Crucial Georgia Senate Race Between Walker and Warnock Heads to December 6 Runoff

PHOTO: This combination of photos shows, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Aug. 3, 2021, left, and Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker speaking in Perry, Ga., Sept. 25, 2021.

Taniesa L. Sullivan | The Weekly Ledger News

GEORGIA —The race for Georgia’s pivotal U.S. Senate seat between Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, is heading to a runoff election, according to media outlets.

Under Georgia law, a candidate must gain a majority of the vote to win. Neither Walker nor Warnock is expected to secure 50.1% of the vote.

Warnock, a Baptist minister, was elected to the Senate in a January 2021 runoff, becoming the state’s first Black senator in the process. His runoff with Walker, a Georgia college football hero, will be held on Dec. 6.

Most polls had the two candidates in a dead heat.

The race was, from the outset, one of the most high-profile in the country. Warnock often painted Walker as unfit and unqualified to represent the state, taking jabs at his opponent’s intelligence, and his rigid anti-abortion stance.

“You actually have to know stuff to do this job,” Warnock said at a rally in late October.

Walker, meanwhile, claimed Warnock was running a “nasty, dishonest campaign.” “Warnock’s a preacher who doesn't tell the truth,” he said in one ad. “He doesn't even believe in redemption.”

PHOTO: Herschel Walker, Georgia's Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, speaks next to Nikki Haley at a campaign event on November 6, 2022, in Hiram, Georgia.

Walker, 60, became a star player for the University of Georgia Bulldogs, helping them win a national championship in 1980. The team had been integrated for less than a decade when he came aboard. Two years later he won the Heisman Trophy. When he left the school, it retired his number.

Walker went on to play in the National Football League for four different teams over 11 seasons, before retiring from the game in 1997. He also opened several businesses, the most successful being Renaissance Man Food Services. Before this Senate run, Walker had only dabbled in politics, sparingly giving endorsements through the years throughout the state.

PHOTO: Rev. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., speaks to supporters at a rally in Macon, Ga., on Monday.

Warnock, 53, grew up in the Kayton Homes public housing complex in Savannah, Ga. He went on to attend Morehouse College, an HBCU located in Atlanta, before earning his Ph.D. from the Union Theological Seminary.

In 2005, he was appointed to the role of senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. once served as an associate minister. He continues to preach there to this day.

The race marked the first time that two Black candidates from opposing parties had competed for a Senate seat in Georgia. Both men had grown up poor and had roots in the state going back generations. Both were wildly successful in their chosen fields. But on the campaign trail, Walker ran as a right-wing Republican closely aligned with former President Donald Trump, while Warnock portrayed himself as a moderate who was broadly supportive of President Biden’s agenda.

(Yahoo News)