(New York) Voters in Georgia inflicted a final setback on Donald Trump on Tuesday, rejecting in turn one of his star candidates running in the midterm elections.
Chosen by the former president because of his fame as a Georgia college football legend, Herschel Walker bowed to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in the state senatorial runoff.
After counting 99% of the votes, Warnock had won 51.2% of the vote against 48.8% for his Republican rival. This second round, a peculiarity of the Peach State, had been made necessary by the fact that no candidate had won an absolute majority in the ballot on November 8.
The re-election of Senator Warnock, who was elected to the Senate in January 2021 in a special election, will bring the number of seats controlled by Democrats in the upper house of Congress to 51 against 49 for Republicans.
“After a hard-fought campaign, or rather campaigns, I have the honor of speaking the four most powerful words ever spoken in a democracy: the people have spoken,” said Warnock, who is also pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, the same church in Atlanta where Martin Luther King Jr preached during his lifetime.
I often say that a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we want for ourselves and for our children. Voting is faith put into action. And Georgia, you prayed with your lips and your legs, with your hands and your feet, with your head and your heart. You have worked hard and now we are united.
Raphael Warnock
Minutes earlier, Walker conceded victory in a short speech to his supporters.
“There are no excuses in life. And I’m not going to make excuses because we fought well,” he said, adding that his senatorial campaign was “the best thing I’ve done in my life.” .
PHOTO CARLOS BARRIA, REUTERS
Raphael Warnock supporters gathered in Atlanta on Tuesday
Georgia has thus followed in the footsteps of three other key states where candidates supported by Donald Trump had failed to take advantage of the tradition, which disadvantages the party in power in the White House during the midterm elections, of poor economic conditions or even the unpopularity of Joe Biden to defeat their Democratic rivals in senatorial elections.
Not only had the Republicans failed to defeat vulnerable Democratic senators in Arizona and Nevada, but they had failed to defend a seat of their own in Pennsylvania.
“Senatorial races are different. The quality of the candidates has a lot to do with the outcome,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said last August, criticizing in veiled terms Donald Trump and his influence in the Republican primaries. He was referring in particular to the candidacies of Dr Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and venture capitalist Blake Masters in Arizona, two other political neophytes.
Erratic candidate
But Herschel Walker was a special case. On the eve of the runoff, Republican Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan told CNN he was “one of the worst Republican candidates in our party’s history.”
PHOTO ALYSSA POINTER, REUTERS
Herschel Walker
During his campaign, the media discovered that Walker had multiplied falsehoods or exaggerations regarding his education, his business, his charitable donations and his work in law enforcement, including the FBI. He admitted to having had violent and erratic behavior in the past, linked to a mental illness, and did not contest the accusation of assault made by his ex-wife. Two women claimed he had pressured them into having abortions, although he presented himself as a candidate staunchly opposed to abortion.
And he gave many rambling speeches from which his rival took excerpts for his advertisements. In one of these speeches, inspired by a viewing of the horror film FrightNightHerschel Walker had told his followers that he wanted to “be a werewolf” after discovering that this evil being “can kill a vampire”.
Barack Obama was one of the Americans confused by the question of whether it was better to be a vampire or a werewolf. “It’s a debate that I admit I had myself once … when I was 7 years old,” he said Thursday at a rally in Atlanta.
Reassuring majority for Democrats
Raphael Warnock ran a more traditional campaign, attempting to mobilize both Georgia’s large black electorate and moderate Republicans who were reluctant to vote for Herschel Walker. To win the votes of the latter, he notably welcomed the adoption of an amendment co-sponsored with the Republican Senator of Texas Ted Cruz to the infrastructure bill passed last year.
Even if the Democrats were already assured of a majority in the Senate, the 51e seat which the victory of Raphael Warnock gives them will considerably facilitate the life to them. They won’t need to call on Vice President Kamala Harris’s vote as Senate President as often to break ties.
And they will exercise greater control over Senate committees, including enabling them to more quickly confirm federal judges and issue subpoenas for potential investigations.