Divided
On Tuesday, the people of the US state of Georgia will vote for their new senator. The race between Warnock and Walker promises to be close.
Atlanta/Washington – Just weeks after the full-fledged US midterm elections, the two most successful contenders for the Georgia state Senate seat in the southern US face another runoff. However, it is still not possible to predict with certainty whether the Democrats’ incumbent Raphael Warnock will actually prevail against his Republican challenger Herschel Walker on Tuesday (December 6).
Both candidates have once again invested more in their electoral campaign and used the weeks between the midterm and the early opening of the polls last week to win voters’ confidence. Incumbent Warnock, who was also elected the first black senator in state history in a 2021 runoff with about 93,000 votes, won 49.4 percent of the vote in the midterm. His challenger Herschel Walker ended up with a deficit of nearly 40,000 at around 48.5%. Polls already predict a close race for Tuesday.
Ballot in Georgia: Herschel Walker does not reach everyone in the target group
Traditionally, Georgians have voted more Republican in recent decades: with the exceptions of the 1976 and 1980 elections, in which Jimmy Carter had a clear lead, of 1992, when Bill Clinton won a majority, and of 2020, when a majority narrow, perhaps more against Donald Trump than voted for Joe Biden. Trump’s electoral victory in Georgia in 2016 was relatively narrow at 50.8% of the vote.
Many pundits and the media interpreted the surprisingly poor performance of former soccer pro Herschel Walker, considered one of Trump’s particularly promoted candidates, as a decision by the people of Georgia against the president who was eliminated. Noisy New York Times This is demonstrated, for example, by the fact that in many constituencies in which Walker was late in the Senate election, the gubernatorial election for Republican Brian Kemp failed.
Senate seat runoff in the US state of Georgia: Democrats have a majority in the Senate
If this were also confirmed in the ballot and Warnock won, the US Democrats with 51 seats in the Senate would even be in a better position than before than if both parties had a tie of 50 seats for the US Vice President and thus also Senate President Kamala Harris allowed a casting vote to be cast. The previous 50 seats for Democrats have already been reached by the final tally of the midterm elections.
According to observers, what could worsen Walker’s chances are the numerous negative headlines that have accompanied Walker’s election campaign. The news agency reports it AFP extension that he was caught sprucing up his resume. There were also allegations of domestic violence by his ex-wife and two women who had accused Walker, a self-confessed anti-abortionist, of urging them to have abortions in the past. However, it remains to be seen whether a majority in the politically divided United States is satisfied to vote democratically instead.
What seems certain, however, is that many people in Georgia are still motivated to vote. According to one Cnnreport last week, 300,000 people in Georgia took advantage of the opportunity to vote early every day, breaking the previous record for early voting in one day. (ska with AFP)
