Peculiarities Abound in Georgia’s 2022 Midterm Elections

The candidate wasn’t a white rabble-rousing evangelical Christian but a black progressive Democrat: Sen.

Raphael Warnock,

senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Left-wing religiosity is one of several arresting anomalies in Georgia’s midterm political season.

Mr. Warnock’s audience at the Vicar Community Center in Southwest Atlanta, about 50 people in all, consisted mostly of older black women thrilling to the man’s oratory and occasionally having to silence the phones ringing in their purses. Most of the senator’s appearances have this quality: The aim, you feel, isn’t to win over the undecided but to exhilarate the faithful who will browbeat friends and family into voting. Most Warnock events, accordingly, take place in and around Atlanta or in heavily African-American areas of Columbus and Savannah.

Another anomaly: Mr. Warnock’s Republican challenger isn’t white and has greater name recognition than the incumbent: former football megastar

Herschel Walker.

In the 42 years since Mr. Walker took the University of Georgia Bulldogs to a 12-0 season and a national championship in his freshman year, his name has evoked happy memories for a great many Georgians. I suspect that is why Mr. Warnock almost never refers to him by name, instead calling him “my opponent.” The two will appear in their only scheduled debate on Friday night in Savannah.

Mr. Walker’s liabilities are as widely known as his athletic conquests: accusations of domestic violence by his first wife, an acknowledged struggle with serious mental illness, three children by women to whom he was not married. Last week the Daily Beast published a story claiming Mr. Walker paid for a girlfriend (later identified as the mother of one of his children) to obtain an abortion. Mr. Walker, who has supported both a total ban on abortion and Sen.

Lindsey Graham’s

bill to prohibit it after 15 weeks, denies paying for the procedure.

My own custom is to disbelieve any claim made by the Daily Beast, but the story has damaged Mr. Walker’s candidacy. It provoked his eldest son, a “conservative activist” by reputation, into an online tirade against his father. This is not, it’s fair to say, ideal material on which to base a Senate campaign.

Mr. Walker, further, is unversed in policy and prone to say odd things. In July, speaking to a sympathetic crowd about climate policy, he joked about “our good air” floating “over to China’s bad air,” which “moves over to our good air space.” He was, I gather, trying to make the entirely valid point that it’s folly to punish the American economy with onerous climate regulations when U.S. carbon emissions are already low by comparison with China’s and India’s. But the remark was undeniably weird.

I wondered if Mr. Warnock, sensing his opponent’s weakness, would underprepare for Friday’s debate. Having watched him this week, I think probably not. At the community center, he oscillated skillfully between mawkish campaign rhetoric (“I got involved with politics not because I’m in love with politics but because I’m in love with change”) and recitations of his party’s policy achievements. The expanded child tax credit, which Democrats passed as part of a Covid relief bill in 2021 in a clear attempt to establish a permanent welfare entitlement, Mr. Warnock repeatedly called a “tax cut.” He spoke at length about the spiritual significance of the infrastructure bill—our “broken bridges” are a result of the “brokenness of the human spirit”—and the moral import of the Chips and Science Act, which subsidizes the semiconductor industry.

Mr. Walker, too, has prepared for Friday. I met him on Monday as he took a break from the debate prep in the ballroom of the Georgian Terrace hotel in Atlanta. He will benefit from low expectations and from the domestic failures of the Biden administration. Mr. Walker has another advantage over the pastor-senator: a charming lack of pretension. Mr. Warnock, if I may hazard an opinion, enjoys the sound of his own voice and likes what he sees in a full-length mirror, tight-fitting jeans and all. Mr. Walker doesn’t try to improve on his country-boy accent and generally dresses like a retired ball coach: polo, ill-fitting athletic trousers, sneakers.

I asked him a few questions on his campaign bus at a stop in Carrolton. His answers weren’t sophisticated, but neither were they stupid. Why did he decide to run for Senate? “I was watching people on television try to separate us because of race,” he said. We have our problems, but “I love Americans, and right now people on the left are saying we’re bad people. We’re not bad people, we’re good people. That’s a big reason why I decided to run.” His detractors may sniff, but if

Ted Kennedy

had answered the question “Why do you want to be president?” with an answer as simple and direct as that, he would have been the Democratic nominee in 1980.

A few minutes later Mr. Walker, together with Sens.

Tom Cotton

of Arkansas and

Rick Scott

of Florida, stepped out of the bus to a wildly enthusiastic crowd of perhaps 500 people. The venue was a strip-mall parking lot in Carrolton, west of Atlanta, and Mr. Walker gave a rip-roaring speech about the greatness of America and the nobility of the “men in blue” and the need for energy independence. Leaving aside the content, here was the contrast between the Warnock and Walker campaigns. At the strip mall in Carrolton, people wandered over to the Walker hullabaloo from Chipotle and Brooke’s Pharmacy and Onelife Fitness. Mr. Walker isn’t preaching exclusively to the choir.

There is just one problem with Mr. Walker’s crowds. A fair number brandish Trump merchandise—MAGA caps, Trump 2020 T-shirts, Trump-themed buttons. Mr. Walker wisely didn’t mention the 45th president in his speech, but atmospherics are straight from 2020. Raucous campaign events don’t necessarily translate into electoral majorities. They didn’t in 2020, when

Joe Biden

narrowly carried Georgia. Polls this year have the Senate race nearly tied, but most show Mr. Warnock ahead.

Which brings us to the governor’s race. In that contest—more anomalies—the Republican, incumbent Brian Kemp, has been openly disparaged by Mr. Trump, and the Democrat,

Stacey Abrams,

is the election denier. Ms. Abrams famously claimed she won the 2018 race for governor, but election denialism became unpopular on the left after Mr. Trump took it up with gusto in 2020.

She now avoids the subject of her refusal to concede the ’18 election, even claiming, preposterously, that she never denied the result, as if she hadn’t done so repeatedly and on camera. Her 2022 campaign is as invested in the myth of “voter suppression” as her earlier one was. In ads and campaign talks she still says Mr. Kemp, as secretary of state, deliberately removed black voters from the rolls. Yet only two weeks ago an Obama-appointed federal judge ruled that her Voting Rights Act lawsuit over the 2018 election had no merit.

There are issues affecting the race, to be sure: Mr. Kemp was demonstrably right to reject public-health orthodoxy earlier than most other governors, and Ms. Abrams criticized him on that score at every stage—a hard truth the governor repeats at every campaign event.

Mr. Kemp, meanwhile, has pulled off the delicate feat of angering Mr. Trump without uttering a cross word about him. The governor certified the 2020 Georgia presidential election result, provoking the loser into castigating Mr. Kemp and half-facetiously endorsing Ms. Abrams, but Mr. Kemp has refused to be drawn into the fight over 2020. His campaign events notably aren’t festooned with Trump paraphernalia. That doesn’t appear to have hurt him: He consistently leads Ms. Abrams in polls.

One further anomaly. Mr. Kemp, the most popular Republican in the state, has declined to appear alongside Mr. Walker at a campaign event. It is not unreasonable to think the governor could clear a path into the end zone for Mr. Walker and perhaps win back the U.S. Senate for the GOP. “You can look at our schedule, it’s built out almost all the way through Election Day,” he said when I asked him about it, as if organizing a joint appearance were a difficult-to-surmount logistical challenge. Then: “I’m focused on my race, not anybody else’s.” I interpret that to mean he suspects he has as much to lose in such an appearance as Mr. Walker has to gain.

The Senate race is close enough—with a Libertarian polling around 3%—that it’s likely neither Mr. Warnock nor Mr. Walker will receive a majority on Nov. 8. Then we’ll have to wait until the runoff on Dec. 6 to find out whose side God is on.

Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.