Raphael Warnock wins Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate race, extending the Democratic Party’s Senate majority
Predictions indicate the Democrats have won a highly contested seat in Georgia, solidifying their hold on the US Senate.
After the midterm elections last month, Raphael Warnock successfully fended off Republican opponent Herschel Walker.
By a 51-49 margin, President Joe Biden’s party currently controls the upper chamber of Congress.
The outcome brings to a close the Republicans’ disastrous midterm election results.
With only a narrow majority in the US House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress, the GOP underperformed expectations last month.
Mr. Walker, an American football icon and political newbie, joins a long list of unsuccessful politicians who have received the former president Donald Trump’s support. Mr. Trump is currently running for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.
Although Mr. Warnock had a lead over Mr. Walker by 37,000 votes cast in November, the election in Georgia had to be decided by a run-off vote because no candidate received 50% of the vote.
A special thank you was given to his mother by the 53-year-old southern Baptist minister, whose Atlanta congregation was originally led by civil rights activist Martin Luther King.
He said that she had spent her formative years in Georgia’s 1950s “picking someone else’s cotton.” He claimed that she “helped pick her youngest son to be a United States senator” tonight.
Mr. Warnock was predicted to win by a slim margin. According to Edison Research, he won with 50.8% of the total votes cast compared to Mr. Walker’s 49.2%.
As he addressed his audience at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta, Mr. Walker did not formally concede.
However, he remarked, “There are no excuses in life, and I’m not going to offer any excuses today because we put up one hell of a fight.”
Despite his calls for the practise to be prohibited, Mr. Walker’s campaign was plagued by allegations — which he disputes — that he paid for the abortions of two former girlfriends.
The 60-year-old, who had long raged against absentee fathers, also had to admit during the campaign that he had fathered three children that he had not made public.
Republicans, meanwhile, released an attack ad reminding voters of Mr. Warnock’s ex-claim wife’s that he accidentally ran over her foot with a car during a domestic fight in March 2020.
Election official Gabriel Sterling announced after the polls closed that there had been “record turnout across the board” and that there had been 1.4 million votes cast in Georgia alone on Tuesday.
A record number of Georgians—1.9 million—had already voted early or by mail.
According to federal filings, Mr. Warnock’s campaign raised significantly more money than Mr. Walker’s, spending almost $170 million (£140 million) vs Mr. Walker’s around $60 million.
President Biden, whose favour ratings have been low, and Mr. Trump have mostly refrained from entering the race.
After candidates supported by Donald Trump lost in New Hampshire, Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, Mr. Walker’s Senate campaign represented the final Republican chance to flip a Senate seat. In Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, other Senate candidates Mr. Trump supported won.
Because of the victory on Tuesday night, Mr. Biden will have a little more freedom to choose judges and other officials for his administration, even if most legislation will still require Republican approval.
The party’s ability to maintain control of the Senate in the event that Democrats lost Georgia would have relied on US Vice President Kamala Harris’ ability to break a tie.
