Jonathan Weisman at The New York Times:
The early vote has clearly favored Mr. Warnock. Georgia does not track the party affiliation of early voters, but Black voters, who exit polls showed overwhelmingly favored Mr. Warnock on Nov. 8, are about a third of the early-vote total in the runoff, according to the secretary of state’s office, a greater share than in past Georgia runoff elections. Women, who also sided with Mr. Warnock last month, have cast about 56 percent of the ballots. And Gen Z voters — 18- to 24-year-olds, who break liberal — have come on strong.
Democratic modelers believe that Mr. Warnock goes into Election Day with about an eight-percentage-point lead. If so, they say, Republicans would have to turn out in force and capture about 60 percent of the votes cast on Tuesday for Mr. Walker to pull out a victory.
Charles Bethea at The New Yorker looks at Trump Republicans reluctant to support Walker:
Among the things that gave him pause about Walker, he said, were the nonsensical comments that the candidate had made on the campaign trail—several of which are currently featured in Warnock’s TV ads. In one, we see a clip of Walker speaking in front of a crowd in McDonough, Georgia, on November 16th. “Vampires are some cool people,” he says. “A werewolf can kill a vampire—did you know that? I never knew that. So I didn’t want to be a vampire anymore. I wanted to be a werewolf.” Warnock has also cut ads featuring Republicans who, like the northwest Georgia conservative, voted for Kemp but not Walker. “I was proud to support Brian Kemp,” a middle-aged white woman says, in one of the ads. “The more I heard about Herschel Walker, I became concerned about his honesty, his hypocrisy, but also just his ability to lead.”
And here’s Eugene Robinson’s take at The Washington Post:
Even by post-Trump standards, however, Walker’s campaign has been markedly devoid of policy. If he has any substantive understanding of any issues at all, he keeps it well hidden. […] In Warnock, they have a senator with whom they might disagree but who effectively represents Georgia’s interests on bread-and-butter issues, works across the aisle with Republicans such as Cruz and goes to the most conservative parts of the state to hear his constituents’ concerns. In Walker, they have a sideshow character who once was a football star.
If GOP voters choose the sideshow, it will be because for them — as for Kemp, Cruz, Graham and the rest of the party establishment — the “R” after Walker’s name and the “D” after Warnock’s are all that matter. It will be because party identity is more important than performance, ability or character.
And Matthew Brown examines the history of runoffs in Georgia:
Tuesday’s showdown between Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D) and Republican challenger Herschel Walker is the product of an unusual general election runoff system that was pushed by a powerful Georgia segregationist who sought to blunt the power of Black voters in the 1960s.
While 10 states use runoffs in primary elections, Georgia and Louisiana are the only two that do so in general elections. Georgia’s system was created in 1964 after the urging of Denmark Groover, who blamed Black voters for a reelection loss and proposed runoffs. Groover later acknowledged the runoff system was intended to suppress Black political representation.
On a final note, here’s analysis from David Graham at The Atlantic on Donald Trump’s call to “terminate” the Constitution:
Trump’s view of the Constitution is much like his treatment of the flag he physically embraced while mouthing, “I love you baby” at a conservative summit in 2020: a useful prop for florid praise, but ultimately a passive and lifeless one, easily moved aside.
