As political attacks go, this one was plenty slimy—but it was equally lame, making it a tidy encapsulation of the campaigns waged by Georgia’s two incumbent Republican senators as they attempt to survive Tuesday’s runoffs and maintain Mitch McConnell’s slim majority in Washington. Way back in March, the then estranged wife of Democratic Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock accused him of deliberately running over her left foot with his 2014 Tesla. Paramedics and cops responded; they found no sign of injury to Warnock’s soon-to-be ex-wife, and no charges were filed or arrests made. End of story—until two weeks before today’s crucial vote, when Tucker Carlson “obtained” police body cam footage of the episode (obtained being the standard euphemism for something damaging being leaked by interested parties). Carlson played the tape on his prime-time Fox News show, and it revealed…basically nothing. Warnock, calm if a bit annoyed, wearing a tightly buttoned suit jacket and a primly knotted tie, told the police his side of the story; Ouleye Ndoye, a bit tearful, quietly accused Warnock of lying to protect his political career.
No new facts. Which didn’t stop Kelly Loeffler, in a press conference the next day, from sanctimoniously and artlessly slagging Warnock. “Domestic abuse is a serious issue that Georgians deserve answers to, as to what exactly happened,” she said. This followed months of Loeffler trying to caricature Warnock as an anti-police, pro-abortion leftist tool—to seemingly little effect. “Loeffler might be the worst Senate candidate I’ve ever seen in my life,” says James Carville, who has seen plenty, and who is one of the last strategists to pilot a winning statewide Democratic campaign in Georgia, 30 years ago. “I’m serious. Her presentation, her background—everything. You know she doesn’t believe anything she’s saying, and she just reeks of privilege.”
Perhaps Loeffler’s worst mistake, however—worse than clinging tight to Donald Trump or posing for a photo with a former Klan leader—has been to bash Warnock’s faith. The reverend, as head of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, has preached a traditional social justice agenda. Loeffler has tried to warp those beliefs to paint Warnock as a radical socialist. It could be a coincidence, but early-voter turnout is up sharply among Black Georgians, with especially sizable gains in the suburbs and in rural areas. “In Louisiana, where I live, and in Georgia, there are a shitload of rural, small-town, and midsized-town Black voters,” Carville says. “Loeffler thinks she’s just attacking a preacher’s words. But it’s really attacking something more fundamental—the Black church—and I think it has spectacularly backfired.”
Maybe Trump’s rally Monday night in Dalton, Georgia, will have motivated just enough Republican voters to show up to push Loeffler and David Perdue over the victory line. But the president spent more time complaining about his own loss to Joe Biden, and trying to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to somehow toss out the Electoral College results on Wednesday, than he did boosting the GOP’s vulnerable Senate duo. And there’s little evidence that the Trump sideshow has helped Loeffler and Perdue to this point, with early-voting demographics favoring Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Nearly 116,000 voters who sat out the November election have voted in the runoffs, with Black voters accounting for more than 40% of the surge, and 22% of these voters are under the age of 25—more than double their share of registered voters in the state. “If the past three weeks is any indication, by talking about how everything is rigged, Trump has been depressing turnout by Republican voters, not encouraging it,” says a veteran Georgia Democratic strategist working on the runoff races. “The percentage of white voters has ticked up in the past few days, but I would still rather be us than them. We’re looking at probably 300,000 mail-in ballots still to be counted, and we’ve been winning those 60-40. That’s a great sign.”
Biden and Trump are not on the ballot this time, yet their presence is very real in voters’ minds, with diverging valances. Biden becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992 has injected confidence into the state’s operatives and activists and made it far easier to get voters to turn out for a second time in two months. And Trump has achieved what is always his main goal: making things all about Trump. “Loeffler and Perdue, if they lose, will deserve some blame for not creating even the slightest daylight with the president, and for not making their most effective case—that Georgians like divided government,” a top Democratic operative involved in the runoffs says. “But that would have meant them acknowledging the fact that Biden won in November. Now Trump will absolutely own this loss.”
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