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How Herschel Walker Could Win Georgia’s Senate Race
Despite all the tough headlines, he could prevail. Here are two theories about how the runoff could unfold.The steady stream of tough headlines for Herschel Walker has always obscured one stubborn fact about the Senate race in Georgia: He could still win.With the runoff election just days away, the conventional wisdom holds that Senator Raphael Warnock is waltzing toward re-election against an inexperienced Republican opponent who has a thin grasp on policy issues, avoids reporters, faces serious allegations about his personal conduct and has been known to ramble on the stump. But if things were that simple, Warnock would have won handily in November.And if there’s one thing American politics keeps teaching us, it’s to be humble about predicting what voters will do. With that in mind, here are two basic ways to look at the Georgia runoff on Tuesday:The case for WarnockUnder this theory, the runoff is Warnock’s to lose.Many Republicans will stay home, the thinking goes, because they no longer believe that their vote matters much. It’s hard to make the case that 51 Democrats in the Senate, as opposed to 50, would represent some huge threat to conservative priorities and values. Denying Democrats a majority vote on Senate committees is not the kind of argument that fires up the Republican base.Runoff elections are driven by who can persuade more of their supporters to vote yet another time. And Warnock has a battle-tested turnout operation that has now performed well over three elections.The Walker campaign, by contrast, is relying on Gov. Brian Kemp — who is no longer on the ballot — to drag a weak candidate across the finish line. Senate Republicans have basically rented Kemp’s field program for the runoff, but it’s not at all clear that an operation built to turn out voters for Kemp can change gears so easily. Walker drew about 200,000 fewer votes than Kemp did, suggesting that there’s a large chunk of Republican voters who find the Senate hopeful unworthy. Forced to stand on his own two feet, Walker might crumble.Democrats are also outspending Republicans heavily down the stretch. Since Nov. 9, they’ve spent more than double what Republicans have spent on the runoff on digital and television advertising — nearly $53 million versus a little over $24 million, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. The two parties were much closer to parity in the three months before Election Day, though Democrats had a slight edge in spending.The case for WalkerThe second theory rests on the fact that Georgia is still fundamentally a right-leaning state, as this year’s blowout race for governor showed. Perhaps the state’s historical tendencies will prove decisive in the runoff, whatever Walker’s deficiencies as a candidate.Warnock finished ahead of Walker in the general election by fewer than 40,000 votes. The Libertarian candidate, Chase Oliver, received more than 81,000 votes — and he is not on the ballot this time. Oliver earned about 50,000 votes more than the Libertarian candidate did in the race for governor, suggesting that he was a sponge for conservatives who could not stomach Walker. If only 46 percent of Oliver’s supporters vote for the Republican this time, Warnock’s margin on Nov. 8 will be completely erased.It’s possible, too, that voters who chose Kemp but not Walker in November will change their minds — if they show up, that is. Walker drew a lower share of the vote than Kemp did, not just in metro Atlanta but also in the most conservative areas of the state. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Walker ran behind Kemp by at least six percentage points in eight counties — most of them Republican strongholds, with the exception of Cobb County.Walker’s indictment of Warnock was always a simple one: He’s another vote for President Biden’s agenda. And, Biden, with an approval rating in the 30s or low 40s, is about as popular in Georgia as the Florida Gators. So Warnock was careful, during his lone debate with Walker, not to associate himself too closely with Biden.What to Know About Georgia’s Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More
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Turnout Was Strong in Georgia, but Mail Voting Plummets After New Law
An analysis of November turnout data shows that voting by mail dropped as Georgians increasingly cast ballots in person. The shift hints at the possible impact of a 2021 voting overhaul.While voter turnout remained strong, absentee voting in Georgia dropped off drastically in this year’s midterm election, the first major test of an expansive 2021 voting law that added restrictions for casting ballots by mail.Data released by the Georgia secretary of state showed that mail voting in the state’s November general election plunged by 81 percent from the level of the 2020 contest. While a drop was expected after the height of the pandemic, Georgia had a far greater decrease than any other state with competitive statewide races, according to a New York Times analysis.Turnout data suggests that a large majority of people who voted by mail in 2020 found another way to cast their ballots this year — turning to in-person voting, either early or on Election Day. Turnout in the state was 56 percent of all active voters, shy of the 2018 high-water mark for a midterm election.The numbers are the first sign of how the 2021 law may have affected the election in Georgia, which has recently established itself as a battleground state. The law was signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, and backed by G.O.P. state lawmakers who said that the changes would make it “easier to vote, harder to cheat.” It significantly limited drop boxes, added voter identification requirements and prevented election officials from proactively mailing out absentee ballot applications.But civil rights groups, voting rights advocates and Democrats noted that there was no evidence of widespread fraud in elections. They viewed the law, known as S.B. 202, as an attempt to suppress Democratic-leaning voters, especially people of color, who had just helped flip Georgia blue in a presidential election for the first time in decades.President Biden called the law “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” Major League Baseball moved its All-Star game out of suburban Atlanta in protest.This year, after a mostly smooth and high-turnout general election under the new rules, both sides saw validation in their arguments. Republicans pointed to the strong overall turnout as evidence that the law had not suppressed votes. Democrats and civil rights groups argued that their sprawling voter education and mobilization efforts had helped people overcome the new hurdles.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More
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Georgia Voters Defy Efforts to Suppress Them
Tuesday afternoon, I waited over an hour and a half to vote in Atlanta in the Georgia Senate runoff between Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker.This is my second election cycle in Georgia, but I still can’t get used to the wait times to vote. It’s a voter suppression tactic in and of itself. It’s a poll tax paid in time.I lived more than 25 years in New York, where I took for granted that voting was a casual affair. For years, I would take my children into the booth with me so that they could see how the electoral process worked. There was never a line. Maybe there was a person or two in front of us, but no real delay.I wouldn’t do that here in Georgia. Forcing a child to wait in a long line in the cold could by itself be considered abusive.But, as I waited, something else occurred to me: Voter suppression is one of the surest cures for apathy. Nothing makes you value a thing like someone trying to steal it from you.The line, and all the people patiently waiting in it, is a symbol of resilience and perseverance. It is a reminder that people will work hard to overcome obstacles to accomplish things they deem essential.Waiting in line is such a feature of Georgia voting that some counties even publish their waiting times online so that voters can plan their arrivals to have the shortest wait.These waits can disproportionately affect nonwhite voters. According to a report by Georgia Public Broadcasting and ProPublica before Election Day in 2020, a shrinking number of polling places “has primarily caused long lines in nonwhite neighborhoods where voter registration has surged and more residents cast ballots in person on Election Day.”According to the report, the nine metro Atlanta counties “have nearly half of the state’s active voters but only 38 percent of the polling places.”Yet those voters would not be deterred.During the general election, voters set a record for the number of early votes cast in a Georgia midterm election, and on Monday and again on Tuesday they set records for single-day early voting in a Georgia runoff. It is interesting to note that an estimated 35 percent of the early votes so far are from African Americans, a slightly greater figure than their percentage of the population of Georgia.This is a testament to the fortitude of those voters, because they were the ones targeted by Georgia’s latest round of voter suppression with “uncanny accuracy,” as the Brennan Center for Justice’s president, Michael Waldman, put it last year. Waldman wrote that Gov. Brian Kemp “signed his voter suppression bill in front of a painting of a plantation where more than 100 Black people had been enslaved. The symbolism, unnerving and ghastly, is almost too fitting.”People who defend voter suppression point to these numbers as proof that their critics are simply being hyperbolic and creating an issue where none exists. But that is the opposite of the truth as far as I can see it. From my perspective, voters are simply responding with defiance to the efforts to suppress.And yet that defiance might still not be enough to overcome all of the obstacles placed in voters’ way. While those record daily numbers are heartening, they are in part a result of a new Republican election law that cut the number of early-voting days roughly in half. Even with the extraordinary turnout, it is unlikely this year’s early voting will match that of last year’s runoff between Warnock and the Republican incumbent, Kelly Loeffler.In addition, Republicans have fielded a singularly offensive candidate in Walker, a man not fit for elective office, a walking caricature of Black competence and excellence, as if Black candidates are interchangeable irrespective of accomplishment and proficiency.The whole time I was waiting in line, I kept thinking about how the wait would have been impossible for someone struggling with child care or elder care, or someone whose job — or jobs — wouldn’t allow for that long a break in the middle of the day.Also, I voted on an unseasonably warm day. What about those whose only opportunity to vote might be a day when it was raining or cold? The line at my polling place was outside for 90 percent of the time I waited.I have nothing but disdain for the efforts to suppress the vote in my new home state, but I have nothing but admiration for the voters’ determination not to be suppressed.Democracy is being saved by sheer force of will, by people climbing a hill that should never have been put in front of them.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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Georgia’s Senate Runoff Sets Records for Early Voting, but With a Big Asterisk
A 2021 state election law cut in half the runoff calendar in Georgia, which had about twice as many days of early voting before last year’s Senate runoffs.Georgia has eclipsed its daily record for early voting twice this week in the state’s nationally watched Senate runoff election, but even if the state keeps up the pace, it appears unlikely to match early voting turnout levels from the 2021 runoffs.The number of early voting days has been cut roughly in half for the Dec. 6 runoff between Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and the Republican candidate, Herschel Walker, compared with last year’s Senate runoffs in Georgia.Democrats swept both of those races, which lasted nine weeks and helped them win control of the Senate. Since then, Republicans who control Georgia’s Legislature and governor’s office passed an election law last year that compressed the runoff schedule to four weeks.The 2021 law also sharply limited voting by mail. Election officials can no longer mail applications for absentee ballots to voters, and voters have far less time to request a ballot: During the runoff, a voter would have had to request a ballot by last week. And because of the law, far fewer drop boxes are available to return mail ballots than in the 2020 election and its runoffs.The result is a funnel effect in Georgia. Voters have a far smaller window to cast ballots, which has led to hourslong lines around metro Atlanta, a Democratic stronghold, even though fewer people are voting ahead of Tuesday’s runoff race than in the early 2021 elections. Democrats fear the restrictions will hamper a turnout machine they spent years building — which delivered victories for Mr. Warnock, Jon Ossoff and Joseph R. Biden Jr. two years ago.On Monday afternoon in Alpharetta, Ga., a northern suburb of Atlanta, the wait time to vote was 150 minutes, according to a website that tracks lines at polling places. At the same precinct, the wait was 90 minutes on Wednesday. Early voting ends on Friday.Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the secretary of state’s office, wrote on Tuesday night on Twitter that nearly 310,000 people had voted that day, surpassing the previous record that had been set on Monday.What to Know About Georgia’s Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More
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In Georgia, Walker’s Pace in the Finish Worries Republican Allies
The Senate candidate’s performance in the final days of the runoff campaign has Republicans airing frustrations. But no one is counting him out yet.ATLANTA — Herschel Walker was being swamped by negative television ads. His Democratic opponents were preparing to flood the polls for early voting as soon as doors opened. After being hit by fresh allegations of carpetbagging, he was left with just over a week to make his final appeals to voters in the runoff for Georgia’s Senate seat.But for five days, Mr. Walker was off the campaign trail.The decision to skip campaigning over the crucial Thanksgiving holiday weekend has Mr. Walker’s Republican allies airing frustrations and concerns about his campaign strategy in the final stretch of the overtime election against Senator Raphael Warnock.Democrats, they point out, have gotten a head start on Republicans in their early-voting push and are drowning out the G.O.P. on the airwaves — outspending them two-to-one. With less than a week to go, time is running out fast for Mr. Walker to make inroads with the moderate conservatives who did not support him during the general election.“We almost need a little bit more time for Herschel’s campaign to get everything off the ground,” said Jason Shepherd, the former chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party, pointing to the transition from a general election campaign to a runoff sprint. Notably, the runoff campaign was cut from nine weeks to four by a Republican-backed law passed last year.“I think we’re behind the eight ball on this one,” Mr. Shepherd added.Mr. Shepherd said Mr. Walker’s decision not to campaign during Thanksgiving was just one troubling choice. He also pointed to a series of mailers sent by the Georgia Republican Party encouraging voters to find their polling places that contained broken QR codes as examples of poor organizing. And he raised concern about the steady stream of advertisements supporting Warnock, a first-term senator and pastor, on conservative talk radio and contemporary Christian stations.Supporters listening to Herschel Walker during a campaign event on Monday.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesBoth Democrats and Republicans note that they are far from counting Mr. Walker out. The race remains within the margin of error, according to recent polling. Democrats outspent Republicans in the general election, too, pouring in more than $100 million, compared with $76 million spent by Republicans.Still, Mr. Walker, the former football star, won 1.9 million votes earlier this month — landing 37,000 votes short of Mr. Warnock and roughly 60,000 votes shy of the 50 percent threshold for winning the seat outright.His campaign has been one of the most turbulent in recent memory: Mr. Walker was found to have lied or exaggerated details about his education, his business, his charitable giving and his work in law enforcement. He acknowledged a history of violent and erratic behavior, tied to a mental illness, and did not dispute an ex-wife’s accusation of assault. Two women claimed that he had urged them to have abortions, although he ran as a staunchly anti-abortion candidate. He denied their accounts. He regularly delivered rambling speeches, which Democrats widely circulated with glee.“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Herschel Walker might be the most flawed Republican nominee in the nation this year,” said Rick Dent, a media consultant who has worked for candidates from both parties and plans to vote for Mr. Warnock.What to Know About Georgia’s Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More
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A Resonant Topic in Georgia’s Senate Runoff: Insulin Prices
The cost of insulin is nowhere near as contentious as just about everything else raised in the runoff, but in a state with a high diabetes rate, it has proved a powerful issue.MACON, Ga. — The runoff election for Senate in Georgia has not lacked for drama, with a fresh round of attack ads, a fevered get-out-the-vote effort and both sides casting the outcome as pivotal for the nation’s future even though control of the chamber is no longer at stake.But one campaign issue relevant to many voters has little to do with the highly partisan horse race. Rather, it involves one of the most common chronic diseases in America, diabetes, and the soaring cost of the medicine used to treat it, insulin. In both the general and runoff campaigns, Senator Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, has made much of his efforts in Congress to cap the price of insulin at $35 a month, talking them up in ads, debates and speeches.“It has resonated with just about everyone,” said Dr. Kris Ellis, a physician who also owns the Bearfoot Tavern in Macon, where Mr. Warnock made a recent campaign stop. “If you don’t have diabetes, you know someone with diabetes.”He was describing an unsettling reality in Georgia, as in much of the South, where diabetes rates are staggeringly high and the escalating cost of insulin over the years has led to painful choices and, for some, catastrophic consequences.“I have someone in my family with diabetes who couldn’t afford insulin,” Tony Brown, 57, said on a recent afternoon as he walked into a building in downtown Macon where he works as an engineer. For that reason, he said, he would turn out one more time to vote for Mr. Warnock in Tuesday’s runoff.As campaign issues go, the price of insulin is nowhere near as contentious as just about everything else raised in the four-week runoff between Mr. Warnock and Herschel Walker, the former football star who is his Republican challenger. Even so, interviews with Dr. Ellis and a number of other voters suggested it had broken through the noise of the high-decibel contest, which Georgia requires because neither candidate won a majority of the vote in the general election.“I have someone in my family with diabetes who couldn’t afford insulin,” Mr. Brown said.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Warnock has focused on lowering insulin prices since arriving in the Senate nearly two years ago, motivated in part by hundreds of letters that have poured into his office, pleading with him to do something. He has also described seeing the ravaging impacts of diabetes, including losing limbs and eyesight, on congregants at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where he is the senior pastor.“This isn’t an ideological matter, it’s a practical one — and it has broad support across the political spectrum,” Mr. Warnock wrote last spring in an opinion essay published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.Earlier this year, he introduced legislation that would require both Medicare and private insurers to cap out-of-pocket costs for insulin at $35 a month. The average out-of-pocket cost per prescription reached $54 in 2020, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which also found that many patients pay significantly more for diabetes care.What to Know About Georgia’s Senate RunoffCard 1 of 6Another runoff in Georgia. More
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Mark Meadows Ordered to Testify in Trump Investigation
The South Carolina Supreme Court rejected an effort by the former White House chief of staff to avoid testifying in an investigation of election meddling.ATLANTA — The South Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered Mark Meadows, a White House chief of staff under Donald J. Trump, to testify in the criminal investigation into efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn his November 2020 election loss in Georgia.In a three-paragraph written opinion, the court pointedly said Mr. Meadows’s legal efforts to avoid participating in the investigation were “manifestly without merit.”Mr. Meadows, 63, is one of three well-known Trump allies — in addition to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the former national security adviser Michael Flynn — who have been trying to fend off subpoenas ordering them to testify before a special grand jury in Atlanta. Those efforts are part of a broader endeavor by a number of Trump’s allies to avoid cooperating in the Georgia investigation. That attempt has been met with mixed results. Last week, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina testified after a protracted legal fight that was settled by the U.S. Supreme Court.The special grand jury is considering whether Mr. Trump and others broke state laws by, among other actions, spreading falsehoods about election fraud and pressuring state officials to consider changing the results of Georgia’s presidential election, which Mr. Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes.Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Flynn were ordered to travel to Atlanta to testify by judges in their respective home states of Virginia and Florida, and they have appealed those decisions.Mr. Meadows, a former Republican representative from North Carolina, was deeply involved in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power. Congressional hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol showed that he repeatedly asked the Department of Justice to conduct investigations based on Mr. Trump’s unfounded theories about election improprieties around the country.Prosecutors say the special grand jury has evidence that Mr. Meadows set up and participated in the now infamous recorded phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Mr. Trump can be heard telling Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, that he wanted to “find” the 11,780 votes that would allow him to win in Georgia. In December 2020, Mr. Meadows made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., to try to view an election audit that was in progress there. He was told by local officials that he was not authorized to see it.Like Mr. Flynn and Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Meadows has argued that he does not have to testify on the grounds that the Georgia special grand jury should be considered civil, not criminal, in nature. That, he argues, makes the subpoena unenforceable under an agreement among states that allows them to secure the attendance of out-of-state witnesses for criminal investigations.This legal strategy was successfully employed in Texas, where it found favor with a majority of members of that state’s Court of Criminal Appeals, and that most likely explains why a number of Texas-based witnesses who received subpoenas in the Georgia case have not appeared in court.In South Carolina, however, a lower court judge rejected Mr. Meadows’s argument in late October. Later, a group of current and former prosecutors filed an amicus brief arguing that if the state’s Supreme Court accepted Mr. Meadows’s argument it would “undermine interstate comity and the effectiveness of law enforcement across state borders, not just between South Carolina and its neighbor Georgia, but nationwide.”Mr. Meadows was originally scheduled to testify on Wednesday, but that appointment will most likely be pushed back. A spokesman for Mr. Meadows’s lawyer declined to comment on Tuesday, as did a spokesman for Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is heading up the investigation.Danny Hakim More
