J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg are among the A-listers who have contributed to Sen. Raphael Warnock’s campaign against Herschel Walker
The senior pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta is already backed by Hollywood A-Listers, including veteran TV producer Norman Lear, producer/directors J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. Warnock received more money from California donors than from Georgia.
With control of the Senate at stake, the race was too close to call after Tuesday’s election. Warnock had a slight lead on Wednesday, at 49.4% (1,941,499 votes), to Walker’s 48.5% (1,906,246 votes). The race will be decided by a runoff on December 4, with neither candidate reaching the threshold of 50%. This could decide whether Democrats maintain a slim majority in Senate.
“Everyone will put money into Georgia,”Rick Taylor, a veteran Democratic political consultant, said that.
Although Warnock holds a large lead in fundraising outside of the state, Taylor stated that Walker will be supported strongly by the GOP. “We’ll see him continuing to get whatever money he needs.”
Ted Cruz (Republican from Texas) plans to fly to Georgia to assist Walker, a football legend and anti-abortion conservative. Walker was rumored to have paid his girlfriends to have abortions. He denied all claims.
Warnock collected more than $8.72million from California donors for Tuesday’s re-election campaign. (That’s 73% more than the $5.03 million he’s collected from his home state of Georgia.)
“Keep the faith,” Warnock told supporters early Wednesday morning inHis campaign released a video. “We’re going to take that journey together over the next six years.”
Walker stated Wednesday to supporters that he is very optimistic about the runoff and asked them for their support for another month in order to secure a win.
“I’m like Ricky Bobby. I don’t come to lose,”He said this in reference to Will Ferrell’s NASCAR driver role in the movie “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Warnock is the leader in 2022 campaign donations by individuals in the TV/Movies/Music sectors with almost $1 million raised.
This will be Warnock’s second runoff election since 2021, when he was ultimately elected to fill the late Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson’s term after his retirement in 2019.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary-of-State, told reporters Wednesday that he won his re-election Tuesday and that the election in Georgia went smoothly and fairly. He will do the same for the runoff between Walker and Warnock for U.S. Senate.
As his state’s top election official, Raffensperger gained national recognition from the congressional committee hearings on the Jan. 6, 2020 Capitol riot. The committee played a December 2019 video from Raffensperger’s office in which he and other Georgia Republicans rejected former Pres. Donald Trump’s attempts to pressure them to overturn votes in their state for Biden and hand Trump the victory.
Raffensperger loosely referred to such election denials while thanking his Democratic opponent, Bee Nguyen, for calling him Tuesday night to “graciously concede”The race.
“That’s the way it’s supposed to be. We need all candidates who come up short to acknowledge it, and to come back, and fight within our system, another day,”Raffensperger spoke at a press conference on the Georgia state capitol steps.
He expressed his excitement about the possibility of having his office allow him to do so. “the voters of Georgia to decide the race”for the Senate and his office have already started to build official ballots for this runoff.
“At the end of the day, everyone wants to know that we have honest and fair elections, and we do,”Raffensperger stated.
