This is the fucking guy we have to defeat in the runoff next month:
A video showing Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker referring to America as "the greatest country in the United States" has gone viral following an election rally on Thursday.
Walker, who is running in Georgia's Senate runoff election on December 6, spoke at an event, along with Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz, as the state prepares for another round of campaigning.
Footage of Walker's remark shared to Twitter on Friday by PatriotTakes had been viewed more than 500,000 times as of early Saturday morning.
PatriotTakes describe themselves, in part, as "researchers monitoring and exposing right-wing extremism."
And now Walker’s campaign needs to get bailed out again:
Mitch McConnell is tapping Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to help Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker over the finish line in his December runoff election — a contest that could decide control of the chamber next year.
Kemp is loaning his get-out-the-vote machine to the Senate GOP’s voter turnout efforts, giving the party entrée to a political team that is increasingly viewed as one of the GOP’s most formidable state operations. The governor ran a gauntlet this year, prevailing over a Donald Trump-backed primary opponent by a lopsided margin before comfortably defeating Democrat Stacey Abrams in the general election.
Under an agreement that was finalized Thursday, Kemp will transfer his door-knocking, data analytics, phone-banking and micro-targeting program to the Senate Leadership Fund, the McConnell-aligned super PAC that is bolstering Walker. The super PAC will provide the funding for the $2 million-plus effort, which will be run by Kemp’s senior advisers and staffed by more than 100 field workers.
It’s the first time that Senate Leadership Fund, which spent more than $230 million on advertising this election cycle, has ever funded a get-out-the-vote effort on the ground. But the party has reason to invest heavily in turnout operations in Georgia: Just two years ago, Republicans lost the Senate majority after falling in a pair of runoffs in the state, in part because some GOP-aligned voters decided not to vote.
But Republicans are scared this guy is going to fuck it all up again:
Supporters of Republican Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker are suggesting that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis might be better to have on the campaign trail than former President Donald Trump, a CNN report says.
Walker is due to face incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock in a run-off in December after both failed to secure over 50% of the vote.
Many Trump-endorsed candidates lost or underperformed in the midterm elections, while his rival DeSantis easily won a second term in Florida.
In particular, Georgia Republicans worry that Trump would put off suburban women and independents, whose votes will be critical in the state.
"I think that Youngkin or DeSantis is a better fit for soft Republicans or independents in the suburbs that we need to turn out," Ralph Reed, president of the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition, told CNN.
Reed added that he was not speaking for the Walker campaign and that perhaps Trump could still appeal to rural voters in Georgia.
It’s really fucking infuriating that we have to deal with Herschel Walker for another month and really feel bad for black voters in Georgia who have to help us bail out Democracy again:
Aaron Jones took a deep breath when he emerged from the public library on Ponce de Leon Avenue here into the warm Georgia sun after casting his votes in the midterm elections on Tuesday afternoon.
By late that evening, he was anxiety-ridden and befuddled as Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock was engaged in a tight race with the embattled former football star Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee.
Wednesday morning, Jones was exasperated.
“It’s been stressful,” Jones, an auto body repair supervisor, said. “Not from the standpoint of who I would vote for. But you look at what’s going on in politics and too much of it is not about the people. It’s ugly stuff about one party over the other, and that’s hard to watch and hear every day. But now, after all that, it’s still not over.”
Warnock, as of Wednesday morning, had a slight lead, with 49.2% of the vote compared with Walker’s 48.7%, according to NBC News. Since neither candidate had reached a majority of the overall vote, as required by state law to claim victory, the two will battle it out in a runoff election, set for Dec. 6.
The result could decide whether Democrats retain their tenuous hold on the 50-50 Senate, especially with two other Senate races (Arizona and Nevada) still to be called.
“Now we have to go through another month of ugly politics,” Jones, 47, said. “This is disappointing because one candidate is a qualified senator. The other is Herschel Walker.”
A runoff election to decide control of the Senate is not new for Georgia or its Black voters. Just 22 months ago, in January 2021, the Black vote (which was instrumental in getting President Joe Biden elected two months before) propelled Warnock to victory in a runoff. That win, coupled with that of Sen. Jon Ossoff, also in a runoff against a Republican incumbent, gave Democrats control of the Senate.
Now, Jones said, Black voters are facing the burden of having to pull Georgia — and the country — across the line. Again.
“The thing is, we can do it,” he said. “We’ve shown it. It makes no sense that we have to go back. That part is confusing.”
The fact that Walker was able to force a runoff after enduring so much controversy during the campaign baffled Jones and other Black voters here. Two women accused the former Heisman Trophy winner of having paid for their abortions years ago. Walker, who declared himself anti-abortion, denied the claims. Warnock’s ad campaign focused on Walker’s brushes with the law, his exaggerations about his academic credentials, his mental health issues and family concerns, but it was still a tight race.
But grassroots organizations are ready to help Warnock win:
On Monday morning, the team at A-B Partners, a Washington, D.C., political-communications firm that works with progressive groups, gathered on Zoom. They had less than 24 hours before the Election Day polls opened for a series of contests around the country that Democrats, at least, were billing as a last chance to sustain a functioning democracy.
A-B Partners is home to the minds behind the 501(c)(4) known as Win Black, a multi-organization project founded in 2020 aimed at muting what A-B Partners founder Andre Banks describes as “racist disinformation.” And this week, much of the focus in that Zoom room was on Georgia, home to major races involving Black candidates—Republican Herschel Walker and Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock facing off for Senator, and Democrat Stacey Abrams making another run at becoming the first Black woman to be a governor—and an electorate with a substantial number of non-white voters.
Misinformation and disinformation are now a part of the American political atmosphere. The former is inadvertent and the latter intentional, but the results can be the same: rendering voters so cynical or anxious that they see no value in voting at all. Since the 2016 election, investigators have found proof of those campaigns, some of it virtually out in the open, some more shadowy, in groups created by operatives abroad but bearing titles like “Being Black in Arizona.” According to a Senate report, in 2016, “no single group of Americans was targeted by [Russia’s Internet Research Agency] information operatives more than African-Americans.”
So sometimes Win Black’s work means, as it did in 2020, amplifying real content posted by people at a location where false rumors of “BLM violence” or “voter crackdowns” are circulating—the kinds of ideas that, research shows, can depress turnout. It can also sometimes require live efforts to contradict misinformation, with response posts that are carefully designed to go viral; in the Win Black memes library this week were dozens of possibilities, ranging from a serious black-and-white portrait of an African-American man holding a flag to a gif of unlucky-in-love R&B diva Mary J. Blige saying “I can’t trust you.” Of late, the work also involves trying to hunt down the originators of misleading information and the often futile battle to get social media platforms to remove it, all while pushing counter-messaging cognizant of the complex social truths at hand.
By the end of that two-day period, a much-prognosticated red wave had not arrived, but Abrams had lost to Republican incumbent Brian Kemp, and the Senate race between Walker and Warnock was set to go to a runoff. That means several more weeks of campaign activity are to come. And Georgia is of particular interest to Democrats, as a key swing state and one that shines a light on some of the party’s ongoing obstacles. Democrats can’t win there without bringing a maximum number of Black voters into the process, but the state is also home to about 120,000 Black male registered voters who—despite Abrams’ famous voter-mobilization effort—sat out the last few election cycles, Banks says. Those voters, then, are a prime target for disinformation, and for Democratic campaign efforts. So inside shops like Win Black, the fight continues.
And Democrats are investing heavily into making sure Warnock wins:
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Senate Democrats’ official campaign arm, will spend $7 million to mobilize voters in the Georgia runoff race, the organization announced on Thursday, adding to what had already become the most expensive Senate contest of the midterm elections.
Both parties see the tight race between Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, the Democratic incumbent, and his Republican opponent, Herschel Walker, as critical to deciding control of the Senate.
The two candidates advanced to a runoff in December after neither cleared the 50 percent threshold to win the election outright, according to The Associated Press. Only about 35,000 votes separated the two candidates on Thursday morning, with more than 95 percent of the ballots counted. Mr. Warnock had 49.4 percent of the vote and Mr. Walker had 48.5 percent.
The organization’s cash injection for Mr. Warnock, who is defending a seat that he won less than two years ago in a special election that also went to a runoff, will fund get-out-the-vote initiatives and build on the campaign’s field organizing efforts, the committee said.
“We know talking directly to voters through a strong, well-funded ground game is critical to winning in Georgia,” Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the committee’s chairman, said in a statement.
And Senator Warnock has a narrative ready for this runoff:
Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock's campaign laid out its strategy for what is shaping up to be an expensive runoff in Georgia for his seat on Dec. 6, projecting confidence about victory in a memo Thursday.
“Reverend Warnock will win the runoff by continuing the strategic investments in paid communication and field organizing, continuing to hold the diverse coalition that has driven Reverend Warnock’s success, and emphasizing that this race is about who is able to represent our state,” Warnock campaign manager Quentin Fulks wrote. “We are confident we will win on December 6th.”
Fulks presented a two-prong message that signals the senator will continue to campaign as he has been so far: promoting his work with lawmakers in both parties for Georgia and attacking Republican rival and former football star Herschel Walker as "completely unqualified for a job that requires knowledge of the issues and an interest in listening and learning."
With 99% of the vote counted, Warnock leads Walker 49.6% to 48.3%, or by roughly 49,000 votes. NBC News has projected that neither will top the 50% required by state law to win on the first ballot. Georgia in 2020 held two Senate contests that went to runoffs, both of which were won by Democrats, including Warnock, giving the party razor-thin control. If neither party sweeps both Arizona and Nevada, a Georgia runoff would once again determine which party controls the Senate for the next two years.
Fulks indicated Warnock will campaign on his vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, which imposed a $35-per-month cap on the cost of insulin for Medicare seniors, and his push to extend health insurance coverage to Georgia, which he has sought to do by expanding Medicaid to lower-income residents of the state.
And Fulks, labeling Warnock a "proven vote-getter," noted that Walker underperformed Trump's 2020 vote share in urban and suburban counties, which played a crucial role in enabling Democrats to win that year in the former Republican stronghold. The Atlanta metropolitan area, which makes up more than half the state's population, has trended toward Democrats due to a mix of shifting demographics and white college graduates leaving the GOP.
FYI:
This is because of the state's newest election law, SB202, outlines the timeline for runoff elections and the time span voters can register before an election.
Gov. Kemp signed the Election Integrity Act of 2021 into law last March. The legislation deems that runoff elections must be held on the 28th day after a general or special primary election. This means instead of the previous nine weeks, voters will have four weeks to cast a ballot in a runoff election. Under this timeline, it marks Georgia's Senate runoff for Dec. 6 on the election calendar.
SB202 also outlines that a voter must register 30 days before an election. This leaves a two-day gap between voter registration and when a runoff must be scheduled -- which means no new voters can be registered in the period before the runoff.
"So basically, anybody who is already registered to vote is going to be eligible to vote in the next election so as long as you were registered to vote by Election Day," 11Alive political analyst and Emory University associate professor Andra Gillespie said. "So anybody who was registering to vote now would not be eligible to vote in the runoff election."
In this case, it means Warnock and Walker will have to appeal to voters who may have not turned out to the ballot box in the first place and really hone in on their supporters, Gillespie added.
"So suffice to say, there is already a ready-made pool of registered nonvoters in the midterm election who could still be mobilized to be able to vote for both the Democrats and the Republicans on Dec. 6," she said. "And so I expect that both parties are going to be looking at that data and targeting the most likely of those nonvoters to get them to come out to vote for them on Dec. 6."
Data from the Secretary of State's Office shows that a little more than half of the state's registered voters cast their ballot during Georgia's midterm election.
That leaves about 2,995,250 registered voters for two candidates to court and convince to show out in the runoff.
Boosting turnout in this runoff is important and we have to pull it off for the sake of having a Democratic Senate Majority to save Democracy. Click below to get involved with Warnock’s campaign and these grassroots organizations GOTV efforts:
Georgia
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