Polls and conversations with top strategists in both parties suggest Tuesday's Georgia Senate runoff will be close — but that Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) holds a small but resilient advantage over Herschel Walker.
Why it matters: Runoffs are typically about turning out your base a second time. But in Georgia, both are targeting a critical mass of swing voters — independent-minded suburbanites just outside Atlanta.
What's happening: Walker's ties to former President Trump — and struggles communicating his positions on the campaign trail — have made him uniquely ill-suited to win over swing voters, who have made the difference in recent closely contested Georgia elections.
- A closing ad from the Warnock campaign features footage of Walker speaking about vampire movies, pregnant cows and how "our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air."
- The ad shows voters with stunned facial reactions, side by side with Walker's comments.
🧮 By the numbers: On Election Day, Walker underperformed the rest of the Georgia Republican ticket, running 7 points behind Gov. Brian Kemp in Cobb County, an affluent and fast-diversifying county in the Atlanta suburbs.
- Among white college-educated voters, Kemp tallied 63%, according to the Edison Research exit poll — a 5-point edge over Walker with that traditionally Republican voting bloc.
Between the lines: The Republican strategy for the runoff is to use Kemp as Walker's leading surrogate on the airwaves, appealing to Republican voters to stick to their partisan instincts.
- In November, about 203,000 voters backed Kemp for governor but not Walker for senator.
That big-tent strategy was undermined by Trump's dinner with antisemitic rapper Kanye West (who changed his named to Ye) and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
- Kemp got ahead of other leading Republicans in issuing a full-throated denunciation of the dinner: "Racism, antisemitism and denial of the Holocaust have no place in the Republican Party."
- At the same time, the Walker campaign was declining to comment — and has remained silent ever since, even as leading GOP figures including Mike Pence and Kevin McCarthy have made public statements denouncing antisemitism, Holocaust denial and white supremacy.
Our thought bubble, with Axios Atlanta's Emma Hurt: Walker is using Kemp in TV advertising and mailers, but rarely mentions the governor on the campaign trail.
