GA-Sen: The final Senate race of 2022 concludes Tuesday as Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock faces Republican Herschel Walker in a high-stakes runoff that could give Democrats a 51-49 majority that would leave them far less reliant on West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Polls close at 7 PM ET, and we’ll begin our liveblog then at Daily Kos Elections. You can also follow us on Twitter for blow-by-blow updates.
We got two final polls the day before Election Day giving Warnock, who outpaced Walker 49-48 last month, the edge, but there are caveats about both. YouGov, working on behalf of UMass Lowell, showed the senator up 51-46, while the GOP firm InsiderAdvantage’s survey for Fox 5 gave him a smaller 51-48 edge. Recent media polls from SurveyUSA and SRSS had Warnock leading 50-47 and 52-48, respectively.
YouGov’s survey was in the field from Nov. 18-28, which, while still within the 14 day maximum we require for inclusion in the Digest, is still quite a while. The poll was also only released a week after it was completed, so it wouldn't capture any developments from the final days of voting.
InsiderAdvantage’s Dec. 4 numbers are more fresh, though by only polling for a single day, it reduces its chances of reaching a representative sample of voters. That’s indeed something the firm struggled with ahead of the November elections, as it produced some very overly optimistic numbers for GOP candidates in races across the nation. (Amusingly, InsiderAdvantage Chairman Matt Towery wrote in October, “Incumbents don’t win runoffs in Georgia,” which is not true; Towery now says, “It is also becoming obvious that Democrats are better at focusing on ballot collection in Georgia runoffs.”)
Both parties have poured serious amounts into the second round, but Democrats have enjoyed a truly massive financial advantage over the last four weeks. AdImpact says that Warnock outspent Walker $27.3 million to $11.5 million in advertising, while Democratic outside groups walloped their GOP counterparts $29.9 million to $15.8 million. Warnock had a similarly lopsided $71.1 million to $30.3 million edge in the leadup to the Nov. 8 contest, though GOP organizations back then led Democratic super PACs $89.9 million to $64.3 million.
Warnock is closing out the runoff with an ad touting his humble origins and independence from special interests, as well as an offering where a diverse group of voters say they can’t back Walker. Warnock’s allies at Georgia Honor also launched a spot during Saturday’s SEC Championship Game between Walker’s old University of Georgia team and Louisiana State University bemoaning how far the Republican went from being a “Georgia football legend” to a disgrace.
The commercial goes on to play a clip of Walker’s ex-wife saying, “He held the gun to my temple and said … he was gonna blow my brains out,” as well as a former girlfriend alleging that Walker threatened violence if she didn’t have an abortion.
Walker himself is closing out his campaign with a spot featuring Gov. Brian Kemp praising him. Politico, though, notes that Kemp himself didn’t actually campaign with his party’s nominee during the final week of the runoff.
So why exactly does Georgia require a runoff for general elections where no one earned a majority in November? The Washington Post’s Matthew Brown explains that the idea came about after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Jim Crow-era county unit system, which gave small and predominantly white rural counties disproportionate influence over elections, in 1962.
A new system was successfully promoted in 1964 by segregationist state Rep. Denmark Groover, who had returned to the legislature a few years after losing re-election to an opponent who won with a plurality after consolidating Black support. It was widely understood at the time that Groover’s runoff plan was aimed at hurting Black voters, something he himself acknowledged decades later.
The law, thanks to what Brown calls a “19th century legal quirk,” initially didn’t apply to the governor’s race, where the legislature still was empowered to pick the winner if no one earned a majority. The Democratic-dominated legislature did indeed select segregationist Lester Maddox in 1966 even though Republican Bo Callaway actually earned more votes than him, but a referendum two years later extended the runoff rules to this office.
The Justice Department, citing Grover’s own testimony about his racist intentions, sued in the early 1990s along with the American Civil Liberties Union to abolish the general election runoff system, arguing that it was aimed at hurting Black voters. However, the courts kept it intact: As one expert witness from that case tells Brown, “The judge was willing to believe that while Groover was a racist, he wasn’t responsible for this system.”
This worked out badly for the Democrats in 1992 when Sen. Wyche Fowler was forced into a second round of voting after outpacing Republican Paul Coverdell 49-48 only for Coverdell to prevail 51-49 in overtime. The Democratic legislature, rather than scrap the runoff altogether, changed the law to only require it in races where no one earned at least 45%, a move that allowed Democrat Max Cleland to win the 1996 Senate race outright with a 49-48 plurality.
This lasted until 2005 when Republicans, who controlled both chambers of the legislature for the first time since Reconstruction, once again required candidates to a majority of the vote to avert a runoff. And sure enough, Republican candidates for years performed considerably better in the second round: In 2008, most notably, Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss initially led by just 3 points before winning his runoff by 15.
Things went far differently last cycle, though. While Republican candidates running in the November 2020 special election all-party primary for Senate outpaced the combined Democratic vote 49-48, Warnock himself beat appointed GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler 51-49 the following January. Republican Sen. David Perdue also went from a 49.7-47.9 advantage over Democrat Jon Ossoff in the contest for a full six-year term to a 50.6-49.4 defeat.
Perdue responded by whining that the runoff itself was unfair, carping that Ossoff and Warnock "do not fairly represent most Georgians." Rather than just abolish that system, though, the GOP legislature simply slashed the time between the general election and a runoff from nine weeks to four.