Warnock, Walker take different paths in appealing to voters

ATLANTA - During early voting in Georgia’s Senate runoff, Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock is working to get the jump on Republican challenger Herschel Walker, who is putting less emphasis on advance balloting.

After winning a state lawsuit to allow Saturday voting after Thanksgiving, Warnock spent the weekend urging his supporters not to wait until the Dec. 6 runoff.

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“What we are doing right now is soul work,” Warnock said at Liberty International Church southwest of downtown. “We are engaged in a political exercise,” Warnock continued, “but this is moral and spiritual work, and for us that has always been based on the foundation of the church.”

He’s following up with a Georgia visit by former President Barack Obama, who’ll be with Warnock on Thursday in Atlanta. The event at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Pullman Yards is open to members of the public, who can visit https://www.mobilize.us/gavotes/event/544292/.

In contrast to Warnock, Walker, didn’t hold public events over Thanksgiving weekend, and in his return to the campaign Monday night in the northern Atlanta suburb of Cumming, he did not mention early voting specifically. “Tell your friends to come with you to vote,” he said. “If you don’t have any friends, go make some friends.”

Separately, the Republican Party and its aligned PACs are trying to drive turnout after Walker underperformed other Georgia Republicans in the general election. Walker finished the first round with about 200,000 fewer votes than Gov. Brian Kemp, who easily won a second term.

Early in-person voting continues through Friday. Runoff Election Day is Tuesday of next week.

Warnock led Walker by about 37,000 votes out of about 4 million cast in the general election but fell short of the majority required under Georgia law, triggering a four-week runoff blitz.

On the campaign trail

The senator appeared with a parade of Black leaders for weekend rallies and a march reminiscent of voting rights demonstrations during the civil rights movement.

“We have one vote here that can change the world,” Andrew Young, a former Atlanta mayor, implored Black voters on Sunday. Rising from his wheelchair to speak, the 90-year-old former congressman and U.N. ambassador reminded the assembly of the congressional compromise that ended post-Civil War Reconstruction and paved the way for Jim Crow segregation across the South.

“One vote at the end of the Civil War pulled all of the Union troops out of the South and lost us the rights we had fought for in the war and that people had fought for us,” he said, starting “a struggle that we have been in ever since.”

Warnock praised the weekend turnout as he campaigned Monday with college students on the campus of Morehouse College, where he graduated. “I don’t want us to get too comfortable, or self- congratulatory,” he said. “We’ve had just two days of early voting, today is day three. We cannot take our foot off the gas.”

Later Monday, Warnock appeared in suburban Cobb County with musician Dave Matthews, who praised Warnock as a “decent man.” The audience of hundreds included many middle-aged white voters, a key target for Warnock as he tries to reach past core Democrats to capture voters who sometimes choose Republicans.

“When you go home, please tell all your friends that were like, on the fence, to get on the correct side of the fence,” Matthews said.

Walker, for his part, has drawn enthusiastic crowds in the early weeks of the runoff, as well, and his campaign aides remain confident that he has no problem among core Republicans. His challenge comes with the middle of the Georgia electorate, a gap highlighted by his shortfall compared to Kemp.

“I feel Herschel Walker benefited by having Brian Kemp in the original election on Nov. 8, and I think Kemp not being there will hurt the Republicans a little bit,” said Alpharetta resident Marcelo Salvatierra, who voted for Republican Kemp and Democrat Warnock and still supports the senator in the runoff.

Salvatierra said he backed Kemp’s re-election “because it seems to me Georgia has done well.” But Republicans at the federal level, he said, never offered a serious counter to Democratic control of Washington, while Walker also comes with considerable personal baggage.

“Character matters and I sense he doesn’t have character,” Salvatierra said.

Warnock has encouraged that sentiment among core Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans. For months, he’s said Walker, a former football star making his first bid for public office, was “not ready” for the Senate. In recent weeks, he’s ratcheted up the attack to say Walker is “not fit,” highlighting the challenger’s falsehoods about his accomplishments in the private sector, along with allegations of violence against women and accusations by two women that Walker encouraged and paid for their abortions. Walker, who backs a national ban on abortions without exceptions, denies that he ever paid for any abortions.

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