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Herschel Walker gave a nice concession speech, talking about the need to believe in America and, yes, the Constitution. But in the end, Georgia’s Senate runoff wasn’t that close, and that has huge implications beyond the defeat of the former football star.
Despite a cliffhanger night in which the lead bounced back and forth, Raphael Warnock won reelection by 100,000 votes, about 3 percentage points, to give the Democrats a 51-seat majority in the Senate.
A generic, boring Republican candidate probably could have won. But Walker could not. He had way too much personal baggage and ran an erratic campaign, perhaps symbolized by his rambling account of a movie in which a werewolf can kill a vampire.
The inescapable verdict is that it was the final setback of the midterm season for Donald Trump, who handpicked Walker to make the Georgia run. There were five battleground contests for control of the Senate–Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire as well as Georgia–and Republicans only had to win two to take control. All five of Trump’s MAGA candidates lost, from celebrities like Dr. Oz to unknowns like retired general Don Bolduc.
VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY IS – AND SHOULD BE – TIME’S PERSON OF THE YEAR
Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker delivers his concession speech during an election night event at the College Football Hall of Fame on Dec. 6, 2022, in Atlanta. Tonight Walker lost his runoff election to incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga.
(Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Most of them softened their stances on Trump’s stolen election rhetoric, and on abortion rights, but they all lost what looked like winnable races for the GOP.
Gaining a 51st senator–and making Joe Biden the first president since FDR not to lose a Senate seat in a midterm election–means more than reduced reliance on Kamala Harris to break ties.
It takes a nuclear bomb out of Joe Manchin’s hands, since he could single-handedly blow up anything the…
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