Mr. Kingston said on Wednesday. “He was his own man.”Stephanie Lai More

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      Walker, Trump’s Celebrity Pick, Underscores Trump’s Fall

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      Donald Trump loved Herschel Walker.He told him so when he “fired” him from “Celebrity Apprentice.” As Trump put it: “You know how much I like you. I love you. I love you. I am not a gay man, and I love you, Herschel. Herschel, you’re fired.”As Walker said in an interview years ago, “I’ve known Donald before he became the Donald. I started out with Donald Trump. I tell everyone that little Donald and little Ivanka lived with me during the summer.” He took them to Disney World, Sea World, the Bronx Zoo, “any place.”Walker’s son Christian referred to Trump as Uncle Don.The men were clearly close. Trump believed in Black exceptionalism — but only for athletes and entertainers.When New York’s elite shunned Trump, he found a home in pop culture. He came to understand the currency in it and the power of it. Unlike high society, which thrived on exclusion, entertainment fed on the possibility of inclusion and economic ascendance.Trump learned early the lucrative industry of dream selling. He learned early the power of celebrity as the embodiment of those dreams.To him, celebrities were a class unto themselves, people who could transcend race and wealth, crossing over into the golden plane of the hero. You can admire a Black celebrity, cheer for him, be thoroughly entertained by him and never relinquish your animus for or prejudices against other Black people.As long as those entertainers avoided any mention or invocation of race — other than to discuss their upbringing or praise a parent — even people hostile to Black people could be fans of theirs.This is why Trump could argue that he was not racist — he could always say he had known and been friendly with so many Black entertainers. But he was friendly with them even as he was hostile to other Black and Brown people. Walker has said his warm relationship with Trump dates back to 1982, but it was only a few years later, in 1989, that Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York, so that the Central Park Five, who were just boys at the time, would “be afraid.”The boys implicated in the attack have since been exonerated, but Trump has refused to apologize for his ad.Trump, like many people, is able to compartmentalize on the issue of race, segregating the masses whom he abhorred from the few he idolized.And so, when there was a need for a Republican to run for the Senate seat in Georgia against Raphael Warnock — a man who, with the support of Black voters as well as others, shocked the political establishment in that state when he won his first Senate race nearly two years ago — Trump did a simplistic racial calculation: he knew a conservative Black acolyte who could run against the liberal Black intellectual.He called on his old friend Walker. It didn’t matter that Walker was not a political figure or even a politically engaged person. It didn’t matter that he was wholly unsuited for any form of public office. It didn’t even matter that he didn’t live in Georgia.Trump drafted him, and he agreed. Celebrity, Trump thought, would cover all flaws.In the end, it did not. Trump’s brand, his celebrity worship and promulgation, was not enough to push Walker over the edge. But while Walker failed, Trump failed even worse. Unlike some races this cycle in which Trump simply endorsed a candidate, Walker was one Trump personally chose.And even before Tuesday night, Georgia had rejected Trumpism, choosing some Republicans in November who had defied Trump’s pressure campaign to steal the 2020 election and incurred his wrath because of it.Yes, Walker was a historically horrific candidate, but the Trump brand has also begun to sour in Georgia. This is in no way to excuse the Georgia Republicans who went along with the Walker charade, even after seeing up close that he was not only unqualified to be a senator, but likely incapable of performing the duties. They saw up close his incompetence, intellectual deficiencies and glaring defects, but they still hewed more to their partisanship than to their principles.They twisted themselves into knots to excuse Walker, using a roundabout racism to do so. Some said that what we saw as a lack of intelligence was in fact a regional affectation: Walker speaks the way many Black people in Georgia speak.In their construction of things, deficiency was endemic to Blackness and ubiquitous among Black people. The best that could be hoped for was a Black person who was willing to fall in line and vote with the party. Walker had proven that he would do that. He would be a willing puppet for their ventriloquism.And he came dangerously close to winning.This will remain a stain on the Republican Party. But Walker didn’t win. Cynicism didn’t win. Trump didn’t win.Competence and common sense prevailed.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Warnock Wins, and Once Again Trump Loses

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      The last Senate runoffs in Georgia fell on the 5th of January, 2021, which meant they were immediately overridden in the nation’s imagination by the events of Jan. 6. But everything that’s happened since has somehow brought us back around to where we stood just before the riot at the U.S. Capitol, with yet another Georgia runoff providing yet another case study in why the Republican Party desperately needs to move on from Donald Trump.In the case of the previous runoffs, Trump’s influence on the outcome was flagrant and direct: He made the entire pre-runoff period a stage for his election-fraud dramatics, pushing the Republican Senate candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, into attacks on the integrity of the elections they were trying to win. And he almost certainly dampened Republican turnout with his suggestion that the fix was in — a suggestion amplified by his more lunatic allies, who discouraged Republican voting outright.This time around the Trumpian influence was a little more indirect, but still important. He publicly encouraged his old U.S.F.L. pal Herschel Walker to run for Senate and helped to clear the field with his endorsement, ensuring that the G.O.P. would have a hapless, incompetent and morally suspect candidate in one of the year’s most important Senate races. And then he forced Walker to stagger through the runoff against Raphael Warnock in the shadow of Trump’s own low-energy campaign announcement, which was succeeded by Trump’s dinner with anti-Semites, which was succeeded by Trump’s call to suspend the Constitution in order to restore him to the presidency.All of this predictably helped make the runoff a fractal of the larger 2022 pattern: Under Trump’s influence, with Trump’s preferred candidates, the Republican Party first sacrificed a potential Senate majority and then sacrificed one more Senate seat for good measure.The natural question evoked by the memory of the last runoffs, though, is whether this will make any long-term difference inside the G.O.P. If Republican voters didn’t tire of Trump after he gave away a winnable election and then inspired a mob to storm the Capitol the very next day, why would merely giving away another runoff be a deal-breaker? If Trump somehow managed to remain the 2024 front-runner after the insanity of 2021’s Jan. 6, why would his loyalists abandon him after the mere political disappointments of 2022’s Nov. 8 and Dec. 6?One answer is that the truest loyalists won’t; there will be a strong Trump vote in any imaginable Republican primary where he doesn’t drop out early. But for the Republicans who aren’t the deepest loyalists — the ones who didn’t vote for Trump in the early primaries of 2016, the ones giving Ron DeSantis leads here and there in early primary polling — there are two reasons to suspect that this runoff’s aftermath will be different from the last one’s.The first is just the compounding effect of multiple defeats. Like a miracle sports team, the ’69 Mets or this year’s Moroccan World Cup soccer squad, Trump earned himself a storehouse of belief with his stunning upset in 2016. That the Republican Party then lost the House in 2018 — well, that was to be expected, since incumbent parties generally struggle in the midterms. That the G.O.P. lost the presidency in 2020 — well, there was a plague, mass protests, rejiggered election rules and a general atmosphere of craziness, and anyway the polls were wrong and Trump almost pulled it out in the Electoral College, the miracle juice still there but just not quite enough.But to disappoint again in 2022, in a context where many Republicans expected to do extremely well — and more, to have so many of Trump’s preferred candidates flop while other Republicans won easily — well, at a certain point the memory of 2016 fades, and the storehouse of faith and good will is depleted. At a certain point even a potent demagogue needs to post some actual wins to hold his coalition together. At a certain point — maybe it isn’t here yet, but it’s closer — the leader who loses just starts to look like, well, a loser.The second reason this time might be different is that there will be time for the defeat’s reality and lessons to sink in, for the stink of loserdom to circulate — whereas last time Trump was actually helped in his bid to hold onto influence and power by the way the Georgia results vanished into the smoke of the Capitol riot.Yes, there was a brief moment where his obvious culpability in the mob’s behavior weakened him dramatically, leaving him potentially vulnerable to a concerted push from congressional Republicans. But when that push didn’t come, when the G.O.P. leadership took the cautious (in the case of Mitch McConnell) or craven (in the case of Kevin McCarthy) way instead, their decisions helped to rebuild Trump’s relevance and power.And so did the peculiar nature of Jan. 6 itself, which despite the best efforts of its media interpreters was always destined to be an unstable signifier — a deathly serious insurrection from one vantage point, but from another a more absurd affair, defined more by the spectacle of the QAnon Shaman roaming the Senate floor than by the threat of an actual coup d’état. However shameful some of the spin that Trump defenders settled on to explain away the day’s violence, they had material to work with in the sheer strangeness of the riot, which in a polarized atmosphere inevitably yielded to warring interpretations of its meaning.Stark election defeats, on the other hand, while less serious and less extreme than a violent disruption of the Senate’s business, are also harder to reinterpret in ways that make your own side out to be martyrs rather than just losers.Trump’s election fraud narrative managed that kind of reinterpretation once. But if Trump has to run in 2024 against DeSantis, he’ll be facing a rival who won’t need to reinterpret defeats as stolen victories, because he himself won easily when Walker and so many other Trumpian picks and allies lost. And the old rule that if you’re explaining, you’re losing, may apply especially to a situation where Trump has to explain to primary voters why the winning he promised them turned into so many unnecessary defeats.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      Christian Walker Lashes Out On Twitter After Father’s Georgia Senate Loss

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      Christian Walker, the estranged son of Herschel Walker, unleashed a string of fiery tweets late Tuesday after his father, a Republican, was defeated in Georgia’s Senate race. He lashed out at both his father and Republican leadership, accusing them of betraying him and the party. A right-wing influencer with half a million followers on Instagram and another 250,000 on TikTok, Mr. Walker called his father a “backstabber” and claimed the Republican Party cynically made him their candidate mainly “because he was the same skin color as his opponent.” He also wrote that former President Donald J. Trump courted the elder Mr. Walker for months, “DEMANDING that he run.” The first tweet was posted just four minutes before The Associated Press called the runoff for Senator Raphael Warnock, the elder Mr. Walker’s Democratic opponent. In all, the younger Mr. Walker posted eight times, ending with a tribute to his mother, saying he was “so happy she can rest now, and this bull crap is over with.” The younger Mr. Walker rose to national prominence in October, after being critical of his father following a series of scandals — including that he had three children that he had not previously mentioned publicly and that he’d paid for an abortion for a former girlfriend and encouraged her to have a second abortion, despite being staunchly pro-life (a second unnamed woman later said he paid for her to have an abortion, too). Mr. Walker denied the abortion allegations and, after his son’s October outburst, tweeted: “I LOVE my son no matter what.”But he has been largely quiet since then, a silence he attributed on Tuesday night to his desire not to “swing voters to Warnock.” In an impromptu session Tuesday night on Twitter Spaces, the social media site’s live audio platform, the younger Mr. Walker said that with the Georgia contest decided, he could speak freely.The wide-ranging monologue was delivered to more than 1,300 listeners, with Mr. Walker repeatedly saying he was a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump. But he accused the former president of incorrectly assuming that his father would win because “he’s Georgia royalty” without realizing “he’s not a good candidate.” He said that his preferred candidate for the 2024 presidential race would be Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Mr. Walker attacked Senator Lindsey Graham, saying that both Democrats and Republicans disliked him and that his father should not have campaigned with him, which he did multiple times throughout the race. He also recounted his own surreal experience of learning that he has three half-siblings through reports in the national media and feeling outraged at his father’s dishonesty. “He would lie to the campaign and then the journalists would come out and find the story,” said Mr. Walker, who lives in Miami. “It was just absurd.”Chase Oliver, the Libertarian candidate whose losing bid in the Senate race in November helped push the contest into a runoff, called in to wish the younger Mr. Walker the best and said: “I’m glad this is over for you.” He also proposed ranked-choice voting in Georgia and said that if Herschel Walker had reached out to him directly, he might have been able to encourage his supporters — he earned about 80,000 general election votes — to vote for him.In a bizarre moment, a person identifying himself as Chi Ossé, a sitting member of the New York City Council, called into the audio platform to tell Mr. Walker he was a “huge fan” despite being a “radical leftist.” In response to a question about his own political ambitions, the younger Mr. Walker laughed, saying he would “never” run for office. More

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      Walker vs. Warnock: Georgia Runoff Election Results

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      Source: Election results are from The Associated Press. The Times estimates the number of remaining votes based on historic turnout data and reporting from The Associated Press. These are only estimates and they may not be informed by reports from election officials.The Times’s election results pages are produced by Michael Andre, Aliza Aufrichtig, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Véronique Brossier, Irineo Cabreros, Sean Catangui, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Lindsey Rogers Cook, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Asmaa Elkeurti, Tiffany Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Will Houp, Jon Huang, Jason Kao, Josh Katz, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Vivian Li, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Alicia Parlapiano, Jaymin Patel, Marcus Payadue, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Jaime Tanner, James Thomas, Urvashi Uberoy, Ege Uz, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, William P. Davis, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski and Allison McCartney. More

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      Runoff Election Winner Will Become Georgia’s First Full-Term Black Senator

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      Senator Raphael Warnock already made history in 2021 when he became Georgia’s first Black senator, winning a runoff to secure a partial term. But whoever wins this year’s runoff will earn another distinction: the first Black senator to win a full six-year term in Georgia.The achievement is within reach of both Mr. Warnock and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker. But that’s about where their similarities end.Mr. Warnock is a sitting senator and a pastor, while Mr. Walker is a former football star and political neophyte. They have drastically different beliefs, public speaking styles and personalities. In the days leading up to the runoff, Mr. Walker held a series of modest events while Mr. Warnock held rallies and urged hundreds of congregants to vote during his sermon on Sunday.The race increasingly became an exercise in damage control for Mr. Walker. Unearthed details of his private life coupled with misrepresentations and exaggerations about his education, charitable giving, business and work in law enforcement have affected his campaign.But the polls still show a close race — not surprising, considering fewer than 40,000 votes separated the two men on Election Day last month. As each camp has sought the edge, the contest has become the second-most expensive Senate race in American history.After Mr. Warnock defeated Senator Kelly Loeffler in 2021, he became just the 11th Black U.S. senator in history. Mr. Walker, should he emerge victorious, would be the 12th. More