When the post game report on the 2022 Georgia runoff for Senator is written, one name is going to rise to the top, Stacey Abrams. She has spent the last 6 years religiously putting together a grassroots organization that not only went knocking door-to-door, but included community outreach, and voter registration. And while the time wasn’t quite right for her in 2022, she will reap the benefits, and so will the Democrats. Because the prehistoric GOP state apparatus lying in the dust.
Let’s make this clear. In a runoff race like this, it isn’t just community outreach and mobilization, it’s also having the necessary tools to pull it together. When the runoff was announced, the GA GOP immediately moved to stop early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, due to their interpretation of some arcane GA law. The Warnock campaign sued in state court, and the GA Supreme Court, dominated by Republicans sided with them. They got the go ahead for early voting on the Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving.
And the Democrats blew the doors off. Over the weekend, 24 of the 49 GA districts held early voting, and there was a near record turnout of 166,000 votes cast in that period. Because of the Trump regime order to eschew early voting and show up on election day, the vast majority of the haul figures to be Democratic.
And it only gets better. Because yesterday was the first day of statewide early voting, and they blew the doors off of the previous record number for early voting with some 306,000 votes cast. Again, this figures to be a heavily pro Democratic vote total, building Warnock with a comfortable early vote cushion to offset the expected surge in GOP same day voting. And we still have 3 more days of early voting to come.
And the numbers only get worse for Walker. Even if you ignore the heavily slanted goldrush of early votes the Democrats are banking like a kid with his tooth money, when it comes to cash on hand. Herschel Walker is once again sucking hind teat. According to a report recently released, with a week to go to the runoff election, Warnock has a war chest of some $29 million to spend, as compared to walker’s $10 million.
And Warnock is putting it to good use too. Knowing that early voting is showing that 18-28 voters are waiting in line for 2 hours to vote, Warnock is hammering college towns with mailers, flyers, and even bus stop signs touting his candidacy, and urging the kids to get out and make their voices heard.
And what is Herschel Walker doing? Um. How about literally nothing. In the weekend following Thanksgiving, Raphael Warnock held 6 different public campaign events. Walker? He held his last public event the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and then didn’t crawl out from under his rock for a public appearance until yesterday! And worse yet is the fact that local reporting is saying that when he does make a personal appearance, he seldom does so without at least one handler on stage with him, to sit Shiva and make sure he doesn’t go off the rails again.
Election day is one week from today. Thanks to Georgia’s shameless attempts at voter suppression, I take nothing to the bank until the front doors open. The last poll I saw showed warnock with a 51-47 lead, barely within the margin of error. But every sign I’m seeing tends to make me believe that the result won’t even be that close. And here’s the McGuffin. Remember I said that Warnock had a $29M to $10M cash lead going into the final week? You know what I didn’t say? That GOP heavy hitters like McConnell and GOP Super PAC’s are pumping millions into Walker’s campaign in order to prop him up. Because they aren’t. With control of the Senate out of reach, they’re throwing Walker overboard. One week to go.
To put this in football terms Walker and his “college football is king” supporters can relate to think of it this way: Warnock has a quality offensive line (thanks to Stacey Abrams’ years of work) blocking for him and Walker has a line made up of broken down, old (very old) veterans all playing with significant injuries. And Walker keeps injuring himself!
In too many ways, this contest has been over for weeks now. Warnock came out ahead in the first round, so it stands that he would do so in the second. Add in how the Senate stays in Dem hands no matter what, Walker is an out-of-control gaffe machine and local GA Republicans are going to use this upcoming loss as a way to stick it to Trump and I like our chances
Um, you’ve forgotten that the whole reason for the runoff’s existence is because of the Libertarian candidate who siphoned off 2.1% of the vote; there was only a 0.9% difference between Warnock and Walker in the general election.
And, in the “came out ahead in the first round, so it stands to that he would do so in the second,” that’s NOT always true. In fact, in the Perdue-Ossoff runoff, Purdue led in November 2020 with 49.7% of the vote to Ossoff’s 47.9% and the Libertarian candidate pulled in 2.4%; the total number of votes cast was 4,952,175. When the runoff was held in January 2021, Ossoff won with 50.6% to Purdue’s 49.4%; the total number of votes was 4,484,902 or 467,273 fewer votes (both candidates lost whole votes from November to January but Ossoff lost fewer; Ossoff’s vote loss was 104,596 while Purdue lost 247,638 votes).
In the special election between Loeffler and Warnock, the rules were completely different as the general election was a “jungle primary” with 20 listed candidates including 8 Democrats and 6 GOPers. Warnock did lead after the jungle primary BUT if you count all the Democratic votes vs all the GOP votes, then the GOP candidate had a slight lead (11,632 or 47,808–one of the GOP candidates withdrew before the election but his name remained on the ballot). Doing this kind of “generic” count would have made it seem that Loeffler had the “lead” as it was just assumed that she would pick up most–if not all–the other GOP votes. (There were, incidentally, 1 Libertarian, 1 Green Party and 4 listed independents who amassed 109,929 votes. And, as with the Purdue-Ossoff race, the runoff lost more than 429,000 votes but, Warnock only picked up 672,000 votes between the elections while Loeffler picked up 922,000.)
An erudite minister vs a wife beating moron. Think they can discern the difference in Georgia?