Raphael Warnock’s Victory is a 2024 Warning Shot for Republicans

Decency won. Competence won. Normalcy won. Not by enough. But at the end of the day, Senator Raphael Warnock prevailed over Herschel Walker. Democrats expanded their majority. The common sense candidate won. The guy whose own campaign staff regarded as a “pathological liar” lost. That’s progress, right? Cynicism has sure had its innings. But as the 2022 cycle comes to a close, there seems to at least be some momentum for good. 

Okay, okay, okay — let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re still treading in troubled waters. Tuesday’s vote felt too close for a race between a respected reverend and a hypocritical dolt who has spent much of his campaign trying to explain away disturbing allegations of domestic abuse. And while the loss seems to be further souring the GOP on Donald Trump, who saddled his party with this and other poor quality candidates, much of their objection is about politics, not principle. Suppose the Supreme Court endorses the independent state legislature theory, say, and paves the way for more MAGA victories, regardless of Trump’s own unpopularity? What if a similarly dangerous, but more electable demagogue rises? The fact remains that this party is lousy with MAGA extremism and shouldn’t be viable again until it has been scoured of it. 

If that’s a long way off still, the midterms — and Warnock’s run-off victory Tuesday — give some cause for optimism in the meantime. J.D. Vance aside, most of Trump’s highest-profile midterm picks failed. And, other than Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, most of the election denier candidates conceded their own races. Walker was among them: “I want you to believe in this country, believe in our elected officials, and most of all, stay together,” the former football star said in a brief concession speech. Warnock, meanwhile, won his fifth election in two years for the same seat, and now has a full term in front of him — a major victory for national Democrats, who will enjoy an absolute majority in the upper chamber for the next two years, but also for the state of Georgia. “After a long and hard fought campaign, it is now my honor to utter the four most powerful words in a democracy,” Warnock said in a soaring victory speech Tuesday night. “‘The people have spoken.’”

“As you did in 2021 when you sent an African American man and a Jewish man to the Senate in one fell swoop,” Warnock continued, referring to his and Jon Ossoff’s run-off victories last cycle, “you are sending a clear message to the country about the kind of world we want for our children.”

It was a moving scene, particularly when Warnock invoked the history of the country, state, and his own family. His mother, who was behind him during the speech, “grew up in the 1950s, in Waycross, Georgia, picking somebody else’s cotton and somebody else’s tobacco,” he said. “But tonight, she helped pick her youngest son to be a United States senator.” It was an enthusiastic exclamation point on the Democrats’ unexpectedly strong midterm showing, and an unmistakable rejection of the Trumpiest elements of the Republican Party. 

Of course, the Warnock victory owed a great deal to how wildly weak Walker was as a candidate. But it was also, as Warnock noted in his victory speech, the result of hard fighting — by the campaign, which successfully sued state officials last month to allow early voting, and by voters, who he said “endured” obstacles to the ballot to deliver the narrow Democratic victory. “The fact that voters worked so hard to overcome the hardship put in front of them does not eliminate the fact that hardship was put there in the first place,” Warnock said. 

That work has paid off in the form of momentum. It may not be enough to drive a stake through the heart of Trumpism, but three straight elections suggest more Americans than not are tired of the crazy and hungry for something else. It’ll be up to Democrats to carry that through two years of divided government and into 2024, especially if Republicans refuse to do any real soul-searching in the wake of their disappointing midterm performance. “It’s big,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a Wednesday morning press conference on Warnock’s victory. “It’s significant,” he added, saying the results show Americans “believe in democracy.” “It’s hanging around for a long time, as long as we fight for it,” Schumer said. “We’ll continue to do that.”