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Warnock's Georgia victory: Dems control every Senate Committee
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
What does the Democratic win in the Georgia Senate race mean?
There are two major implications from Senator Raphael Warnock's victory last night in the Georgia Senate runoff. The first is that it ends the longest running tied Senate in American history and gives Democrats 51 seats and outright control of Senate committees that can be used to conduct oversight. This probably means more uncomfortable hearings for titans of industry next year and while the House will focus their oversight activities on the Biden administration, the Senate is going to be calling in bank CEOs and representatives of concentrated industries to talk about corporate profits and inflation.
The second is that this is yet another bad election outcome for former President Trump, who handpicked the Republican nominee, Herschel Walker, who is a first-time political candidate and not a very good one. Walker massively underperformed his fellow Republican, Governor Brian Kemp in both the general election and the runoff, and had a less controversial or more seasoned politician been the nominee, Republicans could have potentially kept or won back this seat.
This is the second runoff election in Georgia in a row that Republicans blame former President Trump for losing and it feeds into the narrative that Georgia, which President Biden won in 2020, is now a swing state, meaning that it will be one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds along with Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin in 2024.
Republicans control the other statewide offices in Georgia however and this race, despite Walker's flaws was close. So a key question is if Georgia is the next North Carolina, a state that tempts Democrats after President Obama won it in 2008, but one that they can't consistently win because of its structurally conservative lean.
One interesting fact about the 2022 midterms is that they were the first midterm election since 1934 where no incumbent Senator lost reelection, showing the power of incumbency even in narrowly divided and hard-fought elections.
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U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) speaks during an election night party
The Peach State has spoken
“The people have spoken,” US Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock said late Tuesday night as he took the stage after winning a nail-biter run-off election in Georgia. Warnock narrowly defeated his GOP rival Herschel Walker, of former NFL fame, to give Dems a 51-seat majority in the upper chamber. (Neither candidate reaped 50% of votes in the first round last month, sending the Peach State back to the polls for round two.) This result confirms that Senate Dems protected every seat they had on the ballot in last month’s midterms, as well as flipping one crucial seat in Pennsylvania. This edge means that Team Blue will now lead every Senate committee, giving them more wiggle room to confirm President Biden’s judicial picks and prevent their Senate rivals from tinkering with legislation. The defeat of Walker, backed by Donald Trump, is another big blow for the former president, whose interventions in the midterm election proved disastrous for the GOP. It also confirms that Georgia, once a deep-red state where Brian Kemp recently won reelection as governor, is now a battleground state that's up for grabs in 2024.
"Red wave" coming in US midterms
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here. A Quick take to get you started on your week, and of course, we are looking forward, if that's the right term, to tomorrow's midterm elections in the United States. Increasingly a time of political dysfunction and tension and polarization and conflict, and tomorrow will certainly be no different.
First of all, in terms of outcomes, almost always in the United States, the party that is not in power, that doesn't occupy the presidency, picks up seats in the midterms. Tomorrow should be no different. Biden's approval ratings are not incredibly poor, but certainly low. View of the economy, which is the top indicator that most people say they are voting on, is quite negative, and expectations are negative going forward, even though the US isn't quite in a recession.
That means that the Republicans will easily win the House. I don't think that there's any need to question predictions around that front. It's more whether it's 15 seats or whether it's 30 seats, how much of a wave it actually looks like. Some believe that it's easier to govern if there's a 30-seat swing, because that will mean that the Republicans will be less beholden to relatively extreme members of their caucus.
But either way, the relevance of the MAGA right in going after Biden in launching investigations and making it much harder to go about the business of day-to-day governance for the Democratic president, I think, is certain from the new House. So that's the first point.
And on the Senate, I think it's a much, much, much closer race. We're talking about a few individual races that really matter: Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia. The Republicans should take the majority back, but then again, the Republicans should have had the majority in the last two years, and they didn't. And the reason they didn't, very oddly, is because former president Trump, angry that he had lost the election and promoting the idea that it was stolen, called all of his friends on the ground and said, "What are you doing to help me overturn my election?"
When that didn't happen, and there were special by-elections in Georgia that the Republicans should have won, Trump was much more focused on the fact that he had lost his election and he claimed it was stolen, and that meant that a lot of people that otherwise would have turned out in the by-elections for Republicans down ballot from Trump chose not to vote.
And the Democrats, and no one, no friends of mine in Senate thought the Democrats had a shot to win these elections, they ended up winning both of them. And so they ended up with a 50-50 seat majority. Biden owes that majority almost completely on the actions of former President Trump.
And here you have some of that happening yet again, where the Republicans would have a much easier time if Trump personally was not pushing and endorsing a number of candidates that are particularly weak, but they're very loyal to him. And we're talking about, of course, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania. Should be easy for someone to beat Fetterman, especially given the challenges that he has experienced in campaigning and then on the debate stage after his stroke. There's no question that that has hurt him significantly in how he is perceived in the upcoming election. But Dr. Oz is an unfit candidate to run, and so the Dems have a chance of actually winning that seat.
In Georgia, Herschel Walker is just thoroughly incapable of acting as a Senator, should not be running for Congress and certainly shouldn't be the nominee, but because he is, the Democrats have a chance of holding that seat; Reverend Warnock in a very, very tight race against Herschel.
Even given all that, I still think the Republicans are likely to take the Senate, maybe pick up one or two seats. If they have a very strong day, they could even get to 54. It's possible.
But the fact that the Democrats are still in this race is really because of Trump. And it's so interesting. So you try not to generalize on politicians, but if you were going to generalize, one thing that I certainly always felt was true is that they want their party to win. And in this case, that's really not true. Trump cares about winning personally, but doesn't care all that much about his party winning if it's not about him. And as a consequence, the Republicans are less likely to pick up the Senate than they might otherwise be. And this, of course, is deeply frustrating to rank-and-file Republicans in the leadership of the GOP, but they're not going to say it publicly. Why? Because Trump is still by far the most popular character in the party.
Now, the Democrats are in trouble here, and Biden in particular, who has shifted his campaign message from overturning abortion to focusing more on the economy to then now the idea that this is about the end of democracy: if you don't vote for Democrats, it's the end of democracy. Whether or not you believe that's true, it's really not a great campaign strategy for a couple of reasons.
First is because the Democrats haven't acted that way at all. If you think about how the Democrats have actually run Congress over the last two years, it's not been as if democracy was under threat. It's been legislating as usual. And furthermore, the very fact that Democrat leadership has actually funded election deniers in Republican primaries, because if they win, they're more likely to lose the general election to a Democrat; that's certainly not consistent with the idea that democracy is in threat. It's consistent with the idea of, "No, this is politics as usual. You do everything you can to win these individual races."
So I think that Biden should not be using this argument. And furthermore, you should really only talk about democracy being an existential risk in an election where either, number one, you're pretty confident you're going to win, or number two, you're desperate. Well, the Democrats aren't desperate right now. They have two years still with the presidency under their belt, and we don't know what the Republican nomination process is going to look like or whether Trump is going to be the nominee.
So I don't think you need to do that, and furthermore, after Biden and the Democrats take up pretty significant to potentially a pretty catastrophic loss for them this week, it's going to be very hard for them to move away from the, "Wow, we said it was all about democracy and we lost." So what does that mean for your ability to govern going forward? What does that mean for the way you're perceived internationally going forward? So I think that was a mistake, and the way they took this on at the end.
Of course, the biggest problem that we all have is that right after the Congressional midterms, we are going to be dead into presidential elections, and Trump will almost certainly be announcing his candidacy in relatively short order, probably back on Twitter and on Facebook and all the rest, and the country is just going to feel politically so crisis-oriented. It's just going to feel like a disaster.
And for American allies around the world who want to count on the United States, that looks a lot weaker. It makes it feel like the two years of Biden were not a move back to normalcy, but actually a brief breather in the midst of a country that is becoming much more dysfunctional, much more divided, much more politically incompetent as a partner. And of course, for adversaries, it means more opportunity for them to act against American interests with impunity.
We'll see where it gets, but the level of division in the United States is certainly going to affect not just US domestic policy, but US foreign policy as well. Anyway, those are a few words of how I'm thinking about the midterms tomorrow. We'll all be watching very carefully, and I'll be talking to you real soon.
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Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker.
The trouble with Herschel
Signal’s Willis Sparks writes about his Georgia roots and how the world craves authenticity from political leaders.
Where I come from, there are two important institutions – church and football – and worship takes place in both.
I’m a Georgia Bulldog. Unlike the previous four generations of my family, I graduated from a different school, but my family ties to the University of Georgia extend back to the 1850s, and I’ve been watching Georgia football games in Sanford Stadium since 1972. I’m what you call a Dawg to the bone.
I was in Knoxville, Tennessee, on September 6, 1980, when a teenage recruit named Herschel Walker made his legendary college football debut by steamrolling defenders and shocking a sellout crowd of 102,000 fans of a rival team.
I was there for every Athens, Georgia, home game in 1980 as freshman Herschel led my Dawgs to the Promised Land, a national championship. I was there through 1981 and 1982, when Herschel won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s best player.
You have to understand … He stood six feet, two inches tall, weighed 220 pounds, and had Olympic-sprinter speed. That’s not natural. He seemed, to steal a phrase from Shakespeare, to be “made of some other matter than earth.” His performances inspired the wide-eyed shaking of heads.
I never met him. If I had, I’d have been too young and starstruck to speak, and young Herschel would have been too shy to cross the divide. He was Clark Kent as well as Superman, which in our estimation made him still more worthy of love and respect.
I was also on campus when the news dropped that Herschel was skipping his senior year at Georgia to play in a fledgling professional league for a brand new team owned by a flamboyant businessman named Donald J. Trump. That was in 1982.
Forty years later, with the backing of former President Donald J. Trump, Herschel Walker is now a candidate for the United States Senate. And because he’s faced the scrutiny that comes with a bigtime political campaign, we know that the athlete made of some other matter than earth is a man with feet of clay.
We already knew Herschel had struggled with what we used to call “multiple personality disorder.” But because he decided to run for Senate, we now know that Herschel Walker, champion of a national abortion ban, stands accused by two different women of pressuring them to have, and then paying for, abortions for which he shared responsibility – and the physical evidence says it’s true.
We know that Herschel’s ex-wife and son accuse him of physical and emotional abuse. We know that Herschel’s claim that he graduated from the University of Georgia in the top 1% of his class is a lie. He didn’t graduate at all. And then he lied about lying about it.
Then there’s the much bigger problem that when Herschel speaks about policy, he’s often barely coherent.
By the way, Herschel’s Senate opponent is the current incumbent, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who continues to serve as pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, a post once held by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (I wasn’t kidding about football and church.) Other Black faith leaders are now making their opinions of Herschel known.
No one wants to know that his boyhood hero is a deeply flawed human being, and it’s not much consolation to be told that he may be so emotionally ill that he can’t see his own dishonesty or abusive behavior. Yet, Herschel may very well be elected to the US Senate next Tuesday.
How did we get here? How has this deeply flawed man reached this point? Around the world, there’s a craving for “authenticity” in our political leaders. British conservatives will back a man who plays the buffoon and can’t comb his hair over someone posh and polished. Ukrainians preferred a TV sitcom star to yet another member of the old political and business elite. Brazilians of the left want a union man, and those on the right back a tough-talking former soldier. Pakistan’s last prime minister, who survived an assassination attempt this week, was famous as a cricketer before he ran for office.
In Herschel’s case, the authentic man of the people has been exposed as a thoroughly inauthentic human being. And yet … he may win because authenticity often becomes defined in tribal terms. Herschel is not a perfect person, some of my fellow Georgians concede, but he’s one of us, not one of them. When he gets to Washington, D.C., he’ll stand up for our values, not theirs.
If Herschel doesn’t win on Tuesday, it may be thanks to another brand of Georgia Republican, the one disturbed by Herschel’s past but who doesn’t want to talk about politics because there’s a huge game this weekend in Athens. These are people who, like me, wish the hero had stayed on his pedestal. A few of those people may skip the vote altogether, and that could be enough to re-elect Warnock in a race so close it may not be decided until a runoff in December.
I won’t lie: I’ve spent much more time this week thinking about the Georgia Bulldogs’ football showdown with Tennessee this Saturday than about midterm elections. And I now vote in New York, not in Georgia.
But I know that, on Tuesday night, whether Herschel wins or loses, I’ll go to bed with a knot in my stomach.
Herschel Walker's abortion news bad for GOP, but ad spend will determine control of US Senate
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
Which US Senate candidate has had the worst week?
The battle for the Senate remains very close with both parties having plausible paths to a majority in the November elections. Republicans have massively underperformed in several states that were held by Democrats that were supposed to be competitive this year, but aren't.
New Hampshire looks all but out of reach given the unpopularity of the Republican candidate there, and while Arizona could still be a pickup, the forecast today is leaning strongly towards the incumbent Democratic senator, an ex-astronaut who has not made any major mistakes so far in his re-election bid. Far more interesting are races in Nevada and Georgia. Republicans could potentially pick up one or even two seats.
The race in Pennsylvania where TV doctor Mehmet Oz is suffering under the spotlight as a first-time candidate, potentially costing the Republicans a seat that they currently control. Oz is coming on stronger in recent weeks, attacking the Democrat in the race as being too liberal for the swing state. These attacks have helped Oz close his polling gap from 10 points to just below six, and he's been benefiting from millions of dollars in outside spending that's helping him, despite some damaging reporting this week that he experimented on dogs earlier in his career.
Having a far worse week than Oz is Georgia candidate Herschel Walker, a former running back at the University of Georgia who's running for a seat that Republicans need to win if they want to control the Senate. A news site this week reported that Walker, who's now pro-life, paid for his girlfriend to have an abortion in 2009. His son, who has an influential YouTube channel as a conservative, came out on Twitter condemning his dad for abandoning him and his mom, a woman that Walker had previously threatened with a gun.
Prior to this week, Walker had been seen as having probably the Republicans' best chance of picking up a seat in this cycle, and he still could pick up that seat, but the Georgia election's a weird one because if neither candidate gets to over 50% of the vote, they will go to a runoff in December 6th where turnout could be a lot different than it will be on election day in November. Walker will no longer benefit from the popular incumbent governor on top of the ticket.
Walker is probably having the worst week of anybody running for Senate right now, but these races are far from over and will be defined by tens of billions of dollars in negative advertising over the final weeks of the campaign.