Trump Loyalist Loeffler’s Attacks on Pastor Warnock Risk Suburban Votes in Georgia’s US Senate Race
Beau Davis, a 33-year-old security specialist from the Atlanta suburbs, is the kind of voter Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue may need to win runoff elections next month that will determine the…
Beau Davis, a 33-year-old security specialist from the Atlanta suburbs, is the kind of voter Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue may need to win runoff elections next month that will determine the balance of power in Washington.
But Davis, an independent who has voted twice for President Donald Trump, isn’t sure he will vote on Jan. 5. He dislikes Trump loyalist Loeffler’s campaign attacks on her Democratic opponent, the Reverend Raphael Warnock, a Black pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.
“This is just getting ugly for no reason,” Davis said while Christmas shopping in the suburban city of Marietta, 20 miles (32 km) northwest of Atlanta.
“I don’t want to vote against her,” he added. “I just don’t know.”
Loeffler’s attack ads have sought to portray Warnock as a dangerous anti-American, anti-police, anti-Israel “Marxist” tied to Black Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright and an infamous 2008 sermon in which he declared: “God damn America!”
A Warnock campaign spokesman described the attacks as an attempt to distract voter attention from Loeffler’s record on healthcare and other issues.
Loeffler and Perdue, who like their Democratic rivals Warnock and Jon Ossoff, are running virtually in unison, appear to have the advantage in a state that has historically backed Republican candidates.
The Republicans also enjoy a structural advantage: A victory by just one will preserve a one-seat Senate majority, and with it, the ability to block Democratic President-elect Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.