Francis Chung/E&E News/POLITICO via AP Images
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) at the Capitol, May 25, 2022
Fun fact: Georgia is the site of the Western Hemisphere’s largest solar manufacturing facility. Qcells, an American subsidiary of Hanwha Solutions, a South Korean firm, set up a 1.7 gigawatt factory in Dalton, Georgia, and last year, in May, Qcells announced a 1.4 gigawatt expansion. This week, First Solar announced a $1 billion investment to build an even bigger 3.5 gigawatt factory in the Southeast. Could the company end up in Georgia, already one of the top ten solar states and gradually becoming America’s solar manufacturing hub?
Georgians have their two Democratic senators to thank for the new energy in solar investments. The Rev. Raphael Warnock co-sponsored the Solar Energy Manufacturing for America Act that his colleague Jon Ossoff introduced last year, with a generous array of new tax credits for solar firms. When the Inflation Reduction Act, a genuine, pigs-flying marvel, was finally turned into law, it included manufacturing credits that will translate into billions in clean-energy investment. When First Solar announced the new “Southeast” factory this week, it explicitly pointed to the IRA as the reason for expanding.
As the midterm elections approach, Warnock can tout the job creation potential of solar in Georgia. But there are other achievements as well. Warnock’s bill capping co-pays for insulin at $35 per month for Medicare patients is in the IRA. He supported, like all Democrats, negotiating prescription drugs for seniors, and broader health benefits for veterans suffering from toxic burn pit exposure. And he played a unique and prominent role in convincing President Biden to engage in mass student loan forgiveness. These successes stand to resonate strongly with the average Georgia voter.
In response to all of that lawmaking, his Republican challenger Herschel Walker, a football G.O.A.T. in the state, offered up that Warnock “can do more than just the insulin.” A no-exceptions abortion opponent, Walker believes that “people are more concerned” about the economy than the loss of abortion rights—a statement that actually bears some resemblance to actual GOP talking points.
Walker wallows in absurdities of the ya-gotta-be-kidding-me kind, accusing the senator of lying about not owning a dog featured in one of his 2020 campaign commercials and appearing to refer to an “honorary agent” card as a valid law enforcement credential. The two candidates have yet to schedule what could be a most interesting debate.
For anyone still shell-shocked by the 2016 election, now is the time to understand that Herschel Walker could be elected as the next senator from the great state of Georgia. In a world where documented transgressions and word salads tossed in public are no longer automatic disqualifiers for elected office, Walker, like his friend and political mentor Donald Trump, will not necessarily suffer for his fabulist’s bio.
The tendency outside Georgia to view Walker as Donald Trump’s creation is off the mark. Walker’s victory in the Republican primary—he crushed the competition—has nothing to do with Donald Trump and everything to do with the Heisman Trophy he won as a junior with the University of Georgia Bulldogs 40 years ago.
The Georgia Senate matchup is a triumph of Republican racial cynicism.
An Emerson College poll released this week shows Walker leading Warnock by two percentage points. (An April poll had Walker ahead by four points.)Warnock has led in other polls earlier this summer, too, but for the most part, both men’s leads have been within the margin of error. FiveThirtyEight has the two men essentially tied.
From afar, Warnock, the heir to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church pulpit, should steamroll one of the weakest U.S. Senate candidates in recent memory. But the Republican Party has had spectacular success launching unqualified people into elected office. The Georgia Senate matchup is a triumph of Republican racial cynicism. Walker’s backers understand Georgia’s “God, guns, and football” ethos better than a dubious Mitch McConnell ever will: The only way to beat an experienced, capable, Black, and therefore threatening, lawmaker is with a nonthreatening Black man who can bamboozle votes out of white voters with crowd-pleasing smiles, selfies, and simple statements.
Walker appeals to certain conservative ideals white Republican voters can embrace as Black excellence. As former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley opined in February, “Herschel Walker is living proof that hard work and determination pay off.” The Republican establishment greeted the revelations about Walker’s children, academic career, and mental health challenges with dismay and surprise, suggesting that the quest for the perfect Black candidate diluted interest in deep pre-primary background checks. But in a deeply religious state like Georgia, transgressions can have redemptive value.
Walker’s political naïveté makes him much more dependent on white handlers and palatable to white voters, which also suits GOP designs. Two other Black Republicans in the six-man primary race, both with military backgrounds, lacked stellar name recognition and, likely, malleable personalities. And who needs the optics of a white Republican like Gary Black, the state’s agricultural commissioner who came in a distant second to Walker, going up against the formidable Warnock, when a Black superstar is available. In this contest, Republican Party identification is stronger than racial animus: Rural Republican voters will come out heavily for Walker.
As for Black voters, Trey Hood, a University of Georgia political scientist, doesn’t see any burgeoning affinity for Walker. “Having studied voting patterns and voting behaviors among Southerners for a long time now, I’ve seen absolutely no movement of Black Southerners away from the Democratic Party,” says Hood. “You’re looking at 90 percent of African Americans always voting Democratic. I don’t see Herschel Walker siphoning off any of that.”
Warnock has been a prodigious fundraiser, hauling in nearly $70 million for his 2022 run, with nearly $20 million over the past quarter. Walker has vacuumed up only about $7 million. But mega-millions may not matter either.
The Emerson College poll found that the economy is the top issue for all voters, while abortion is the top issue for women. Even in the pivotal suburbs, particularly in metro Atlanta, abortion is second to the economy. A majority of Georgians do disagree with Georgia’s restrictive abortion laws.
As for student loan debt, nearly 60 percent of Georgia college graduates had student loan debt in 2019-2020, with an average debt load of roughly $28,000. Warnock, unlike many Democrats in tough races, embraced and advocated heavily for student loan cancellation, even meeting directly with Biden to convince him. One worrying sign for the Warnock campaign in the Emerson College poll, which was taken after the student loan executive order: A majority of 18- to 24-year-olds (66 percent) gave President Biden very low marks on job performance, a factor that Emerson found contributing to a shift to former President Trump in a hypothetical 2024 matchup with Biden.
In this down-to-the-wire contest, the wild card is turnout. In 2020, when Warnock ran and won initially, Black turnout was higher than white turnout. But a Brennan Center analysis found that white turnout in this May’s primaries exceeded Black turnout by the widest margin in at least a decade. Nearly 30 percent of white voters cast a ballot, compared to 22 percent of Black voters. In past years, the gap did not exceed 3.5 percentage points.
That’s where the fiendishly designed new voting regulations come in. S.B. 202, Georgia’s notorious voter suppression law, contains some positives, like expanded early-voting hours. But it complicates numerous other logistics for voters of color. For example, voters in cities and suburbs, where most people of color live, have seen their travel times to ballot drop boxes increase, since the legislation mandated fewer boxes.
An NPR, WABE, and Georgia Public Broadcasting investigation found that the number of drop boxes available to voters in Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett Counties, the four suburban Atlanta enclaves where roughly 50 percent of voters are people of color, fell from 107 to 25. Hours and box access were also curtailed. The law targets voters with almost surgical precision, Georgia style.
Barring pigs flying, Walker will take the rural areas and Warnock will win in Black communities. That leaves the race hinging on moderate voters in the suburbs. Suppressing the vote in metro Atlanta communities of color, of course, threatens Warnock. Despite high unfavorables in the Emerson poll, Walker currently leads among the suburban voters Emerson surveyed, 50 percent to 41 percent.
But Walker’s campaign cannot discount the electoral conundrum posed by Republican moderates fed up with Walker’s nonsensical declarations, and Trump’s classified documents drama and his 2020 election obsessions. For the disgruntled, not voting is on the table, as is blanking the contest, or voting Libertarian. “If it is close,” says Hood of the University of Georgia, “it doesn’t take a whole lot of movement one way or the other to affect the race.”
