U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock has held onto his seat, securing a victory in Georgia’s closely-watched Senate race and defeating Republican challenger Herschel Walker.
Warnock started with a double digit lead thanks to early voting numbers, but it chipped away as results poured in, with both men trading leads all night in the extremely close race.
When the vote was called, Warnock received about 1,708,000 votes to Walker’s 1,670,000, with over 95% of precincts reporting, the N.Y. Times reported.
It was déjà vu for Georgians, as they headed to the polls for the second time in less than a month for the Tuesday Senate runoff election, which was “triggered after neither candidate passed the required 50% threshold in the November midterms.” Some pundits are even going so far as to claim Georgia is the next swing state.
This election marks the first time ever that the state of Georgia will have a full-term Black representative in the Senate; however, in an aberration from Issa Rae’s oft-quoted Emmy quote, in this election, we’re not rooting for everybody Black.
With Warnock holding on to his Senate seat, Democrats have a 51-49 majority and, importantly for the them, control over all of the Senate committees.
Warnock, a senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church in Atlanta, is the Democratic incumbent candidate who, in unusual circumstances, was last elected in January of 2021 in a special runoff election. He had essentially been on a non-stop campaign cycle since he was elected.
Walker, a former University of Georgia and NFL player, had a campaign plagued with scandals, including several domestic abuse allegations and claims that he paid for abortions for his ex-girlfriends (plural), although Walker has denied these claims and maintained his anti-abortion stance. Even worse, these rumors had been circulating on top of a myriad of rather unusual campaign stump speeches, wherein at some points Walker has engaged in long tangents, speaking about vampires and werewolves.
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Here are some key takeaways from tonight’s embarrassingly close election.
01
Walker’s ascent is a low point in modern U.S. politics
Given the many political controversies our nation has witnessed in the past several years, the fact that Walker even made it this far to a runoff election for a seat in the United States Senate indicates, as The Atlantic so aptly writes that, “[t]oo many of us have simply gotten used to the corrosion of our public life…Win or lose…The Republicans have acclimated the American public to ghastly behavior from elected officials and candidates for high office. The result is lasting damage to our political system no matter what happens in Georgia or in the 2024 races…in a better time in our politics, these candidates would not have survived even a moment of public scrutiny or weathered their first scandal or stumble.”
Georgia voters were energized, despite having to turn out for two general election days
Georgians didn’t appear to show any signs of voter fatigue—about 300,000 Georgians voted early each day this week “setting records for the largest single-day early voting turnout in state history.” This equated to roughly 1.8 million votes in just one week, and this all went down before early voting ended last Friday.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
03
We’re spending a TON of money on elections
According to OpenSecrets, this race was the most expensive race during this midterm season. Super PACs spent “nearly $16 million more on Warnock than his Republican challenger Herschel Walker ahead of the runoff election, spending more than $40 million on expenses like advertisements supporting Warnock or opposing Walker. Other PACs spent more than $24 million supporting Walker or opposing Warnock, according to filings reported to the Federal Elections Commission.” Astonishingly enough, these amounts pale in comparison to the overall amount of political funds spent in the Peach State since 2020, where in only four races, an astounding $1.4 billion has been expended.
04
This was a Trump test…and he’s not doing too well
This race was considered a critical indicator and temperature check of people’s attitudes toward former President Trump, who announced his third presidential campaign a mere three weeks ago. Today’s election represented Trump’s last chance in 2022 “to claim victory in a battleground for one of his closest political acolytes.” This occurs as some Republicans have begun to distance themselves from Trump—as Paul Ryan told SiriusXM, “It’s crystal, crystal, crystal clear. We lose with Trump if we stick with Trump. If we dump Trump, we start winning.”
Since taking office about three weeks ago, Donald Trump has issued a blizzard of 200+ executive orders. Among them are two key anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) directives that threaten to roll back decades of progress in expanding opportunities for people of color, women and other historically marginalized groups.
The first executive order eliminates DEI enacted under President Biden, who required all federal agencies to create plans to “address unequal barriers to opportunity” and ensure workplace equity. Trump’s order terminates all DEI, DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility), and environmental justice jobs as well as any programs, grants, or contracts related to its implementation, calling them “forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs.”
The second executive order eliminates all DEI orders from previous administrations, including one by President Lyndon Johnson from 1965, which required federal contractors to provide equal opportunity measures. In rolling back the policies, Trump called DEI “immoral” and “illegal” and painted it as a “corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system” that robbed “hardworking Americans”—implicitly white men—“of opportunities because of their race or sex.”
President Trump also warned of “adverse consequences” for those federal workers who fail to report colleagues who refuse to dismantle DEI policies.
While the order is limited to the federal government, it directs federal agencies to find ways, including potential litigation, to pressure the private sector also to abandon its DEI policies. This threatens to accelerate a corporate anti-DEI trend that has already been in the works. Walmart, which back in 2020 announced a $100 million investment in a center for racial equity, announced several days after Trump’s election that it was dropping the center and would no longer use the terms DEI and Latinx in official communications. McDonald’s, Meta and Target have also dropped their DEI initiatives as reported by Axios.
After the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, which deemed affirmative action in university admissions unconstitutional, attacks on DEI proliferated, and the term became a right-wing bogeyman blamed for almost anything that goes wrong in any workplace. For example, just one day after the tragic plane and helicopter collision over the Potomac River which claimed 67 lives, Trump baselessly blamed DEI policies for the crash—while the investigation into the crash’s cause had barely begun. Language in President Trump’s executive order also portrays DEI policies as inherently dangerous declaring they “threaten the safety of American men, women and children across the Nation by diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work and determination when selecting people for jobs and services in key sectors of American society.”
These statements seem to suggest that DEI exists in opposition to excellence and hard work—and that providing opportunities to non-white people automatically lowers standards.This is false. DEI requires the same standards for everyone and only hires those who fulfill the requirements of a given job, a point echoed by Everett Kelly, National President of the 800,000-member American Federation of Government Employees “The federal government already hires and promotes exclusively on the basis of merit. The results are clear: a diverse federal workforce that looks like the nation it serves, with the lowest gender and racial pay gaps in the country. We should all be proud of that.”
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Black people make up a larger share of the federal workforce (18.6%) than they do of the civilian workforce (12.8%),according to Pew Research. It’s unclear how many people will be affected by the order. Still, the federal government is the biggest employer in the US and Black people, who have the highest unemployment rates, risk greater job loss as a result.
The vagueness of President Trump’s orders have also left agencies struggling to comply and erasing Black history in the process. For example, the Air Force recently removed the Tuskegee Airmen from their training videos, and it was only reinstated after public outcry.
The anti-DEI trend is part of a larger attack on anti-discrimination efforts, sparked by the push for racial progress after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Now that DEI is under fire, the question is—how do we keep these policies alive?
Despite mounting political pressure, companies like Apple, Costco and JPMorgan Chase remain steadfast in their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, refusing to bow to conservative attacks. Additionally, most Fortune 500 companies have not abandoned their DEI policies.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a non-partisan group that fights “government abuse” primarily through lawsuits, counters President Trump’s claim that DEI or DEIA is illegal, saying, “The executive orders attempt to conflate these lawful efforts with discrimination, weaponizing enforcement to bully institutions into abandoning critical programs.” “However, no court has declared DEIA efforts inherently illegal, and President Trump cannot override decades of legal precedent.” The ACLU supported and launched numerous lawsuits against the rollback of DEI during Trump’s first term and have vowed to do so again.
In the meantime, the Civil Rights Act is still the law of the land, and it remains illegal to discriminate against anyone based on race, gender, and other protected characteristics.