(Trends Wide) –– Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock will win the runoff for Georgia’s Senate seat, according to a Trends Wide decision-making table projection. This victory will give the Democrats an additional seat in the upper house of the United States Congress.
With their victory over Republican challenger Herschel Walker, the Democrats will control 51 seats to the GOP’s 49.
For his part, Herschel Walker will award the Senate race to Warnock in a speech from Atlanta, a senior adviser told Trends Wide.
This contest in Georgia ends a difficult cycle of midterm elections for the Republicans, who won a majority in the House of Representatives but saw their hopes of dominating the Senate dashed amid the problematic candidacies of some candidates backed by former President Donald Trump. , including Walker himself.
Indeed, the runoff in Georgia represented a final midterm election test of Trump’s influence as the former president embarks on his third run for the White House. It was also a sign that — after Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state plus two runoff victories that handed Democrats Senate seats in 2021 and a majority — Georgia is now definitely a disputed state.
Democrats’ control of the Senate next year had been resolved through close races in states like Nevada, where Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto held on to her seat despite economic headwinds, and Pennsylvania, where Democrats John Fetterman won a seat held by the Republican Party.
The Senate had been split evenly 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris casting tie-breaking votes. That has given inordinate power to moderate figures like Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who have often single-handedly curbed their party’s ambitions. By securing a full six-year term, Warnock will allow Democrats to dispense with the current power-sharing arrangement with Republicans while making it easier for Biden’s appointees to advance.
Although Warnock won more votes than Walker in last month’s general election, he did not get the majority needed to ensure victory. Tuesday’s runoff netted more than $80 million in ad spending, according to data from ad tracking firm AdImpact, with Democrats spending roughly twice as much as Republicans.
Warnock had a narrow lead over Walker in a Trends Wide poll released last week. Walker had a negative favorability rating as voters questioned his honesty after a series of scandals. He has denied reports that he pressured or encouraged women to have abortions, despite the fact that he previously advocated banning the procedure without exception on the campaign trail. Trends Wide’s KFile has reported that he will get a primary residence-only tax break this year on his home in the Dallas, Texas area while running for office in Georgia.
The state broke early voting records for a single day last week, but the time for early voting has condensed significantly compared to 2021. The total number of voters dropped from about 3.1 million last year to about 1.87 million in 2022. Democrats were optimistic, in part, because of black voters, who heavily favored Warnock in the Trends Wide poll. They accounted for nearly 32% of early voting turnout, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.
Walker, however, had strong turnout among Republican voters, who tend to vote in greater numbers on Election Day.
“This is about turnout,” Walker said Monday as he urged voters to “flood the polls.”
“Now, we have to get into the game. We can no longer stay on the sidelines,” he added.
But Trump, who like Biden stayed out of the state during the runoff, complicated the fortunes of the Republican Party across the country this year. Precisely because battleground state voters rejected many of their candidates who deny the 2020 election results.
Some of the first signs of that were seen in Georgia two years ago, when his efforts to cast doubt on mail-in ballots and vote counting were held responsible, in part, for the Republican Party’s 2021 losses in two 2021 elections. runoff that gave Democrats control of the Senate.
This year, the former president’s efforts to exact revenge on Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who refused Trump’s demands to nullify the 2020 election, received a resounding rejection from voters in the primary. Kemp handily defeated Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams last month, garnering some 200,000 more votes than Walker.
While Kemp and Walker spoke a few times during the general campaign, the two men largely kept their distance from each other in contention. All that changed in the second round. Kemp attended a rally with Walker and appeared in an advertisement for him. He held private fundraisers and lent a large Mitch McConnell-aligned PAC a vote-mobilization apparatus he had built over months, all of which could prove critical to Walker.
But Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, who also opposed Trump’s outlandish demands after the 2020 election, told Trends Wide Monday that Trump’s endorsement in the primary was the only reason Walker was converted. on the Republican nominee, but now the former president is “probably the biggest headwind Herschel Walker has.”
Duncan suggested Tuesday’s election would serve as a sort of final reckoning for Trump, one that could lead Republicans to take a tougher stance against his meddling in future elections, even as the former president seeks to re-establish himself as the standard-bearer for the party in his recently announced bid to retake the White House.
“We’re trying to break this vicious cycle of addiction to Donald Trump as Republicans,” Duncan said on Trends Wide’s “AC360.”
“We just got beaten when it should have been one of the biggest, easiest games we’ve done in years, in decades. But unfortunately we put the wrong candidates in places all over the country,” he added.
