Last week, when Senator Kelly Loeffler, Republican of Georgia, and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, her Democratic challenger in a special runoff election, to be held on January 5th, met for a debate, expectations for conflict were high. Loeffler, who was appointed to her seat in January, by Governor Brian Kemp, needs to persuade Republican voters to keep her there. Warnock, a respected pastor who until recently led the New Georgia Project, an initiative, founded by Stacey Abrams, to increase voter turnout, has wide name recognition among African-Americans but needs to turn that support into a constituency broad enough to deliver him a victory. Neither candidate has been elected to office before, and, almost certainly, neither expected to be in one of two runoff elections in the state which will determine control of the United States Senate—and, by extension, the degree to which vestiges of Trumpism will remain in place during the early Biden Administration. (The other race pits the Republican senator David Perdue against the Democrat Jon Ossoff; if the polls are to be believed, Ossoff leads Perdue by less than one point, and Warnock leads Loeffler by nearly three.)
In the debate, Loeffler, who appeared stiff, raised familiar Republican themes, accusing Warnock of wanting to defund the police (he said that he does not), and challenged his position as a pro-choice clergy member. Warnock, alternately relaxed and subdued, stuck mostly to kitchen-table issues such as pandemic relief and health care. Yet, if the debate lacked the anticipated drama, it provided some insights into how Republicans are approaching close races in a state where they’ve grown accustomed to winning with ease. Meanwhile, on the same night, Ossoff debated an empty lectern, since Perdue did not show up to their scheduled event. (A clip from a previous debate, in which Ossoff called Perdue a “crook” who was more interested in his financial affairs than in the well-being of the state, had gone viral.) But Loeffler, too, debated someone who wasn’t in the room. She addressed an imaginary Warnock, a raging Marxist sympathizer whom she referred to thirteen times as a “radical liberal”—a seemingly handy oxymoron directed at people not much interested in the significant differences between radicals and liberals.
In fact, Warnock is the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, the institution that was home to Martin Luther King, Jr., and whose congregation, degreed and pedigreed, is known as much for its relative economic comfort as for its historic civil-rights legacy. (In January, Loeffler attended M.L.K. Day services there, in keeping with the tradition of Senator Johnny Isakson, whose term she was appointed to complete when he retired.) One of twelve children, Warnock was raised in public housing in Savannah, and went on to graduate from Morehouse College and earn a doctorate from Union Theological Seminary, in New York.
Still, Loeffler called him “someone that has invited Fidel Castro, a murderous dictator, into his own church, someone that has celebrated anti-American, anti-Semite Jeremiah Wright.” Actually, Castro spoke in 1995 at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where Warnock was a twenty-six-year-old youth pastor. Warnock replied that he didn’t invite Castro and had never met him. With the Jeremiah Wright charge, Loeffler was asking voters to reach back a dozen years, to Barack Obama’s Presidential primary campaign, and remember a now retired clergyman whose church the Obamas attended and whose incendiary sermons—recall the clip of him shouting “God damn America!”—ignited a firestorm but were not enough to deny Obama the nomination.
If elected, Warnock will be Georgia’s first Black senator—and the eleventh Black senator in the nation’s history. The Republican plan to defeat him is apparently drawn from the playbook used against the nation’s fifth Black senator, who went on to become the first Black President. A Republican strategist told the Times that Ossoff is “too dull” to caricature, noting that Warnock offers much more material to work with. (Translation: Ossoff is white, Warnock is Black, and this is still Georgia.) Warnock released an ad mocking the lines of attack against him: “Raphael Warnock eats pizza with a knife and fork. Raphael Warnock once stepped on a crack in the sidewalk. Raphael Warnock even hates puppies.”
The fervor of Loeffler’s campaign points to other headwinds she faces. A former C.E.O. of the financial-services company Bakkt and a co-owner of the W.N.B.A.’s Atlanta Dream, Loeffler has held office for less than a year, and she was reportedly not Trump’s first choice to replace Isakson. Trump lost the state (the ballots have now been counted three times, though Loeffler has not acknowledged the result), but his claims that he was a victim of voter fraud may lead to some Republicans’ not bothering to vote this time. When the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, appeared at a gathering of voters in Marietta, a woman asked how the election is supposed to work if it’s already been decided. “It’s not decided!” McDaniel replied. Trump, too, visited Georgia recently, for a rally in Valdosta, and told the crowd, “They cheated and they rigged our Presidential election. But we will still win!” There is a contradictory logic to having the person who just lost the Presidential race in the state campaign on behalf of people hoping to win Senate seats there—especially in the case of Perdue, who got more votes statewide in November than Trump did. The effect could be to further demoralize the Republican electorate.
All this points to a supreme irony confronting Georgia as early voting begins, on December 14th. Last year, the House of Representatives passed H.R.1, the For the People bill, which includes the most comprehensive election-reform measures in recent history. Among its provisions are new mechanisms to govern voter-roll purges, oversight of standards for electronic voting machines, and measures to prevent foreign interference in American elections.
Like much other legislation, it has been stalled by a Senate controlled by Republicans under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. This means that, for those Georgia Republicans who believe that Trump was the victim of fraud in their state, returning Loeffler and Perdue to office would actually further postpone a remedy to their alleged problem. American elections are vulnerable, just not in the ways that some Republicans in Georgia are claiming. (The 2018 gubernatorial race that delivered Brian Kemp to office was itself marred by irregularities.) An argument for electing Warnock and Ossoff is the fact that the biggest obstacle to preventing “rigged” elections in the future is the Party complaining about rigging in the one that just happened. ♦
