Now what?
The final act of the 2022 midterm drama closed Tuesday night with incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) defeating football legend Herschel Walker in a U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia. The spread just now stands at just under three points.
“After a hard-fought campaign — or, should I say, campaigns — it is my honor to utter the four most powerful words ever spoken in a democracy: The people have spoken,” Warnock, 53, told joyful supporters in Atlanta.
Warnock won the seat in a special election on Jan. 5, 2021, making last night his third election contest in under two years. Walker, the Republican, was recruited to run for the seat by embattled former president Donald Trump. The Walker loss is the third Georgia Senate seat loss for candidates backed by Trump. Georgia’s Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan predicted days ago that Walker “will probably go down as one of the worst candidates in our party’s history.”
The Warnock win gives Democrats a 51-seat majority in the Senate and will make it easier for Senate Democrats to advance legislation for the next two years as well as to confirm judges. It also means Democrats may have an easier time holding their Senate majority in 2024. Democrats will, however, have to contend with a House narrowly controlled in January by the GOP. Warnock’s reelection means that rather than being an expected wipeout for Democrats, 2022 “was more or less a status-quo election,” The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake observes.
“The year of Republicans blowing it is now complete,” reads the subhead on Jim Newell’s analysis at Slate. With Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win there, Georgia now becomes a major battlefield for Democrats in 2024.
Heavy early voting by Warnock supporters left Walker unable to gain the “yardage” he needed to make up on a rainy Election Day.
Aaron Blake (Washington Post):
One thing you’ll notice if you look at the map of the election results is that Walker often ran stronger in the state’s rural and ruby-red counties than he did four weeks ago. But Warnock ran stronger in the metro Atlanta area, and turnout was slightly stronger there. Turnout everywhere was very high for a runoff, and it looks like it will end up around 90 percent of the total vote on Election Day, but it was narrowly higher in blue counties.
I’d like here to compare two maps. The first is the Times’ Georgia runoff election map:
The second is my For The Win contact tracking map.
1/6 of Georgia lives in 32 counties between 30,000 and 100,000 population
Stacey Abrams is due a lot of credit for her organizing in Georgia, and then some. But she is not the state party.
Grayed-out counties had no Democratic committees (or else zero digital presence) earlier this year. Of 159 counties, just over 100 had county party organizations. With so much of the population concentrated in the Atlanta metro area, Democrats can win statewide races by running up the score in the few, large urban counties even while getting clobbered in the more numerous rural ones. This is what happens in statewide races. Candidates focus their efforts and funds where the large blocks of votes are.
The problem is that this strategy leaves local Democrats in smaller rural areas unsupported or under-supported. In Georgia, as in other rural states, many counties are thin on population, making it harder to recruit party leadership. Worse, if there is no Democratic committee there to lend support it is very difficult to recruit candidates for county commissions and city councils. The gray areas on my map in south-central Georgia correspond to the deep red areas where Republicans dominate. Guess why?
Democrats cannot win back state legislatures if they don’t show up to play. As we’ve seen, red state legislatures are where much of the mischief takes place.
UPDATE: Listen to live Moore v. Harper oral arguments here at a10 a.m. ET.