2022 Midterm Elections: Warnock Beats Walker, Giving Democrats 51st Senate Seat (Published 2022) (2024)

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Warnock defeats Walker in Georgia’s Senate runoff.

Throughout one of the most expensive Senate races in American history, Mr. Warnock used the cadences and lofty language he honed as the senior pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church to ask Georgia voters to rise above the acrimony and division of Donald J. Trump’s politics.

“I am Georgia,” he proclaimed Tuesday night in Atlanta, invoking the martyrs and heroes of the civil rights movement and the small towns and growing cities of his childhood. “I am an example and an iteration of its history, of its peril and promise, of the brutality and the possibilities. But because this is America, because we always have a path to make our country greater against unspeakable odds, here we stand together.”

He uttered what he called the four most powerful words in a democracy: “The people have spoken.”

The defeat of Mr. Walker, who was handpicked by Mr. Trump, culminated a disastrous year for the former president, who set himself up as a Republican kingmaker, only to watch his Senate candidates in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — as well as his picks for governor in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia — go on to defeat in primaries or in last month’s general election.

Mr. Walker’s loss will almost certainly lead to soul-searching for a Republican Party that must decide heading into the 2024 election how firmly to tether itself to a former president who has now absorbed powerful political blows in three successive campaign cycles. An exhausted-looking Mr. Walker spoke only briefly after his defeat, asking his supporters at an event at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta, “We’ve had a tough journey, have we not?” He added, “God is good.”

The Georgia result also holds a bold message about race in the rising New South.

Mr. Warnock was the first Black person from Georgia to be elected to the Senate when he won a 2021 runoff. Republicans chose another Black candidate to try to deny him a full term — a former football star with no political experience and little ideological depth — elevating the role of race and identity in a contest where the Republican candidate denied the existence of racism and the Democrat spoke of painful injustices that have yet to be remedied.

Now, with six years ahead of him in the chamber, Mr. Warnock will remain part of a stunningly small group: Of the more than 2,000 people who have served in the United States Senate, only 11 have been Black. Of the Senate’s 100 current members, just three are Black: Mr. Warnock; Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; and Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina.

Mr. Warnock’s campaign officials said on Tuesday that they intentionally treaded lightly on the racial dynamics of the matchup against Mr. Walker, understanding that a heavy-handed message on race could alienate moderate white voters. Mr. Warnock was also wary of running a negative campaign while maintaining his post behind the pulpit of a high-profile church.

Instead, in the final weeks of the general election campaign, the Warnock team segued to a violent episode from Mr. Walker’s past. The campaign and allied groups poured more money into advertisem*nts highlighting the account of Mr. Walker’s ex-wife, who said he had threatened her life.

In the general election in November, Mr. Warnock, 53, finished ahead of Mr. Walker by about 37,000 votes. But neither candidate cleared the 50 percent threshold needed to win, sending the race into a runoff. Under Georgia’s new election law, the runoff period was shortened to four weeks from nine, giving both campaigns little time to regroup, adjust their strategies and mobilize voters to return to the polls.

Mr. Warnock’s aides also credited the lawsuit their campaign and other Democratic groups filed against the state of Georgia to lift a ban on early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. They won the lawsuit and cleared the way for more than two dozen counties — a majority of which favored Democrats — to open their doors for voters.

To Republicans who have said the strong turnout in the general election and the runoff showed the absence of any voter suppression, Mr. Warnock disagreed. “Just because people endured long lines that wrapped around buildings, some blocks long, just because they endured the rain and the cold and all kinds of tricks in order to vote,” Mr. Warnock said, “doesn’t mean that voter suppression does not exist. It simply means that you, the people, have decided that your voices will not be silenced.”

Mr. Warnock and his Democratic allies funneled millions of dollars into the race, outspending Mr. Walker by more than two to one in less than a month. By the final week of the runoff campaign, Mr. Warnock had topped $53 million on the airwaves, while Republicans had spent only $24 million. That was just a fraction of the $400 million spent in total on the race by the candidates, their committees and outside groups during the midterm election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, a group that tracks money in politics.

Mr. Warnock won with overwhelming support from Black voters, who make up one-third of Georgia’s electorate and are integral to its Democratic base. Black voters in Georgia expressed disappointment, even anger, on Tuesday at what they saw as an effort to manipulate them to support a flawed Republican candidate who they believed had been selected because of his race by political figures who would dictate his actions.

“Herschel Walker is a product of Georgia politics,” Aisha Horan, 47, said after casting her ballot on Tuesday for Mr. Warnock at the Cobb County Civic Center in Marietta. “Someone looked around and said: ‘We need to counter Warnock, especially for those Black folks. Let’s just stack the deck against them a little bit more.’”

But Mr. Warnock also won a key slice of support from moderates in the state, a group he paid extra attention to in the runoff campaign. Luke Maran, 23, an independent voter and mechanical engineering student at Georgia Tech, said he agreed with conservative economic principles of efficiency and low taxation, and had his qualms about the extremes of liberal social policies. But ultimately, he said, he voted for Mr. Warnock as the more qualified candidate.

Republicans struggled to articulate a message to galvanize their voters after Democrats secured Senate control during the general election. And while Mr. Walker, 60, used his fame to vault to the top of the Republican candidate field, he made a series of missteps and contended with a near-constant flow of damaging headlines about his personal life and business career.

He did not dispute his ex-wife’s previously aired accusations of domestic violence. But he was also accused, for the first time, of fathering children he had not previously disclosed, exaggerating and lying about his business prowess, and urging women he was in relationships with to have abortions. His campaign denied all of these claims.

Those scandals and a series of nonsensical verbal diatribes — on the relative merits of werewolves and vampires, China’s “bad air” and a bull on the wrong side of a fence eyeing several cows — appeared to have a profound impact on his standing, especially with Black men, some of whom saw Mr. Walker as the white power structure’s mistaken idea of a candidate who would appeal to them.

“It was embarrassing, and I heard other Black men in my circle talk about their embarrassment,” Rachman Holdman, a 48-year-old information technology manager in Sandy Springs, said after voting for Mr. Warnock on Tuesday.

An array of Republican figures visited the state regularly to bolster Mr. Walker’s campaign during the runoff period, including Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida.

But in the final days, Mr. Walker held few events — and he disappeared from the campaign trail altogether during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, baffling his G.O.P. allies who saw it as a crucial window. By Election Day, he appeared to be unable to encourage a sizable portion of moderate voters, particularly those who had supported Gov. Brian Kemp in the general election, to turn back out for him.

Mr. Kemp, a Republican, had to walk a fine line in the runoff, preserving his political capital in a contest that was trending away from the G.O.P. while appearing to lend enough support to Mr. Walker to maintain his reputation as a devoted party leader.

Complicating the issue for Mr. Kemp was Mr. Trump. The former president had urged a former Republican senator, David Perdue, to challenge the governor in the primary in May. Mr. Trump wanted revenge for Mr. Kemp’s refusal to back his attempt to overturn his defeat in Georgia by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.

Mr. Kemp easily defeated Mr. Perdue in the spring, only to be left propping up Mr. Trump’s Senate candidate in the fall.

Alyce McFadden and Richard Fausset contributed reporting.

In a soaring victory speech, Warnock declares, ‘here we stand together.’

“I am Georgia,” the senator said. “I am an example and an iteration of its history, of its peril and promise, of the brutality and the possibilities. But because this is America, because we always have a path to make our country greater against unspeakable odds, here we stand together.”

He addressed those who point to the results of the race as proof that there was no voter suppression in Georgia. He said that just because people stood in blocks-long lines in the cold to cast their ballots did not mean voter suppression did not exist.

“It simply means that you, the people, have decided that your voices will not be silenced,” he said.

Responding to the impromptu comments of the audience around him, as if standing at the pulpit on a Sunday at his Atlanta church, his remarks often blended the personal with the political.

“I want to say thank you to my mother, who is here tonight,” he told the crowd. “You’ll see her in a little while. But she grew up in the 1950s in Waycross, Ga., picking somebody else’s cotton and somebody else’s tobacco. But tonight she helped pick her youngest son to be a United States senator.”

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Christian Walker lashed out at his father, and the G.O.P., after the Senate race was called.

The first tweet was posted just four minutes before The Associated Press called the runoff for Senator Raphael Warnock, the elder Mr. Walker’s Democratic opponent. In all, the younger Mr. Walker posted eight times, ending with a tribute to his mother, saying he was “so happy she can rest now, and this bull crap is over with.”

The younger Mr. Walker rose to national prominence in October, after being critical of his father following a series of scandals — including that he had three children that he had not previously mentioned publicly and that he’d paid for an abortion for a former girlfriend and encouraged her to have a second abortion, despite being staunchly pro-life (a second unnamed woman later said he paid for her to have an abortion, too).

Mr. Walker denied the abortion allegations and, after his son’s October outburst, tweeted: “I LOVE my son no matter what.”

But he has been largely quiet since then, a silence he attributed on Tuesday night to his desire not to “swing voters to Warnock.”

In an impromptu session Tuesday night on Twitter Spaces, the social media site’s live audio platform, the younger Mr. Walker said that with the Georgia contest decided, he could speak freely.

The wide-ranging monologue was delivered to more than 1,300 listeners, with Mr. Walker repeatedly saying he was a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump. But he accused the former president of incorrectly assuming that his father would win because “he’s Georgia royalty” without realizing “he’s not a good candidate.” He said that his preferred candidate for the 2024 presidential race would be Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Mr. Walker attacked Senator Lindsey Graham, saying that both Democrats and Republicans disliked him and that his father should not have campaigned with him, which he did multiple times throughout the race. He also recounted his own surreal experience of learning that he has three half-siblings through reports in the national media and feeling outraged at his father’s dishonesty.

“He would lie to the campaign and then the journalists would come out and find the story,” said Mr. Walker, who lives in Miami. “It was just absurd.”

Chase Oliver, the Libertarian candidate whose losing bid in the Senate race in November helped push the contest into a runoff, called in to wish the younger Mr. Walker the best and said: “I’m glad this is over for you.” He also proposed ranked-choice voting in Georgia and said that if Herschel Walker had reached out to him directly, he might have been able to encourage his supporters — he earned about 80,000 general election votes — to vote for him.

In a bizarre moment, a person identifying himself as Chi Ossé, a sitting member of the New York City Council, called into the audio platform to tell Mr. Walker he was a “huge fan” despite being a “radical leftist.”

In response to a question about his own political ambitions, the younger Mr. Walker laughed, saying he would “never” run for office.

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Mr. Abhiraman’s remarks track with what we heard from voters waiting in lines at early polling sites in the Atlanta metro area this week. On Thursday evening, the line outside the East Point Library wrapped around the building and volunteers blasted music from a speaker. For several in the line, bundled up in coats and scarves against the chill, it was their second or third attempt to cast a ballot.

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The key statistics about Trump’s endorsem*nt track record this year.

In Georgia, Mr. Trump’s slate of election deniers lost their primary bids against Republicans who repulsed the former president’s efforts to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 presidential victory. Gov. Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, survived those challenges and then coasted to re-election victories last month.

Here’s a recap of some key statistics from Mr. Trump’s endorsem*nt campaign this year:

• 82 percent: Mr. Trump endorsed more than 250 candidates, and his 82 percent success rate is, on the surface, impressive. But the vast majority of those endorsem*nts were of incumbents and heavy favorites to win.

• 8-2, 6-2: The former president set out to replace the 10 House Republicans who supported his impeachment. During the primary season, eight either lost challenges or retired before facing voters, while two survived. Among the eight Trump-endorsed challengers, six won general election contests and two lost to Democrats.

• 0-5: In the 36 most competitive House races, as determined by Cook Political Report, Mr. Trump endorsed candidates in five contests. All five lost.

• 1-5: Mr. Trump spent heavily on behalf of other candidates for the first time, and the results weren’t good. In the seven races across six states where Mr. Trump’s super PAC spent money, last month he won one (Ohio Senate) and lost five (Arizona governor and Senate, Michigan governor, Nevada Senate, Pennsylvania Senate). Tuesday night he lost the sixth in Georgia.

The election needle is back for the runoff. Here’s what to expect.

The needle projects the final result based on an analysis of the vote that’s been counted and an estimate of how many votes are still left to be counted. In states where granular data is available, such as Georgia, it is able to operate especially quickly by analyzing precinct-level returns that are broken out by method of vote.

The needle compares the election results with our pre-election expectations for each county or precinct to determine whether candidates are overperforming or underperforming expectations. It then estimates how the remaining votes will break, based on demographic patterns in the results counted so far.

Much like a weather forecast, the needle cannot be absolutely certain of a result, but the running estimate reflects a range of possibilities that add up to a probability of who will win. For example, if the needle shows that a candidate or a party has a 75 percent chance of succeeding, you should expect that there are scenarios in which the other candidate can win. After all, when the National Weather Service says the chance of rain is 25 percent, you still might bring an umbrella with you when you leave the house.

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The ‘purple’ precincts to watch in the Georgia runoff results.

Once Republican strongholds, those crossover precincts have flipped their support from one party to the other in recent years. For instance, a majority of the precincts, traditionally Republican strongholds, voted to elect Donald J. Trump as president in 2016 by significant margins. But in 2020, they helped deliver Georgia to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

These precincts could be pivotal in tonight’s runoff race.

Turnout in Georgia remains high compared with pre-2020 runoffs.

Two years ago, the Senate runoff turnout amounted to 91 percent of the general election electorate — by far the highest mark in the state’s history. The Tuesday runoff is on pace to record a turnout of about 85 percent of the total from Nov. 8. After Mr. Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both Democrats, swept the 2021 runoff elections for Senate, Republicans who control Georgia’s state government placed new limits on the state’s runoffs, cutting the time to campaign in half, restricting the amount of early voting available and making it more difficult to vote by mail.

In a 2018 election for Georgia secretary of state, the turnout for the runoff was just 38 percent the general election electorate. A 2008 Senate runoff drew 57 percent of the November electorate.

Mr. Walker was banking on a large turnout of Republican voters on Election Day, while many of Mr. Warnock’s voters were thought to have cast ballots in advance. Mr. Walker’s aides and allies predicted he would need win 60 percent of the Election Day votes to prevail.

So far, Georgia was averaging 110,000 to 120,000 votes per hour as of 3:45 p.m. local time, according to the secretary of state’s office. It expected that the rate would increase to between 120,000 to 140,000 voters per hour during the final three hours of voting, which will end at 7 p.m. Eastern time.

At that pace, it appeared as though most voters in the runoff cast votes early — a figure that totaled about 1.9 million ballots. In the November contest, about 2.5 million early votes were recorded. The runoff was triggered when neither candidate received at least 50 percent of the vote in November.

The Election Day runoff total could rival the 1.4 million people who turned out to vote on Nov. 8 in the nationally watched Senate contest and the 1.3 million votes cast in the runoff elections on Jan. 5 last year, which Democrats swept with a pair of victories that helped give them control of the Senate.

Democrats are eager to hold on to Mr. Warnock’s seat, which would give them an outright majority in the Senate — meaning they would no longer need to rely on Vice President Kamala Harris to cast the tiebreaking vote in the split Senate and would claim one-seat majorities on committees. Such an outright majority would help them move legislation forward and confirm judges and presidential nominees, as well as give the party breathing room if one of its moderate members breaks ranks.

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At the polls: In a Democratic bastion, anxiety and irritation over Walker’s chance at victory.

Democrats in Buckhead, which sits in Fulton County, Georgia’s largest and most Democratic county, said that the two candidates were so starkly different that the choice for Georgians should not be a difficult one.

“I think it’s very obvious, but for so many people to not see that makes me understand that the world is halfway blind,” said Ackylla Burke, a 35-year-old business manager and registered Republican who said she tends to support Democratic candidates. Ms. Burke, who is Black, said that Mr. Walker being in the Senate would only further stoke division in the state and endanger its Black citizens, despite Mr. Walker being Black as well.

“We’re going to go back into six years of hate” if he wins, she added.

For the conservative voters who supported Mr. Walker, having him in the Senate was little more than a matter of keeping checks in place on Senate Democrats. Mr. Walker, they argued, would still hold the party line in the chamber.

“The Senate would be better served 50-50,” said Charles McIntyre, a 77-year-old retiree who lives in Buckhead. Mr. Walker, he said, would help Republicans accomplish portions of their agenda and give the party more influence.

“Let the Republicans have a say. Democrats have had two years. It’s better to have a balance in our power,” Mr. McIntyre said.

Sara Russell, a 59-year-old attorney who lives in Buckhead, became emotional as she considered the possibility of Mr. Walker’s winning election to a six-year Senate term.

“I just — I cannot imagine what would happen if Herschel Walker was elected,” she said. Part of her work as an attorney, she said, involves helping people secure Social Security disability benefits. She feared that a victory for Mr. Walker would give Republicans an additional vote that could further jeopardize her clients’ access to those funds.

“There’s a lot at stake here,” she said.

There were no lines and a very short wait time at the precinct, which sits in Buckhead’s city center complex among designer clothing stores and high-end restaurants. Several voters expressed gratitude for their circ*mstances, saying that in the midst of the chilly weather and rainy conditions on Election Day, they did not have to wait in hourslong lines or risk violating their work schedule to vote.

That wasn’t the case during the early-voting period, when some lines in Atlanta’s metropolitan area stretched around city blocks, forcing voters to wait up to three hours to cast ballots.

“I did not need to bring with me today two books, an apple, an orange, a toothbrush and toothpaste,” said Sharon Powell, a 44-year-old actress and Buckhead resident. “I realize that I have a lot of privilege.”

Georgia’s Senate race again draws astronomical spending: ‘There’s never been anything like it.’

Two years ago, more than $406 million was spent by both sides during Raphael Warnock’s successful first run for Senate. Not to be outdone, Jon Ossoff and his Republican opponent were aided by $514 million in spending to support their candidacies, a sum that shattered the record for a Senate contest.

This year, Gov. Brian Kemp and his Democratic challenger, Stacey Abrams, along with outside groups backing them, raised upward of $250 million. And so far, data from the nonprofit group OpenSecrets shows that nearly $401 million has been spent on the race between Mr. Warnock and his Republican opponent, Herschel Walker, which will be decided in a runoff election on Tuesday.

“There’s never been anything like it,” said Bob Houghton, the president of the Georgia Association of Broadcasters, a trade group that represents the TV and radio stations that are, arguably, the real winners in these races. “It just keeps coming.”

The torrent of cash is a product of two main factors.

Georgia is one of just two states that hold general-election runoffs, which unfold when neither candidate attains at least 50 percent of the vote. These runoff contests essentially amount to second campaigns, with fresh rounds of advertising to buy, get-out-the-vote efforts to pay for, and direct-mail fliers to send.

Over the four weeks leading up to Tuesday’s runoff, nearly $81 million had been spent on advertising to support Mr. Warnock or Mr. Walker, according to data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. That promotional blitz exceeded — by more than $25 million — the total amount spent in this year’s Senate race in Washington, which itself set a record for the state.

The other factor is how Georgia, long considered a Republican stronghold, has slid into purple territory over the past few election cycles. The newfound parity between the parties in the state has drawn significant attention from donors around the country who see Georgia as being in play.

“Because Georgia is now a battleground state, Democrats think they have a shot at it,” said Joseph Watson Jr., a professor of public affairs communications at the University of Georgia. “As a result, these local races have become nationalized.”

Campaign finance data supports that notion. More than 80 percent of the $53.7 million raised by One Georgia, an independent leadership committee backing Ms. Abrams’s unsuccessful run for governor, came from outside the state, as did almost exactly half of the $38.4 million hauled in by Mr. Kemp’s leadership committee, Georgia First. Mr. Kemp won the race by more than seven percentage points.

Those factors are particularly amplified when control of the Senate is at stake, which was the case for both Senate elections in Georgia in early 2021, a time when the runoff period was twice as long as it is this year. That helps explain the eye-popping $507 million in advertising spent during the eight-week runoff contests in Georgia that year, according to AdImpact data.

This year, the second-most-expensive race was Pennsylvania’s Senate contest, where Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Mehmet Oz and their allies spent a combined $313 million. Overall spending in competitive, statewide races in Pennsylvania — including the race for governor — totaled more than $381 million. In Georgia, the amount spent on the races for Senate and governor added up to at least $508 million.

All of that money is a boon to advertising firms and TV stations. Hilton Howell, the chairman of Gray Television, which owns stations in all but one market in Georgia, called it a “tremendous amount of spending” and “a nice Christmas present under the tree for our shareholders.” A single ABC affiliate in Atlanta, owned by a different company, has booked $86 million in political advertisem*nts so far this year, more than any local station in America.

But some experts question the utility of so much advertising when it comes to actually winning the hearts — and votes — of the citizenry.

Erika Franklin Fowler, a professor of government at Wesleyan University and a director of the Wesleyan Media Project, a group that studies political advertising, said the impact of spending on races diminishes as more money and advertising flood into a state or media market.

“Because control of the chamber is at stake, or the added cushion, at least, I think that certainly is what is driving these numbers,” she said. “Campaigns and parties care about winning and less about efficiency, shall we say.”

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The winner of the Georgia runoff will be the state’s first Black full-term senator.

The achievement is within reach of both Mr. Warnock and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker. But that’s about where their similarities end.

Mr. Warnock is a sitting senator and a pastor, while Mr. Walker is a former football star and political neophyte. They have drastically different beliefs, public speaking styles and personalities. In the days leading up to the runoff, Mr. Walker held a series of modest events while Mr. Warnock held rallies and urged hundreds of congregants to vote during his sermon on Sunday.

The race increasingly became an exercise in damage control for Mr. Walker. Unearthed details of his private life coupled with misrepresentations and exaggerations about his education, charitable giving, business and work in law enforcement have affected his campaign.

But the polls still show a close race — not surprising, considering fewer than 40,000 votes separated the two men on Election Day last month. As each camp has sought the edge, the contest has become the second-most expensive Senate race in American history.

After Mr. Warnock defeated Senator Kelly Loeffler in 2021, he became just the 11th Black U.S. senator in history. Mr. Walker, should he emerge victorious, would be the 12th.

At the polls: Suburban Republicans go for Walker, despite some reservations.

“It doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence,” said Mr. Lyle, 43. “I just don’t know how competent he is.”

Mr. Lyle was part of the lunchtime voting rush at Nebo Elementary School in Dallas, Ga., about 35 miles west of downtown Atlanta. The line was short, but the polling place was busy in the afternoon, with a nearly full parking lot and voters coming and going at a good clip, some of them in the fire-red baseball caps and swag denoting an allegiance to the University of Georgia, where Mr. Walker helped lead the football team to a national championship in 1980.

Dallas is in Paulding County, on the cusp of suburbs and countryside. It is 71 percent white, according to Census figures, and nearly 64 percent of its voters supported Donald J. Trump in the 2020 presidential election. These days, its two-lane roads are dotted with signs that read “Herschel.”

While some Republican voters at Nebo Elementary had their reservations about Mr. Walker — either because they questioned his competence or were put off by his myriad scandals — many were willing to overlook them.

“He had some anger problems, and things like that, that appeared after his football career,” said Ed Moses, 63, a retired I.T. worker. “But he professes that he’s got a Christian foundation now.”

Mr. Moses identifies himself as a Christian conservative, like Mr. Walker. And like many voters here, Mr. Moses considered Mr. Warnock’s support for abortion rights to be a deal breaker. It was also a plus that Mr. Walker had been endorsed by Mr. Trump, for whom Mr. Moses plans to vote in 2024.

Desrie Rocha, 63, a retired former owner of a contracting company, came out of the polling place skeptical that her vote counted at all. Ms. Rocha, who believes the unfounded assertions that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump, said she was worried that the QR codes used to scan Georgia’s paper ballots could be compromised. But she said that she tried, at least, to vote for Mr. Walker.

Ms. Rocha said it was a vote “just to keep Warnock out,” and send Democrats a message. “He leans toward Biden, and Biden’s got to go,” she said.

Ms. Rocha blamed Mr. Biden and his fellow Democrats for being too strict about Covid precautions (“They treated us like children”), too vigorous in encouraging vaccination (“They didn’t just encourage — they were the pusherman”) and making impractical moves away from fossil fuels (“They’re trying to push it too quickly”).

She was also skeptical that the litany of issues about Mr. Walker’s personal life were even true. “It’s hard to trust things these days,” she said.

Sydney Kettwig, 25, a hair stylist, was among the Walker voters who said they were concerned about inflation — a problem she believed the Biden administration turbocharged by sending out too many stimulus checks. “I want our gas prices to go down, our taxes to go down, and I don’t want to spend $300 every time I go to the grocery store,” she said.

Ms. Kettwig acknowledged that Mr. Walker had issues in his personal life, but she noted that Mr. Warnock had been accused by his ex-wife of running over her foot with his vehicle during a dispute. (Mr. Warnock denies the claim, and paramedics responding to the scene found no obvious signs of injury.)

That spousal blowup has been a staple of anti-Warnock TV ads, and Ms. Kettwig said that, as a result, she questioned the piousness of Mr. Warnock, who also is the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. “I think him being a reverend is like, whatever,” she said.

An hour of interviews in Dallas showed voters split along racial lines, with all nine white voters saying they backed Mr. Walker and all five Black voters saying they voted for Mr. Warnock.

James Billups, 50, the owner of a house-painting company, thought that it said something positive about race relations that so many rural white Republicans were voting for a Black candidate from their party.

But Mr. Billups, who is Black, did not think that Mr. Walker was the right Black man for the job. Far from it, in fact.

“To be honest with you, the first time I was embarrassed to be a Black man was when I saw him up there speaking,” he said. “He was just speaking gibberish.”

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At the polls: Black voters in Atlanta think about race in a historic contest.

“There’s this whole Republican push to eliminate people’s rights,” said Mr. Brown, 60. “Gay rights, the right of women to get an abortion if they want it.”

His wife, Zena, 58, also voted for Mr. Warnock, saying she was concerned about Mr. Walker’s “incompetence.”

A contest between two Black men as the major-party nominees is a historic moment for this Deep South state, but Mr. Brown said that he did not view it as a sign of progress. Mr. Walker, he said, did not seem to have many ideas of his own — although he gave Republicans credit for making a strategically interesting move in choosing him.

“Picking a big athlete, and a good ol’ boy, and he happens to be Black” might make the Republican Party seem more diverse, he said. But he did not believe many Black voters in his area would be swayed.

“I don’t know about the rural areas,” he said. “There’s no way that’s going to work in the city.”

Stan Gray, 44, a truck driver who is Black, said that he, too, voted for Mr. Warnock — a choice that he said was better for his community.

“I’m voting for the Black people,” he said with a smile. Reminded that Mr. Walker is also Black, Mr. Gray replied that he believed the Republican nominee was “a puppet.”

Some voters gathered at a gourmet coffee trailer across the street from the polling place, sipping something warm to combat the cold and the drizzle. The line at the library was minuscule on Tuesday morning, unlike the early voting period, when the wait was up to an hour for some voters.

A few yards away, there were free snacks and a group of people in winter coats dancing to a DJ and waving signs at passing cars, encouraging motorists to vote. All of it — the coffee, the snacks, the music — was being funded by Georgia Stand-Up, a nonprofit, nonpartisan voter outreach organization.

The effort was called “Party at the Polls,” and the idea was to combat what the group called the “attempts at voter suppression and depression” they attributed to the 2021 Republican-backed Georgia law that criminalized passing out supplies like water to voters in line.

Hannah Risman, a spokeswoman for the group, said that by law, the free food and drinks must be at least 150 feet from the polling place. The group wasn’t taking any chances: She said they carefully measured their distance from the library first thing in the morning.

Voting in the Georgia Senate Runoff: What to Know

Polls are open until 7 p.m. Eastern time. Even if there are long wait times, state election law says voters who are in line at 7 p.m. are still allowed to vote.

How long could the lines be?

It remains to be seen. Wait times during early voting were significant, but as of Tuesday morning, there were no reports of long lines, even in populous Fulton County. Officials have said that elderly voters who are unable to wait in line should see a poll worker.

Can I register and vote today?

No, sorry. But you can submit a registration application online or by mail to be ready for the next election.

What do I need to bring to the polls?

Georgia voters must bring a valid photo ID to vote. These are the accepted forms: a U.S. passport, a driver’s license (even if expired), a student ID from a Georgia public college or university, any state or federal ID card (including a free Georgia voter ID), a Georgia government employee ID, a military photo ID or a tribal photo ID.

Can I report any issues I see at the polls?

To report any “voter intimidation and/or illegal election activities” at a polling place, you can submit a complaint to the Georgia attorney general’s office. There is also a hotline you can call: 888-532-0148.

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How Herschel Walker entered the political arena: a 2020 speech defending Donald Trump.

“I take it as a personal insult that people would think I’ve had a 37-year friendship with a racist,” Mr. Walker told viewers watching the remote event unfold on their screens during the coronavirus pandemic. “Growing up in the Deep South, I’ve seen racism up close. I know what it is, and it isn’t Donald Trump.”

The remarks by Mr. Walker, a former football star, helped fast-track his political rise. He is now running as Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidate in the heated and closely watched runoff election against Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat.

But Tuesday’s election will serve as the ultimate test of that association. Mr. Walker has struggled to shore up support with moderate and Black voters in a year when Mr. Trump’s election denialism and political baggage have hurt him in key battlegrounds across the country. As the race headed to a runoff, Mr. Trump stayed away.

In more than a dozen interviews with moderate and Black voters, many said they viewed Mr. Walker as a mouthpiece for Mr. Trump and expressed doubts that he represented the interests of Black people. But at Mr. Walker’s bus-tour stops, where he spent time shaking hands and taking photos with supporters, his backers argued that the significance of the race, along with the candidate’s Christian faith and conservative values, would move Republicans to the polls.

At the 2020 Republican convention, Mr. Walker was part of a slate of Black, Asian and Latino surrogates who received plum speaking spots. Several sought to defend Mr. Trump, as he and his allies pushed back against criticism that his racist outbursts, hard-line immigration policies and abrasive political style were hostile to women and people of color. Only a month later, Mr. Trump ignited a firestorm when, on the presidential debate stage, he refused to condemn white supremacist groups, telling members of one far-right organization to “stand back and stand by.”

But in front of the camera, Mr. Walker described Mr. Trump as someone with whom he had “a deep, personal friendship.” He said that “it hurt my soul to hear the terrible names that people call Donald. The worst one is racist.”

Mr. Walker defended Mr. Trump’s political approach.

“Some people don’t like his style, the way he knocks down obstacles that get in the way of his goals,” he said. “But that’s how you get the job done.”

Georgia voters are encountering few lines at polling places.

Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, showed just one of its 249 polling places had a wait time of more than 30 minutes around 12:45 p.m., according to its elections website.

The average wait time to vote in Georgia around midday was fluctuating, but remained under five minutes, according election officials.

Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said that Georgia had mostly avoided problems on Tuesday morning and that there had been no signs of efforts to intimidate voters — though the Justice Department advised that it was placing attorneys in four counties to watch for possible voting rights violations.

Any hiccups had been minimal so far, Mr. Hassinger said, along the lines of “somebody forgot to plug in a scanner or somebody forgot to program a scanner.”

Nearly 1.9 million ballots had been cast before Tuesday’s runoff, with the vast majority of them received at in-person early-voting sites, according to the secretary of state’s office.

Georgia gave voters about half as many days to vote early this time than during its previous federal runoffs, which Democrats swept last year with a pair of victories that helped give them control of the Senate. Republicans who control Georgia’s Legislature and governor’s office later passed a law that compressed the runoff schedule to four weeks.

Fewer polling places were used during early voting than on Tuesday, which Mr. Hassinger said could explain why the lines appeared to have dissipated.

The secretary of state’s office predicted that a total of 1.3 million people could vote on Tuesday based on its models, which would fall short of record turnout.

In DeKalb County, which is part of the Atlanta area, none of its roughly 160 polling places had a wait time over 30 minutes as of Tuesday afternoon, according to a county website. One had a wait of 20 minutes.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Warnock said that despite Georgia setting daily records for early voting, obstacles still stood in the way for people to cast ballots, and that he would seek election reforms.

“Get in line and please stay in line,” Mr. Warnock urged voters at the news conference. “It’s just too important, and so people need to show up. Half of life is showing up and the best thing we could do for our democracy is to make sure that our voices are heard and that our votes are cast.”

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Trump world braces for criticism, win or lose in Georgia.

If Mr. Walker wins, a top reason will be the decision to keep the former president out of the state during the runoff election, a move that reflected the Walker campaign’s calculation that Mr. Trump’s political brand carried more risks than rewards.

Mr. Trump’s recently announced presidential campaign is preparing for the blowback with plans to point to the former president’s help during the Senate race, which included fund-raising, a conference call with supporters and multiple posts on his social media website, Truth Social.

The silver lining for Mr. Trump: Either way, his disappointing midterm season will mercifully come to an end Tuesday night.