Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.
A new poll in Georgia finds that Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) is 4 points ahead of his Republican opponent, former NFL running back Herschel Walker, in their runoff election contest scheduled for December 6.
The two candidates will square off in a rematch of their midterm contest earlier this month. Georgia law requires candidates to attain a majority of votes in order to win an election. Although Warnock defeated Walker by nearly 40,000 votes, the Democrat did not reach the 50 percent-plus-one-vote threshold needed to remain in office.
No other candidates will be on the runoff ballot.
In the new poll — conducted by survey companies Fabrizio Ward and Impact Research and commissioned by the AARP of Georgia — Warnock appears likely to retain his Senate seat if he maintains his current 51 percent of support versus Walker’s 47 percent.
The poll, which was conducted from November 11-17, also found that a majority of voters (51 percent) viewed Warnock favorably. Conversely, a plurality of respondents in the poll (49 percent) said they viewed Walker unfavorably, with only 45 percent holding him in a favorable view.
The poll was conducted before many recent and unusual comments from Walker, in which he rambled on about fictional supernatural characters last week on the campaign trail.
Walker described vampires as “some cool people” but added that he wouldn’t want to be one.
“Let me tell you something that I found out: A werewolf can kill a vampire,” Walker said. “Did you know that? I never knew that. So, I don’t want to be a vampire anymore. I want to be a werewolf.”
The comments from Walker were a tangent from his attempt to compare Warnock’s time in the Senate to a scary movie. Walker’s words went viral on social media.
While comical to some observers, Walker’s quirky commentaries that have baffled many are outshined by more alarming and worrisome behavior over the past several months.
Walker, for example, has refused to answer basic questions about his policy stances when asked about them by journalists.
“Have you asked my opponent? Don’t play games,” Walker coldly said to local journalists asking him what he’d do if elected as senator.
In other instances, Walker has presented contradictory policy positions. An anti-abortion candidate, Walker said in October that he was supportive of exceptions to the procedure when a pregnant person’s life was endangered — but just two months prior, he said he was opposed to such exceptions.
At a debate that was scheduled in October but which Walker refused to attend, Warnock said that the Republican wasn’t prepared to be a lawmaker representing Georgia at the federal level. Walker’s “nonsensical answers” on myriad questions, including his history of domestic violence, “shows he is not ready,” Warnock said at the event.
Warnock reiterated this belief in a tweet on Tuesday.
“I have spent my life serving the public,” Warnock said. “Meanwhile, my opponent has demonstrated that he’s not ready to serve or represent the people of Georgia.”
We lost 15 percent of our traffic overnight.
We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.
We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.
We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.
The only way we can keep publishing is with strong reader support. We are asking you to start a monthly donation to Truthout today — anything you can do, whether $5 or $25, makes a difference.