The Georgia Senate race between Republican candidate Herschel Walker and Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock will head to a runoff Dec. 6, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.
Neither Walker nor Warnock has achieved the 50% of the vote required by state law to win on the first ballot. The outcomes of Georgia’s race, following Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, could play the deciding role in the Senate majority.
Multiple outlets including CNN and NBC News projected these results.
Warnock, the current incumbent elected in a 2020 special election, faces Walker, the former professional football player whose campaign was encouraged and later endorsed by former president Donald Trump.
Walker’s past — including allegations by two women claiming he demanded they have abortions years ago — surfaced during his political campaign, which was in part run on a pro-life platform. Walker denied the claims, accused the women of lying and took the brunt of many late night jokes in the wake of these events.
His campaign also took up a strategy of ordering 1,000 imitation police badges – to show support for law enforcement — for a fundraiser after Walker displayed his own mock law enforcement badge at a Senate debate. The moderator repeatedly asked him to put it away since props are not allowed. The prompt to pull out the badge came from Walker’s opponent Warnock’s calling out his lie that he had “worked in law enforcement.”
Elsewhere in Georgia, the state’s gubernatorial race elected Republican Gov. Brian Kempf, who defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams in his bid for reelection and rematch against Abrams after 2018.
In 2020, Georgia’s two Senate contests also went to runoffs, with both GOP candidates defeated by Democrats like Warnock, tipping the Senate scale to Democrat control.
If the Democrats finish with 49 Senate seats prior to this year’s Dec. 6 runoff, Georgia will decide which party takes control of the chamber.
