The good news is, among the midterm contests that held off a red wave is Georgia’s U.S. Senate race, which by Wednesday morning was too tight to call, almost guaranteeing that the Democratic incumbent, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, will face his Republican rival, Herschel Walker, in a December runoff. (Update: The race is indeed headed to runoff.)
The bad news is, it should never have been this close.
From the moment Walker launched his campaign, it was obvious he was unqualified and unprepared—traits that only became more salient with every stop on the trail. Walker displayed not so much a lack of knowledge about basic topics as he did a surplus of incoherent and nonsensical theories on everything from climate change (“Don’t we have enough trees around here?”) to evolution (“Why are there still apes? Think about it!”).
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That distant relationship with facts and reality also showed up in Walker’s seeming inability to tell the truth, and his campaign shuttled from controversy to controversy as each fabrication became headline news. Lies about graduating college, a career in the military, and success in business were succeeded by revelations about three secret children, multiple allegations of having paid for abortions, and an alleged pattern of violent abuse of women. But Walker’s backers stuck with him because he also helped push the lie that has come to define the MAGA Right—Donald Trump’s deranged insistence that the presidency was stolen from him, despite nearly two years of evidence-gathering that proves that’s not true.
There was also, most importantly, the Republican Party’s belief that defeating Warnock, the first black U.S. senator in Georgia history, would be as easy as running an African-American competitor. Still smarting over its 2020 losses in what had long been a GOP stronghold, the GOP found in Walker a candidate who would not only toe the party’s white supremacist lines by peddling racist stereotypes—about black cultural pathology, deadbeat fatherhood, criminal and violence—but a party mascot whose blackness could be used to counter charges of white Republican racism.
Walker’s Republican backers were aware he was wholly unfit to be a senator and knew there were numerous red flags related to his character; in fact, a Washington Post story recounts concerns among GOP operatives dating back to early 2021 about the potential for Walker’s “baggage” to drag down his campaign. But those issues were apparently brushed aside by many Republicans who figured a Trump endorsement, coupled with Walker’s “overwhelming name recognition in Georgia as a Heisman Trophy-winning football star” would be enough to propel him right into Warnock’s seat in Congress. And they figured being famous and black would be all it took to peel off enough African-American support for Warnock to secure a Walker win.
As always, Republicans vastly underestimated black voters, who failed to support Walker from the beginning, rightly looking askance at his MAGA ties and being put off by the myriad indicators of his total unfitness. Black folks are particularly good at assessing the potential harms political candidates will do, a self-preservationist calculation black voters have always had to make. Walker failed on every count.
But those GOP strategists were right in predicting their overwhelmingly white base would embrace a black candidate whom they saw as promoting their agenda, which is rooted in anti-blackness and revanchist white supremacy. According to exit polls from NBC News—which will likely change in the coming days and weeks, but not so much as to undo the primary takeaways here—70 percent of white Georgians chose Walker to represent them in the Senate, compared with just eight percent of black voters. More than 70 percent of white male voters and 68 percent of white women voted for Walker, while just 12 percent of black men did the same. Black women—consistently the most reliable rejectors of GOP white supremacist nonsense—gave Walker just 5 percent their votes.
It’s also notable that a staggering 88 percent of white evangelicals, or nearly nine out of 10, cast their ballots not for Warnock—a true religious scholar who holds a doctorate in systematic theology and the pastor at one of Atlanta’s oldest and most revered black Baptist churches—but instead chose Walker, whose naked hypocrisy in pursuit of political power is a shared trait. It’s likely that those same white conservative voters shrugged off Walker’s moral failings, not just because it’s politically convenient, but because it jibes with the racist views they already hold about black folks. (It’s hard not to remember that Trump was absolutely enraged by Barack Obama’s successes. He’s probably happy to promote a black candidate who doesn’t threaten his confidence in innate white supremacy so thoroughly).
Between now and the December 6 runoff, there will be much pontificating in the media about why this race looked like it did.
I can’t help but suspect some media types will contend that Warnock should’ve shook more babies and kissed more hands, crisscrossed the state more, made his policy stands clearer, or even—in the dumbest takes of all—done more to reach out to Republican voters. But at a certain point, the realities are located in the truths about us, meaning who we are as a country, and where we are at this moment.
Sure, Warnock is progressive on issues that conservatives oppose, but the devil here is in details of race, a changing Georgia, white fears of status loss and a black candidate who they entrust to do the GOP’s white supremacist bidding. That’s how we got here, despite Warnock being so much more qualified than Walker that it’s maddening the comparison is even being voted on.
And even knowing this, there’s still no guarantee Georgia will do the right thing. Should Warnock win, it’s still mortifying for us as a nation that it was ever this close. But in the event Walker wins, it’s a national shame. Either way, it should never have been this close.
