Damn straight:
As the Georgia runoff approaches, President Joe Biden and his predecessors have a lot to say about former NFL running back and Trump-backed candidate Herschel Walker before he faces Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock on Tuesday.
“This is not a referendum on Warnock. This is a choice. A choice between two men. One man who does not deserve to be in the United States Senate based on his veracity and what he said and what he hadn’t said,” Biden said on Friday at a International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) fundraiser in Boston. He added, “The other man is really truly decent, honorable guy.”
On Thursday at a rally in the Peach State, former President Barack Obama made fun of Walker’s strange comments last week regarding vampires and werewolves: “Since the last time I was here, Mr. Walker has been talking about issues of great importance to the people of Georgia, like whether it's better to be a vampire or a werewolf. This is a debate that I must confess I once had myself—when I was 7.”
"This would be funny if he wasn't running for Senate," Obama said, adding, "As far as I'm concerned, he can be anything he wants to be besides a United States senator.”
Here’s the latest news out of Georgia:
The single-day early voting turnout Friday in Georgia broke the last record set just days ago in an indication of intense interest in the race for Senate between former football player Herschel Walker and incumbent Raphael Warnock.
Top election official Gabriel Sterling touted the results on Twitter, revealing that 350,574 people had voted as of 8 p.m. Friday.
“That’s just an amazing number. Great job by the counties’ elections officials and voters,” he wrote on Twitter.
Some voters had to wait an hour to cast their ballots.
The turnout worried Republicans. While Seth Weathers, a Georgia director for former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, had been optimistic about a Walker win, he told The Washington Post: “I have more concern” in light of the big voter numbers.
The last turnout record was set on Monday, with over a quarter of a million Georgians casting early ballots. Before that, the record was about 233,000 on the last day of early voting in the 2018 midterm elections.
Friday was the last day of early voting. Voters will be able to cast ballots in person on election day Tuesday and return mail ballots throughout that day.
As of Friday morning, at least 1,473,000 voters had cast early ballots in person or by mail, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office. That’s 37% of the total votes cast in the Nov. 7 midterm election, Reuters reported.
Republicans certainly should be worried about this:
“Herschel Walker doesn’t have the capacity to land a closing message,” said Ben Burnett, a Republican podcast host in Georgia and former city councilman in Alpharetta, an Atlanta suburb. “And the affiliation and support that he got from Donald Trump … is still a boat anchor around him with the 5 percent of voters that he couldn’t afford to lose.”
Democrats defied historical trends and low approval ratings for Biden to limit losses in the U.S. House, where a narrow GOP majority will take power next year. Their bigger victory was clinching a 50th Senate seat, which assured they would retain control of the chamber, with Vice President Harris empowered to cast tiebreaking votes. Democrats are hoping to expand that narrow majority Tuesday, when the election in Georgia concludes.
Polls show a close race in the runoff, which was triggered because no candidate received a majority of the vote in the Nov. 8 election. A CNN survey released Friday showed Warnock, senior pastor at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church who won his seat last year, with a narrow edge over Walker, a first-time candidate known for his career as a football star.
And for black voters, the choice is clear but it’s still infuriating for them to go through this runoff:
The line of voters circled around the East Point Library on a recent Thursday evening, giving Dacia Davis, a 45-year-old human resources coordinator braced against the chill, plenty of time to contemplate the historic significance of the ballot waiting for her inside.
Two African American men — Herschel Walker, a Republican, and Raphael Warnock, the Democratic incumbent — are vying for a Senate seat in the Deep South, in a runoff contest, a process designed decades ago to thwart Black candidates. The winner in Tuesday’s election will serve in an institution that has been overwhelmingly white throughout its history: Nearly 2,000 people have served in the U.S. Senate, and only 11 of them have been Black.
But a race that may seem like a triumph for Black political power has stirred a complicated mix of emotions for Ms. Davis and many other Black Georgians. Mr. Walker’s troubled candidacy has clouded their pride with suspicions, dismay, offense and even embarrassment.
In conversations with more than two dozen Black voters across Georgia, many said they did not see Mr. Walker, who has taken a conciliatory approach to matters of race, as representing the interests of Black people. Far more than a victory for racial representation, they cast the election in terms of now-familiar political stakes: a chance to keep a Republican backed by Donald Trump from gaining power and working to reverse policies they care about.
“It is a very historic moment,” said Ms. Davis, a supporter of Mr. Warnock. “But it is sort of like a bittersweet moment.” Sure, two Black men are running for Senate, she added, but many Black voters disagree with how Mr. Walker “views the nation and also other African American people.”
Polls suggest Ms. Davis’s views are widely held. A CNN poll released on Friday found Mr. Walker winning just 3 percent of Black voters, who make up about one-third of Georgia’s electorate. That is less support than Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, won when he defeated Stacey Abrams in the governor’s race last month, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of Georgia voters.
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