Former president Barack Obama will stump for incumbent Democratic senator Raphael Warnock ahead of the Georgia runoff election, in which he faces Republican nominee and former NFL player Herschel Walker.
Obama will campaign alongside Warnock on December 1, one week before the election, a source told the Hill. This will mark the second time Obama has traveled to Georgia to boost Warnock. The first time was in October before the midterms.
The race for the Senate seat went to a runoff after neither candidate secured 50 percent of the vote in the general election as required by Georgia law. Warnock led Walker by about 36,000 votes as the final ballots were being counted.
In 2020, the fate of the balance of power in the Senate rested on two runoff races in the Peach State, both of which the Democrats eventually won. This time, Democrats have already retained control of the upper chamber of Congress after Senator Catherine Cortez Masto defeated Republican Adam Laxalt in Nevada. With Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote and 50 seats, Democrats now have an effective majority. However, Democrats could bolster their majority in the Senate if Warnock wins in December.
Walker’s prospects of beating Warnock in November dwindled after he was hit with an “October surprise”: an allegation by a former girlfriend that he paid her to abort a child they’d conceived together in 2009. Walker called the accusation a “flat-out lie.”
Scandal later found Warnock too. The Washington Free Beacon reported last month that Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Warnock serves as pastor, threatened during the pandemic to evict low-income tenants from a building it owns for failing to pay small amounts of overdue rent.
On Monday, Walker released a new campaign ad defending the integrity of women’s sports against transgender intrusion. The ad features Riley Gaines, a female swimmer from the University of Kentucky, who was forced to race against University of Pennsylvania athlete Lia Thomas, a man who identifies as a woman.
Gaines endorsed Walker and alleged that Warnock “voted to allow biological men to compete in college women’s sports.” In 2021, Warnock voted against a Senate amendment that would have prohibited the federal funding of educational institutions that allow men to participate in women’s athletics.
Herschel Walker is up with a new runoff ad about transgender athletes, featuring a swimmer who tied with Lia Thomas.
“My senior year, I was forced to compete against a biological male,” Riley Gaines says in the ad for Walker’s Senate campaign. pic.twitter.com/MlVxnJwkgB
— Natalie Allison (@natalie_allison) November 21, 2022