Warnock and Walker make last pitch in Georgia midterm election runoff

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One is a smooth-talking church pastor with a decades-long history of social-justice activism. The other is a gaffe-prone former football star with a personal life worthy of a daytime soap opera.

It would be hard to find a starker contrast than Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, rivals in Tuesday’s neck-and-neck Georgia runoff election for a Senate seat.

And there may be no single race more closely watched by both parties for the lessons it holds on the country’s political direction: whether the Democrats can continue to make inroads in once reliably red states thanks to increasingly diverse, liberal major cities or if the Republicans can hold on by shoring up their small-town conservative base.

This last, undecided midterm election race will determine whether the Democrats can pad their narrow Senate majority, making it easier to confirm U.S. President Joe Biden’s judicial appointments.

Mr. Warnock, who runs Martin Luther King Jr.’s former church in downtown Atlanta, pitches himself as an heir to the legacy of the civil-rights leader. He and his campaign have been keeping up a frenetic pace, holding five or six public events daily and flooding the airwaves with advertising.

“Vote like democracy depends on it,” he thundered to a crowd of students at Georgia Tech the afternoon before the election. “Vote like it’s an emergency.”

Mr. Walker, by contrast, has held back, making a single appearance most days and keeping everyone but supporters out. This strategy may be a response to the former NFL running back’s habit of making news for his bizarre pronouncements. His speeches have included rambling digressions on everything from bovine insemination to the plots of horror movies.

“Let me tell you something that I found out: a werewolf can kill a vampire,” he told one recent rally. “So, I don’t want to be a vampire any more. I want to be a werewolf.”

The Republican has also faced accusations that he put pressure on two ex-girlfriends to have abortions despite his support for a ban on the procedure, revelations that he once threatened his ex-wife with a gun and evidence that he may not actually live in Georgia. Mr. Walker has denied the abortions, said the domestic violence was caused by his dissociative personality disorder and given unclear answers on his residency.

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Even some Republicans have expressed frustration with Mr. Walker, one of a slate of high-profile midterm nominees pushed by former president Donald Trump, nearly all of whom were defeated last month. In an interview with CBS News, Georgia Lieutenant-Governor Geoff Duncan complained that Mr. Walker “will probably go down as one of the worst candidates in our party’s history.”

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Still, the race has remained competitive. Mr. Walker finished last month’s vote less than a percentage point behind Mr. Warnock, denying the Democrat the 50-per-cent threshold he would have needed to avoid the runoff.

Paul Daegling, 64, a plumber in the Atlanta bedroom community of Stone Mountain who voted for Mr. Walker, said he was more concerned about inflation, which he blamed on the Democrats, than about the Republican candidate’s behaviour. “Going to get gas, it’s killing everybody,” he said.

The Republicans have had some success portraying the polished Mr. Warnock as an overly-slick politico. During the race’s lone debate, Mr. Walker made hay out of Mr. Warnock’s refusal to answer difficult questions, including on whether he would support Mr. Biden for a second term.

Mr. Warnock has also been dogged by a video of his ex-wife, in which she says he once ran over her foot with his car. Mr. Warnock has denied the accusation.

Looming over everything is the prospect of voter suppression. Republicans in the state legislature last year passed a law that makes it harder to vote. Last month, they tried to cut a day of early voting over the Thanksgiving weekend until Mr. Warnock sued to stop it.

Underlying the race are two countervailing demographic trends. A combination of interstate migration and international immigration has fuelled steady growth among Democratic-voting Black, Hispanic and Asian communities in increasingly-diverse Atlanta. Meanwhile, Republicans have seen a steady rise in support among blue-collar white voters, particularly in small towns and rural areas that traditionally leaned Democratic.

Chisom Onyia, a biochemistry student at Georgia Tech, chose to decamp from her native New Mexico for Atlanta and the fast-growing city’s professional opportunities, vibrant Black culture and civil-rights history. Ms. Onyia, who is Black, said both the pandemic’s racial inequalities and the reckoning over police brutality after the murder of George Floyd politicized her generation.

“We’ve seen a lot of the struggles of recent years and how much we’re affected by the decisions that happen in Congress,” said Ms. Onyia, 19, after watching Mr. Warnock speak.

“This is a place where you can see change and what change looks like.”