First off, wow:
Republican Senate hopeful Herschel Walker has been mocked online after claiming "this erection is about the people," during an interview on Fox News.
Walker, a former NFL running back turned political candidate, is hoping to secure a seat in the Senate representing Georgia.
A runoff election against Democratic incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock will take place on December 6, after neither candidate secured 50 percent of the overall vote in the first round.
Walker appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News show on Tuesday, flanked by Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.
He said: "Well first of all this election is more than Herschel Walker, this erection is about the people."
Yeah, we need to send his ass back to Texas:
Republican Herschel Walker is getting a tax break intended only for a primary residence this year on his home in the Dallas, Texas, area, despite running for Senate in Georgia.
Publicly available tax records reviewed by CNN’s KFile show Walker is listed to get a homestead tax exemption in Texas in 2022, saving the Senate candidate approximately $1,500 and potentially running afoul of both Texas tax rules and some Georgia rules on establishing residency for the purpose of voting or running for office.
Walker registered to vote in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2021 after living in Texas for two decades and voting infrequently. In Texas, homeowner regulations say you can only take the exemption on your “principal residence.”
Walker took the tax break in 2021 and 2022 for his Texas home even after launching a bid for Senate in Georgia, an official in the Tarrant County tax assessor office told CNN’s KFile. The Walker campaign did not respond to CNN’s repeated requests for comment. Walker is set to face Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in a runoff election in December after neither candidate earned more than 50% of the vote in November’s midterm election.
Politicians in the past in Texas have landed in hot water over improperly taking the exemption, including then-Gov. Rick Perry, and have typically agreed to pay back taxes.
Questions have swirled around Walker’s residency since he actively began exploring the possibility of a Senate run in Georgia last year, and Democrats and Republicans alike hit Walker over the issue.
To run for office and vote in Georgia, 15 rules, not all of which need to be met, are considered for establishing residency, which include where the resident takes their homestead tax exemption and where they intend to live permanently. The US Constitution only requires a potential senator to be an inhabitant of their state when elected.
Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, said Georgia’s state law about establishing residence to be eligible to run for office is flexible and ultimately, Walker’s biggest problem could be political.
“At the end of the day, this is more of a political problem than a legal one in all likelihood, … where Walker can be painted as a carpetbagger. It does call into question whether Walker’s change of residency was made in good faith,” said Kreis.
Walker really hasn’t been getting great press lately:
Republican Senate hopeful Herschel Walker’s campaign has tried throughout the runoff to link U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock to a troubled apartment complex partially owned by Ebenezer Baptist Church.
So why did his top aides on Tuesday abruptly shift to a different line of attack, questioning whether one of Walker’s former high school football coaches was really his former high school football coach?
It happened after Warnock traveled to Walker’s hometown of Wrightsville for a rally that featured Curtis Dixon, a former coach at Walker’s Johnson County High School who leveled a blistering attack on the Republican.
“Ask him what he has done to be a senator,” Dixon said. “I’ll tell you what he’s done. Not a blessed thing.”
It clearly got under Walker’s skin. His aides coordinated a round of tweets denouncing Dixon as a liar and denying that he was one of Walker’s coaches, bewildering even GOP allies who wondered why they were so quickly knocked off message.
Especially when it comes to this:
The second woman to allege that she was pressured into having an abortion by Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee in Georgia’s hotly contested US Senate race, on Tuesday presented previously unseen letters, audio recordings and pages of her personal diary that she said were evidence of their relationship, which he has denied.
At a press conference in Los Angeles organized by her lawyer, Gloria Allred, the anonymous woman known only as Jane Doe came forward anew with a raft of fresh materials. She said she was doing so because when she first aired her allegations last month “and told the truth, he denied that he knew that I existed”.
The alleged new evidence of the relationship between the woman and the former college football star included a voicemail recording in which Walker was purported to say to her: “This is your stud farm calling, you big sex puppy you”.
Jane Doe also read out a letter which she said had been written by Walker to her parents. “I do love your daughter and I’m not out to hurt her. She has been a strong backbone for me through all of this,” the letter said.
And Republicans are still fighting to suppress the vote:
Republican groups appealed to Georgia's highest court Tuesday in an attempt to prohibit early voting this Saturday in the U.S. Senate runoff election between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker.
The Georgia Republican Party, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Republican National Committee filed the appeal with the Georgia Supreme Court. They are asking the high court to issue an emergency stay of a lower court ruling that said Georgia law does allow voting this Saturday.
The runoff Election Day is scheduled for Dec. 6
The time-sensitive legal battle began after Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger issued guidance to county election officials that said early voting could not be held on Nov. 26 because state law says it is illegal on a Saturday if there is a holiday on the Thursday or Friday preceding it. Thursday is Thanksgiving and Friday is a state holiday.
Warnock's campaign along with the Democratic Party of Georgia and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee sued last week to challenge that guidance. They argued that the prohibition on Saturday early voting after a holiday applies only to a primary or general election but not to a runoff.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox sided with the Warnock campaign and the Democratic groups. He issued an order Friday saying Georgia law "does not specifically prohibit counties from conducting advanced voting on Saturday, November 26, 2022, for a runoff election."
The state on Monday appealed that ruling to the Georgia Court of Appeals, the state's intermediate appellate court. They argued that the ruling was erroneous for procedural reasons and also that Cox was wrong to consider the runoff a separate type of election rather than a continuation of the general election. They asked the appeals court to immediately stay the lower court ruling.
The Court of Appeals issued a single-sentence ruling late Monday declining to stay the lower court's order.
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At the end of the day, it’s still all about turnout:
Voter turnout in Georgia was way down from the 5 million who voted in 2020, and almost two points lower than in 2018 in terms of the registered voters who showed up. Many states saw turnout fall from that midterm’s anti–Donald Trump high, but few predicted it would happen in Georgia, where turnout has risen steadily since 2014. Local organizers blame, at least in part, a lack of donor support for their neighbor-to-neighbor ground game this time around. “You need the outside groups just as well funded as the campaigns,” Hillary Holley, executive director of Georgia’s Care in Action, told me. “And that didn’t happen.” While the Warnock and Abrams campaigns took in record-breaking hauls, many groups on the ground got less than in recent cycles. “There was just a refusal to acknowledge what it takes to pull out voters in this climate,” said longtime organizer Nsé Ufot, a former CEO of the New Georgia Project. As of September, Ufot said, the New Georgia Project had raised roughly half of what it did two years ago.
The “climate” that Ufot mentioned was the result of the obstacles to voting imposed by SB 202, which was signed by Kemp in 2021. Its effects were masked at first by a record number of early votes. But absentee-ballot voting cratered: In 2020, Georgia voters cast more than 1.3 million absentee ballots; in 2022, the number was just over 200,000. SB 202 curtailed the time allotted for absentee voting, and it also drastically limited the number of drop boxes where voters could return their ballots if they didn’t want to use the mail.
A robust ground game could have helped voters deal with those obstacles, but as an activist in one of Atlanta’s most densely Democratic precincts told me, “Nobody ever knocked on my door!” In 2020 she sometimes saw two or three organizers a day.
That new voter suppression law kicks in again for the runoff. It cuts the campaign time from the last cycle’s nine weeks to four, abolishes new voter registration before the runoff, and leaves only a few days for early voting. Up against those barriers, Holley said, “it’s our job to make sure voters know what to do.” She believes they will. “People who were crying on Tuesday night were back in the field on Thursday,” she told me. Funders stepped up too, hearing the clamor for grassroots resources. And Warnock announced 300 new campaign staffers and opened new field offices targeting key areas where Democrats underperformed in November.
And here’s another great reason to make sure Warnock wins:
Two years into his presidency, Joe Biden has already broken records with the number of federal judges he’s gotten confirmed and with the diversity of his court picks. And as Democrats prepare to control the Senate for another two years, Biden is on track to make his impact on the courts a defining piece of his legacy.
It’s only going to get easier for him if Democrats win in Georgia’s Senate runoff on Dec. 6.
The Senate has been tied at 50-50, along party lines, for the entire time that Biden has been president. That’s meant that Democrats and Republicans have had equal representation on the Judiciary Committee, where GOP members have been intentionally delaying the confirmation process for a number of Biden’s court picks.
All those GOP members have to do is unanimously vote no on a nominee, causing a tie within the committee, and it keeps that nominee stuck there. Whenever they do this, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has to file a so-called discharge petition to force that nominee out of the committee and onto the Senate floor for a confirmation vote.
Every discharge petition adds four hours of wait time on the Senate floor. That’s on top of the delays that come with filing a petition at all. To date, Republicans have forced Schumer to use a discharge petition for five of Biden’s court picks who went on to be confirmed. Among them: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
There are currently four other judicial nominees — two appeals court picks and two district court picks — who are still stuck in the Judiciary Committee and need discharge petitions to get out.
Democrats are already set to have 50 seats in the new Senate. If Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) defeats his GOP challenger, Herschel Walker, in the coming weeks, Democrats will have 51 seats. That would mean no more power sharing on committees, no more votes tied along party lines in the Judiciary Committee and no more discharge petitions.
And here’s another great ad from Warnock’s campaign:
With less than two weeks until the Georgia Senate runoff, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., is releasing a new TV ad Wednesday that acknowledges the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and what it means to him.
"Politics these days is often used to divide us," Warnock says in the minute-long spot shared first with NBC News. "But Thanksgiving offers us the opportunity to consider all the things we share in common. We all want better lives for our children, we all want to live in safe and secure communities, we all want to be treated with dignity and respect."
Warnock speaks directly into the camera in this new ad, which will air on broadcast networks across the state through the holiday weekend, according to Warnock's campaign. His campaign has spent and reserved $16.9 million in ads so far through the Dec. 6 runoff, per AdImpact. Republican Herschel Walker's campaign has spent and reserved $6.2 million.
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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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