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      The Senate’s Most Vulnerable Democrats

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      With inflation and President Biden’s sinking poll ratings beleaguering the party, incumbents in four battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire — face tough campaigns.Two senators from states with little in common and at opposite poles of the country found each other this month: Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Mark Kelly of Arizona, who banded together to push a gasoline tax holiday.Their bill — the Gas Prices Relief Act, which would suspend 18.4 cents of federal tax per gallon — soon found two other eager sponsors: Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada.A gas tax holiday may face dim prospects, but the fact that four of its chief backers just happen to be the four most vulnerable Democratic senators in the midterms this November underscores how much they want to ring a populist bell, one that might help them save their jobs.While most attention around the midterms until now has focused on the battle for the House and the state-by-state fights over redrawing districts, Democrats’ fragile Senate majority is also in play.Collectively, the four Democratic senators most at risk — Mr. Warnock, Mr. Kelly, Ms. Cortez Masto and Ms. Hassan — are neither national stars nor senior members of leadership. They are vulnerable not because of policies they passed or failed to pass. Rather, they are incumbents in battleground states in a year of hostile political weather for Democrats, with rising inflation, voter anger at the party in charge and President Biden’s sinking job approval.Even though the president won all four of their states in 2020, his margins were so slim that small shifts in partisan enthusiasm or the allegiance of swing voters, especially suburbanites, could bring Republican victories.Mr. Warnock, Georgia’s first Black senator, and Mr. Kelly, a former astronaut, are defending seats in longtime Republican strongholds that Mr. Biden carried by less than one percentage point. Ms. Cortez Masto, the first Latina senator, is seeking re-election in a state where disapproval of the president registered at 52 percent in a recent poll.Even in New Hampshire, where Mr. Biden won by seven points, Republicans sense an opportunity to oust Ms. Hassan, a former governor, after a recent New Hampshire poll showed that fewer than one in five residents think the country is heading in the right direction.The 2022 climate could still shift. Galloping inflation could moderate. The confirmation of a Black woman to the Supreme Court, or the court’s gutting of abortion rights, could galvanize Democrats. And with much of the Republican Party captive to Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, the Republican nominees who come through bruising primaries could be too polarizing to win. Democrats also hope to pick up Republican-held seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.But history is not in Democrats’ favor. The party that holds the White House almost always suffers midterm losses. Even milestone legislation — Barack Obama’s health care reform, or Ronald Reagan’s signature tax cuts — has made little difference. Midterm voters have generally been more motivated by economic conditions or by a desire to put a check on the party in power.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Campaign Financing: With both parties awash in political money, billionaires and big checks are shaping the midterm elections.Key Issues: Democrats and Republicans are preparing for abortion and voting rights to be defining topics.“Individual candidates and the races they run do matter, but history tells us the political environment is the most meaningful contributor to the midterm outcome,” said Kyle Kondik, an analyst at the nonpartisan Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.Here is a look at Democrats’ most endangered senators.Georgia: The pastor and the ex-football starSenator Raphael WarnockNicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Warnock calls himself “the most vulnerable Senate Democrat up for re-election.” He won his seat in a 2021 runoff thanks to strong Black turnout and the failure of some Republicans to show up after Mr. Trump fanned the falsehood of rigged elections.But Georgia is still a right-leaning state, and disenchantment with Mr. Biden is more intense there than nationally. The president’s job approval was in the mid-30s in two public polls last month. While Mr. Warnock has emphasized how Democrats’ Senate majority delivered pandemic relief, his opponents have attacked his reliance on wealthy, out-of-state campaign contributors.“Biden has lost those white, highly educated voters who migrated to Warnock and are open to coming back to Republicans,” said Brian Robinson, a G.O.P. strategist in Georgia.A poll by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed Mr. Warnock statistically tied in a general-election matchup with the former football star Herschel Walker, who was beckoned into the race by Mr. Trump. Women have claimed Mr. Walker threatened them with violence, and he has acknowledged a history of mental illness. But his stature with Republicans has suffered little.Mr. Walker has avoided public events and generally all but friendly news media. In one interview, he said the Democrats’ proposed John Lewis Voting Rights Act “doesn’t fit with what John Lewis stood for,” though the Georgia congressman, who died in 2020, had dedicated his life to voting rights. Mr. Walker later complained it was “totally unfair to someone like myself” to be asked about the bipartisan, trillion-dollar infrastructure law, perhaps Congress’s biggest achievement of 2021.At some point, Mr. Walker may have to face off with Mr. Warnock, an orator who holds the pulpit that once belonged to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.Jason Carter, the Democratic nominee for Georgia governor in 2014, said, “I have in my office right now a football signed by Herschel Walker, but I don’t want him to be my senator and I’m not alone.”Arizona: Drawing a contrast with progressivesSenator Mark KellyConor E. Ralph for The New York TimesMr. Kelly is defending the seat he won in 2020, where he outperformed Mr. Biden in all 15 counties. The race is taking place in the shadow of a yearlong right-wing crusade in Arizona to undo Mr. Biden’s victory, which has turned off many traditional Republicans.Among the Republican contenders, Attorney General Mark Brnovich acknowledged that Mr. Trump lost in Arizona, but he has tried to regain credibility with the base ever since. The Republican field also includes the venture capitalist Blake Masters, who has appealed to grass-roots anger at China and over the porous Mexican border, and Jim Lamon, a businessman who has run inflammatory TV ads.“You’ve got Republican candidates doing everything they can to out-Trump themselves in a state that defeated Trump,” said Tony Cani, a Democratic strategist.Mr. Kelly has held his attacks against Republicans so far, instead emphasizing his roots as the son of two police officers and his support for popular legislation like the gas tax holiday and a ban on congressional stock trading.Kirk Adams, a Republican strategist, said the G.O.P.’s often fractious wings in Arizona would rally around the eventual nominee.“There is a unifying thread right now, the alarm and concern over the Biden administration, across all factions of the Republican Party,” said Mr. Adams, a former top aide to Gov. Doug Ducey, whom anti-Trump Republicans have tried to coax into the race.Mr. Kelly, the husband of Gabrielle Giffords, the former congresswoman who was critically injured in a mass shooting in 2011, has sought to insulate himself by drawing a contrast with progressives. He criticized Mr. Biden for not labeling the record number of migrants seized at the border “a crisis,” and he disavowed the state Democratic Party’s censure of Senator Kyrsten Sinema for refusing to change filibuster rules.Nevada: A fight over who would fight harderSenator Catherine Cortez MastoElizabeth D. Herman for The New York TimesA war of words over Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020 is likely to animate the Senate race in Nevada, where the leading Republican, Adam Laxalt, has pushed efforts to reverse Mr. Biden’s 33,000-vote win in the state. He has called the falsehood of a stolen election “the hottest topic” of his campaign this year. He has the backing of both Mr. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.Ms. Cortez Masto, first elected in 2016, was a protégé of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader who died last year.“I’ve always been in tough races,” Ms. Cortez Masto said in an interview. “I know that Mitch McConnell will continue to put millions of dollars into this race.”Both Mr. Laxalt and Ms. Cortez Masto are former state attorneys general. Mr. Laxalt is hammering on fears of rising crime, undocumented immigrants and inflation. The state’s tourist-dependent economy has the nation’s second-worst unemployment rate at 6.4 percent.Mr. Laxalt has accused Ms. Cortez Masto of failing to stick up for the police and denounce violent crime. “Vegas can’t survive if violence continues to increase,” he said at a rally this month. “We’re a tourism economy. People are scared to come here.”Ms. Cortez Masto, who says she helped deliver Justice Department grants to local police departments, is trying to localize her race, promoting her procurement of funding to combat wildfires and drought in the infrastructure law, which Mr. Laxalt opposed.“Let me tell you, there’s a stark difference between me and Adam Laxalt,” Ms. Cortez Masto said. “Every day I’m talking to Nevadans, hearing what they need and fighting for them.”New Hampshire: A survivor of earlier red wavesSenator Maggie HassanMichael A. McCoy for The New York TimesMs. Hassan, who won her Senate seat by a mere 1,000 votes in 2016, seemed to catch a big break when the most popular official in the state, Gov. Chris Sununu, told fellow Republicans he wouldn’t run for Senate.But voters’ disapproval of Ms. Hassan, which has reached 51 percent, drew a second tier of Republicans off the sidelines, including Chuck Morse, the State Senate president, and Kevin Smith, the town manager of Londonderry. They joined Don Bolduc, a retired Army general.Ms. Hassan, who was twice elected governor, has $5.3 million in her campaign account, far ahead of rivals.Her campaign boasts that she was one of the original bipartisan negotiators of the infrastructure deal and secured funding for two state priorities, coastal resiliency and high-speed internet (many New Hampshirites work from home). Yet, Republicans point to New Hampshire’s receiving the fewest highway dollars of any state.“I would say there’s zero chance, barring a disaster in our primary — which is always possible — that she could get re-elected,” said David Carney, a Republican strategist who is advising Mr. Morse.The soaring cost of fuel, in a state with no mass transit and where most homes are heated with fuel oil, is one factor driving voters’ pessimism about the country’s direction. On the other hand, a Supreme Court ruling undermining Roe v. Wade this year could infuriate New Hampshire voters, among the most supportive in the country of abortion rights.Ms. Hassan has won three statewide races, including re-election as governor in 2014, a brutal midterm for Democrats. “President Obama was not popular in New Hampshire in 2014,” said Ray Buckley, the chairman of the state’s Democrats. “She was able to win.” More

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      ‘I Will Not Sit Quietly’: 3 Black Senators in Spotlight on Voting Rights

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      Senators Cory Booker, Tim Scott and Raphael Warnock brought vastly different perspectives to proceedings that highlighted the Senate’s striking lack of diversity.Senators Tim Scott and Cory Booker clashed over calling Republican-backed voting legislation “Jim Crow 2.0.”Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — The Senate has only three Black members, a paltry number that is unrepresentative of the country, so when the chamber took up a voting rights bill this week aimed at preventing the disenfranchisement of voters of color, Senators Cory Booker, Tim Scott and Raphael Warnock played an outsized role in the debate.During a more than 10-hour discourse on Wednesday that highlighted the Senate’s lack of diversity, the three men brought vastly different perspectives to an issue that each said had affected them in deeply personal ways, with the two Democrats — Mr. Warnock of Georgia and Mr. Booker of New Jersey — serving as self-described witnesses to Republican-engineered voter suppression, and Mr. Scott, Republican of South Carolina, countering that the real threat to democracy was coming from the left.The protracted proceedings underscored how heavily the white leaders of both parties lean on the few Black members of their rank-and-file when issues of race arise. When Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator from California who was the first Black woman to serve in that post, briefly presided over the debate on Wednesday night, nearly half of the 11 African Americans who have ever served in the Senate were present at once.But it also showed the power of representation and biography in a debate over policy.The moral force that the three senators could marshal to their causes was clear. The back-and-forth between Mr. Scott, the son of a struggling single mother in working-class North Charleston, S.C., and Mr. Booker, a former Rhodes Scholar and big-city mayor, provided a striking moment, as they fought over the meaning of Jim Crow in the present day.Mr. Scott used the elections of all three Black men — but especially himself and Mr. Warnock — to back up his case that America is a nation of expanding democratic opportunity, not voter suppression and inequity.“It’s hard to deny progress when two of the three come from the Southern states which people say are the places where African American votes are being suppressed,” he said.Mr. Warnock, who ministers from Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the pulpit from which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, closed the debate with an appeal to every senator.“Let the message go out: You cannot honor Martin Luther King and work to dismantle his legacy at the same time,” Mr. Warnock said Wednesday night, two days after King’s holiday, when virtually every senator of every political stripe produced an obligatory tribute to the slain civil rights leader.“I will not sit quietly while some make Dr. King the victim of identity theft.”The groundbreaking positions of the men, no doubt, are at least part of the reason they were thrust onto center stage. Mr. Scott was the first Black senator from the South since Reconstruction. Mr. Warnock is the first African American to represent Georgia in the Senate and the first Black Democrat to be elected to the Senate by a former state of the Confederacy. Mr. Booker is his state’s first Black senator.Donna Brazile, a Black Democratic strategist who headed Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, recalled watching Wednesday’s debate and “thinking, ‘I thank God we have in 2022 three Black members of the United States Senate, regardless of party affiliation,’ because they all spoke uniquely from their own experiences of the journey of Black Americans.”But it can be a bit overwhelming, said Carol Moseley Braun, who was the first Black woman to serve in the Senate and the only Black person in the entire chamber when she served.“If it had to do with women, I got trotted out. If it had to do with Black people, I got trotted out,” she recalled in an interview on Thursday. “I couldn’t win.”In the end, no amount of pressure from Mr. Warnock could sway a single Republican to back the voting rights and election protection bill, or persuade the two balking Democrats, Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, to support weakening the filibuster to advance it over G.O.P. opposition.Nor could Mr. Scott save his party from the fallout of defending voting restrictions passed by Republican legislatures that Democrats say are intended to disenfranchise minority voters. The South Carolina senator’s ardent defense of Georgia’s new voting law may have been lost amid the repercussions from a faux pas uttered on Wednesday by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.Asked about protests from voters of color over new restrictions, Mr. McConnell said, “The concern is misplaced because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” Critics interpreted the comment as implying that either Black voters are not wholly American, or that the top Senate Republican considered “American” synonymous with white.Mr. Warnock is the obvious face of the Democratic cause, not because of his skin color but because his tight election victory in 2020 — along with an even tighter win by his colleague, Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia — gave the party its Senate majority, and because Mr. Warnock must face Georgia voters again this November, now under new election rules signed into law by the state’s Republican governor.Indeed, in an evenly divided Senate where the net loss of a single seat would cost Democrats control, Mr. Warnock is perhaps the most endangered Democrat, and the party’s cause célèbre.“Reverend Warnock is the moral authority and conscience on this issue by virtue of his background, his election and his extraordinary rhetorical capabilities,” said Marc Elias, the party’s top election lawyer. “He speaks for so many people, and articulates what so many people feel in their hearts about the importance of voting rights.”Last year, at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, but in the Senate on Wednesday, Georgia’s law was front and center.Mr. Scott fiercely defended the law — “supposedly the poster child of voter suppression” — as actually expanding access to the ballot, saying Democrats were distorting its effects to inject race into the voting rights fight when their real aim was political power.Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia is perhaps the chamber’s most endangered Democrat.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesHe leaned in hard to his biography, which included a grandfather he escorted to the polls because he could not read, to burnish his credentials as he laid into the Democrats’ case for a far-reaching rewrite of election laws that have traditionally been the purview of state and local governments.Speaking for “Americans from the Deep South who happen to look like me,” the conservative Republican recounted the Jim Crow era that his grandfather had lived through, when literacy tests, job losses, beatings and lynchings kept Black Southerners from the polls. The Georgia law is nothing like the “Jim Crow 2.0” that President Biden and other Democrats have called it, he said.“To have a conversation and a narrative that is blatantly false is offensive, not just to me or Southern Americans but offensive to millions of Americans who fought, bled and died for the right to vote,” Mr. Scott said.That brought a sharp response from Mr. Booker. “Don’t lecture me about Jim Crow,” he said, adding: “It is 2022 and they are blatantly removing more polling places from the counties where Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented. I’m not making that up. That is a fact.”But it was Mr. Warnock who brought to the debate the names of his own constituents: a woman who has not been able to vote for a decade because of long lines and constantly moving polling places; a student who could not vote for him in 2020 because the epic waits near her college would have made her miss class; another who waited eight hours in the rain to cast her ballot.“One part of being a first of any kind is thinking, ‘How do I educate people?’” said Minyon Moore, who was a political director in the Clinton White House and a senior aide to Hillary Clinton. “I see that as a badge of honor, not a burden, and I know that Senators Warnock and Booker do, too. They have a responsibility to educate and explain. If they don’t do it, who will?”Mr. Warnock, too, brandished his biography, which included growing up in the Kayton Homes housing project in Savannah, Ga., the youngest of 12 children. His mother picked cotton in Waycross, Ga., as a child, he said, and “the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton helped pick her youngest son as a United States senator” in 2021.It was difficult enough when he beat the incumbent Republican, Kelly Loeffler, by about 93,000 votes with a huge minority turnout; this November will be worse with the state’s new law, he said.Georgia’s legislators “have decided to punish their own citizens for having the audacity to show up,” Mr. Warnock said, adding, “Those are the fact of the laws that are being passed in Georgia and across the nation.”Democrats have been wowed by such rhetorical performances, but the senator’s first year in electoral politics has yielded little in the way of victories. The voting rights push that he has framed as a moral imperative has been blocked. Another effort, to secure health care for the working poor in states like Georgia that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, got a boost when it was included in the Build Back Better Act that passed the House. But that, too, has been stymied in the Senate.He was blunt on Wednesday, when he said during the voting rights debate that he believed in bipartisanship, but then asked, “Bipartisanship at what cost?”“Raphael Warnock feels that he went up there with this idea he can work with anyone,” said Jason Carter, a grandson of former President Jimmy Carter who was the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia in 2014 and speaks regularly to Mr. Warnock. “There may come a time where he throws up his hands and says we can’t get anything done. I haven’t heard the frustration boiling over yet.” More

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      Senate Democrats Hold Hearing on Voting in Georgia

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      ATLANTA — Senate Democrats took their campaign for far-reaching federal voting rights legislation on the road to Georgia on Monday, convening a rare hearing in a state at the center of a national fight over elections.At a field hearing in Atlanta, lawmakers and voters decried the restrictive new voting law signed this spring by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, as an attempt to disenfranchise Black and young voters and consolidate Republicans tenuous grip on power.“There is much talk about not being able to give food and water to voters on line, but the actual law is much more abhorrent than that,” said Representative Billy Mitchell, the chairman of the Georgia House Democratic caucus. “What I am most concerned about — and hope you come up with a solution for — is cheating umpires that these laws are creating.”But the hearing’s real aim is to sway a debate more than 500 miles away in Washington, where Democrats are trying to revive a stalled elections overhaul in the Senate to make it easier to vote and offset many of the changes Republicans have pushed through in states like Georgia.“If you just stay in Washington and get doused down and gridlocked out by our archaic procedures in the Senate, you lose sight of what you are fighting for,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairwoman of the Rules Committee, which is convening the session, said in an interview.An initial attempt by Democrats to debate their overhaul, the For the People Act, failed in the Senate last month in the face of unified Republican opposition. Now, Democrats are trying to retool, but it is unclear if their chances of success will improve as long as key moderate senators refuse to alter the Senate’s filibuster rule, which in effect gives Republicans veto power over their agenda.Party leaders are working with Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the most outspoken Democratic opponent of the measure, to draft a narrower compromise bill, which could come up for another vote in August or the fall. They are also readying additional legislation, named after the late civil rights icon John Lewis of Georgia, to strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That, too, could come to a vote in the fall.Given the likelihood that both those efforts would fall amid Republican opposition, Democrats have begun work to try to include more modest voting rights measures in the party’s $3.5 trillion budget blueprint, which they are working to muscle through the Senate on a simple majority vote.The hearing at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights here is the first time in two decades the Rules Committee has convened outside the Capitol. Ms. Klobuchar has said additional field hearings will follow.Among the witnesses are Sally Harrell, a Democratic state senator from suburban Atlanta; Helen Butler, the executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda; and José Segarra, a voter from south-central Georgia. Senator Raphael Warnock, whose improbable victory in a runoff election here in January delivered control of the Senate to Democrats, also addressed the panel.Republicans on the Rules Committee, who have fought to stymie Democrats’ election overhaul in the Senate, did not attend the hearing.“This silly stunt is based on the same lie as all the Democrats’ phony hysteria from Georgia to Texas to Washington, D.C., and beyond — their efforts to pretend that moderate, mainstream state voting laws with more generous early voting provisions than blue states like New York are some kind of evil assault on our democracy,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said in a statement. More

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      Herschel Walker's Cryptic Video Could Upend Georgia Senate Race

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      If the Georgia college football legend Herschel Walker declares his candidacy it could put former President Donald J. Trump’s power as a kingmaker to the test.ATLANTA — In his 1980s prime, Herschel Walker, the Georgia college football legend, ran the ball with the downhill ferocity of a runaway transfer truck. There was no question about which way he was headed.But that was not the case this week, as Mr. Walker tweeted out a cryptic 21-second video that sent the state’s political players into a frenzy of decoding and guesswork.Did the video amount to an announcement that the Heisman-winning Mr. Walker — spurred on by the sis-boom-bah urging of his old friend Donald J. Trump — plans to enter the Republican primary for a chance to run next year against the Democratic senator the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock?That was one plausible interpretation of the clip, in which a smiling Mr. Walker, who lives in Texas, revs the motor of a sports car.“I’m getting ready,” Mr. Walker says, as the camera pans to the car’s Georgia license plate. “And we can run with the big dogs.”If Mr. Walker indeed jumps into the Senate race, it will go a long way toward firming up the 2022 pro-Trump roster in Georgia, where the former president has vowed to handpick G.O.P. candidates to exact revenge on the Republicans who declined to support his false contention that he was the true winner of the 2020 election in the state, which he in fact lost by about 12,000 votes.Mr. Walker, who once played for Mr. Trump’s professional team, the New Jersey Generals, in the short-lived United States Football League, urged Republicans to stick by Mr. Trump in the weeks after Election Day as departing president pressed his unfounded claims of voter fraud. In March, Mr. Trump, in a statement, said it would be “fantastic” if Mr. Walker ran for Senate.“He would be unstoppable, just like he was when he played for the Georgia Bulldogs, and in the NFL,” Mr. Trump said. “He is also a GREAT person. Run Herschel, run!”But a Walker candidacy may also prove to be the most high-stakes test of whether Mr. Trump’s fervent wish to play kingmaker will serve his party’s best interests in a hotly contested swing state that could determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.Though Mr. Walker is the most revered player in the modern history of the football-crazy state — Bulldog fans still talk about where they were when they saw his jaw-dropping performance in the 1981 Sugar Bowl, the way other Americans talk about the moon landing — the former running back also brings a complicated post-football story.Mr. Walker, 59, says that he suffers from dissociative identity disorder, an affliction formerly known as multiple personality disorder. His forthrightness on the topic of mental illness, outlined in his 2008 book, “Breaking Free: My Life With Dissociative Identity Disorder,” has earned him praise in some quarters. But others have doubted the diagnosis, calling it a convenient way to excuse bad behavior.In a 2005 application for a protective order, Mr. Walker’s ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, alleged that Mr. Walker had a history of “extremely threatening behavior” toward her. In one instance, she has said, he put a gun to her temple. In his book, Mr. Walker admitted to numerous instances of playing Russian roulette.Mr. Walker could not reached for comment for this article, but in a 2008 interview with The New York Times, he said he had the disorder under control with the help of therapy.Leo Smith, a Republican political consultant in Georgia, said that he hopes Mr. Walker will remain on the sidelines. “As a political consultant, I’d recommend that Mr. Walker influence politics through fund-raising and donations, not as a candidate,” he said.Senator Raphael G. Warnock of Georgia, center, greeting Vice President Kamala Harris in Atlanta on Friday. Some believe Mr. Walker’s Twitter video was a sign he plans to run against Mr. Warnock next year.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesBut Randy Evans, a former ambassador to Luxembourg appointed by Mr. Trump, said that Mr. Walker may prove to be a “transformational” candidate who crosses boundaries of party and race (Mr. Walker is Black). “He’s got the demeanor to do it,” Mr. Evans said. “I recognize fully the difficulties of brand-new people who run who’ve never run before, but I thought Senator Tuberville did a pretty good job in Alabama, and that Herschel Walker would do a great job in Georgia.”Mr. Evans was referring to Tommy Tuberville, the staunchly pro-Trump Republican and big-time college football coach who easily won election to the Senate in November. But while Mr. Trump remains popular among Republicans in both Alabama and Georgia, the latter has seen Democrats make big inroads in part because of demographic change and a distaste for Trumpism in some important areas, including the suburbs north of Atlanta.Mr. Trump has already endorsed Representative Jody Hice, a hard-right conservative and Baptist preacher who plans to run for Secretary of State in Georgia against the incumbent Brad Raffensperger. Like Mr. Walker, Mr. Hice supports Mr. Trump’s bogus claims of a rigged election, and a Trump endorsement may be enough to hand him a primary victory.But a number of Republicans are quietly concerned that both Mr. Hice and Mr. Walker may wither in the scrutiny of a general election. Suburban, centrist women are likely to take note of Mr. Walker’s ex-wife’s story, as well as Mr. Hice’s comment that he approved of women in politics, so long as “the woman’s within the authority of her husband.”If Mr. Walker does enter the race, he will be the best known among a Republican field that already includes Kelvin King, a construction executive; Latham Saddler, a former Navy SEAL; and Gary Black, the state agriculture commissioner. There is also a possibility that former Senator Kelly Loeffler, who lost the seat to Mr. Warnock in the January runoff election, could try for a rematch.Mr. Warnock is the pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church — the home church of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His victory in January, as well as the victory of his fellow Georgia Democrat, Senator Jon Ossoff, served as a stinging rebuke to Mr. Trump a few weeks after his own loss in the state.Mr. Warnock must defend his seat so soon after his election because he is serving out the remainder of a term begun by former Senator Johnny Isakson, a Republican who stepped down because of poor health. Mr. Warnock is likely to run emphasizing his support for social programs and support for Georgia businesses.“Whether it’s Trump’s handpicked candidate Herschel Walker, failed former Senator Kelly Loeffler, or any other candidate in this chaotic Republican field, not one of them is focused on what matters to Georgians,” said Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Georgia, in a statement.Debbie Dooley, the president of the Atlanta Tea Party, said that she is hoping that Georgia might see a general election in which all four candidates for the two top offices, senator and governor, are Black, allowing voters to take racial matters out of the decision-making process and instead have a clear choice between “competing ideologies.”In the governor’s race, Ms. Dooley is hoping that Vernon Jones, a Black, pro-Trump candidate not endorsed by Mr. Trump, will defeat Gov. Brian Kemp in the Republican primary. And she is assuming, like many other Georgians, that Stacey Abrams will run for governor on the Democratic side.In the Senate race, Ms. Dooley said she wants to see Mr. Walker jump into the primary and win it. “That’s who Trump wants,” she said, although she added that doing so would betray one loyalty: She is a die-hard Alabama fan.“Roll Tide,” she said. More

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      In Setback for Trump, Doug Collins Will Not Run in Georgia in 2022

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      Mr. Collins, a former Republican congressman and ardent defender of former President Trump, was seen as an experienced potential challenger to Senator Raphael Warnock or Gov. Brian Kemp.ATLANTA — Doug Collins, a former U.S. congressman and ardent defender of former President Donald J. Trump, announced on Monday that he would not seek any statewide office in 2022, at once narrowing the field of Republican candidates for Senate in Georgia and removing a potential intraparty challenge to Gov. Brian Kemp.Mr. Collins’s decision is a setback for Mr. Trump’s hopes of fielding a strong, experienced Republican candidate for Senate or governor next year. Mr. Collins was widely seen as more likely to run for Senate; his announcement now deprives the Trump-supporting wing of the Georgia Republican Party of an experienced challenger to Senator Raphael Warnock, a freshman Democrat who won a special election in January and will be up for re-election to a full term next year.Herschel Walker, the former N.F.L. and University of Georgia football star, has been rumored to be considering a run, and Mr. Trump has urged him to jump into the race. Kelvin King, a contractor and Trump supporter, announced his candidacy earlier this month, and Latham Saddler, a former Navy SEAL and former White House fellow in the Trump administration, has filed paperwork stating his intention to run.Other ambitious Georgia Republicans seeking higher office may also end up trying their luck in the primary. Mr. Warnock is a political newcomer, and Republicans are hoping that his election this winter, as well as that of Senator Jon Ossoff, a fellow Democrat, were anomalies explained in part by the false claims of election fraud pushed by Mr. Trump and his allies, which may have depressed turnout in those Senate races.Moreover, national Republicans are likely to spend big to defeat Mr. Warnock in the general election in an effort to wrest control of the Senate away from the Democrats. It is expected to be one of the most hotly contested and closely watched elections in the country next year.Mr. Collins was also seen as a potential primary challenger to Mr. Kemp, the Republican incumbent who drew the ire of Mr. Trump for refusing to acquiesce to the former president’s demands to try to subvert the election results.Mr. Trump has vowed to campaign against Mr. Kemp and may get behind other pro-Trump statewide candidates in advance of the November 2022 election. Vernon Jones, a former Democrat turned Trump ally, announced his candidacy for governor earlier this month.Mr. Trump had hinted at the idea of backing Mr. Collins for statewide office, although he mentioned him as a potential candidate for governor, rather than senator, at a rally in Georgia in December.As Mr. Trump continues to seek retribution against Republicans in Georgia, he also endorsed another loyal ally, Representative Jody Hice, in March for a bid to unseat the current secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in the state’s Republican primary. Mr. Raffensperger also enraged Mr. Trump by declining to help him overturn the presidential election results in the state. More

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      in Elections

      A Conversation With Senator Raphael Warnock

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      Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherRepublican-led legislatures are racing to restrict voting rights, in a broad political effort that began in the state of Georgia. To many Democrats, it’s no coincidence that Georgia — once a Republican stronghold — has just elected its first Black senator: Raphael Warnock. Today, we speak to the senator about his path from pastorship to politics, the fight over voting rights and his faith that the old political order is fading away.On today’s episodeAstead W. Herndon, a national political reporter for The New York Times.Mr. Warnock was previously a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.Getty ImagesBackground readingGeorgia Republicans passed a sweeping law to restrict voting access in the state, making it the first major battleground to overhaul its election system since the turmoil of the 2020 presidential contest.Last year, Mr. Warnock ran for office in a state where people in predominantly Black neighborhoods waited in disproportionately long lines. Several Black leaders have said Georgia’s new law clearly puts a target on Black and brown voters.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Astead W. Herndon contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Theo Balcomb, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Alix Spiegel, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano and Soraya Shockley.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Laura Kim, Erica Futterman and Shreeya Sinha. More

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      in Elections

      A National Campaign to Restrict Voting

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      Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIn the weeks after the 2020 election, Georgia’s Republican leaders emerged as defenders of election integrity, rebuffing demands by former President Trump to overturn the results. But now voting rights in the state are under threat. The Republicans in the state legislature watched as the state flipped for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in decades and two Democrats — Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock — won their Senate runoff elections. Their response was a package of voting restrictions. Today, we look at the measures introduced in Georgia and how similar laws may be passed elsewhere in the country. On today’s episodeNick Corasaniti, a domestic correspondent covering national politics for The New York Times. Three Democratic state representatives, Kim Schofield, second from left, Viola Davis and Sandra Scott, at a protest outside the Georgia Capitol as House members debated a bill on voting restrictions last week.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesBackground reading Georgia Republicans have moved early in a campaign to rewrite voting rules. Republicans in other states are determined to follow them.The country’s most hotly contested state has calmed down after months of drama, court fights and national attention. But new storms are on the horizon.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Theo Balcomb, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Alix Spiegel, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano and Soraya Shockley.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Laura Kim, Erica Futterman and Shreeya Sinha. More