Raphael Warnock Beats Herschel Walker In Georgia’s Senate Runoff

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) won his first full term in the U.S. Senate by snagging the last open seat on Tuesday by defeating Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a Georgia runoff election.

“After a hard-fought campaign — or, should I say, campaigns — it is my honor to utter the four most powerful words ever spoken in a democracy: The people have spoken,” Warnock said in a speech before his supporters on Tuesday night. “I often say that a vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children. Georgia, you have been praying with your lips and your legs, your hands and your feet, your heads and your hearts. You have put in the hard work, and here we are standing together.”

The upper chamber will now be split 51-49 with the Democrats in a true majority. They added one more seat with John Fetterman (D) beating Mehmet Oz (R) in Pennsylvania from the evenly split Senate of the past two years where the Democrats had Vice President Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker. This solidifies a disappointing election cycle for the Republicans who were projected to take control of both houses of Congress.

Neither Warnock nor Walker were able to reach the 50% threshold required to avoid the runoff in the midterm elections last month, but in the runoff, Warnock brought in 51.4% of the votes in comparison to Walker’s 48.6%. This also marks another former President Donald Trump-backed candidate to be defeated.

Before Trump lost Georgia in 2020, no Republican candidate had lost the state since 1992. Since Walker was hand-picked by Trump to challenge Warnock, his loss holds major implications in solidifying many Republicans’ intentions to look elsewhere for leadership in 2024 even though Trump has already announced his candidacy.