In his victory, Warnock becomes only the 11th African American US senator in the country’s history and the fourth from the South. We went from talking about jobs and the economy to Qanon election conspiracies in 4 short years and - as it turns out- they were listening!- Josh Holmes January 6, 2021 I feel like a one trick pony but here we are again. Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to the Senate leader, Mitch McConnell,noted how badly Trump’s message had played in the Georgia suburbs, tweeting: He added that the “more heavily a county backed Trump in the November general election, the more its runoff turnout tended to drop relative”to that election. They were concerned that their base voters might not be as motivated to turn out because of Trump’s rhetoric surrounding election fraud and the legitimacy of the vote in November, Skelley wrote. “One takeaway from the results tonight is that Republican fears seem to have materialised when it came to runoff turnout. The final part of the puzzle, according to some Republicans, was Donald Trump, who interposed his own conspiratorial grievances into the campaign even as he impugned Republican state officials.Īnd, as Geoffrey Skelley noted on the 538 website, areas that leaned most heavily towards Trump in the presidential elections were those that had the biggest drop-offs in voting. The home state of the former president Jimmy Carter, like other places, has seen its big cities, not least Atlanta, and suburbs increasingly turn Democratic in the last couple of decades, even as the local party has abandoned trying to find candidates palatable to more conservative rural white voters – all of which has helped energise the younger and black electorate in vote-rich metropolitan areas. Warnock’s political rise, in which he has taken up the mantle of an earlier generation of civil rights activists, has coincided with changes in Georgia. Outspoken from the pulpit and on the campaign trail about social justice and racial inequality – some of which has been used in crude Republican attack ads against him – Warnock’s approach, as the religious scholar Jonathan Lee Walton wrote recently in the Washington Post, has been informed by a truth-telling tradition in African American churches that “places an overwhelming moral emphasis on society’s most vulnerable and oppressed”. Serving as an intern at the Sixth Avenue Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, under the civil rights activist John Thomas Porter, Warnock would later become the youngest senior preacher at King’s own church. Growing up in a housing project in Savannah in a family of 12 children, Warnock preached his first sermon at 11 and attended the same college, Morehouse, where King had studied. It not only marks a repudiation of the racist dog-whistle politics of the Trump era, but a change in the political dynamics of Georgia where – until Joe Biden’s victory in the state in November – no Democratic presidential candidate had won since Bill Clinton in 1992. His victory over the hardline Trump supporter and Republican incumbent, Kelly Loeffler, who tried to cast Warnock as a “Marxist radical”, is significant for a number of reasons.
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