Ilhan Omar underperformed Biden by more than perhaps any House Democrat thanks to a 3rd party candidate and well-funded GOP rival

Eliza Relman Wed, November 25, 2020

Rep. Ilhan Omar speaks during a news conference outside of the U.S. Capitol on January 27, 2020 in Washington, DC. Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, handily won a second term this month, but underperformed President-elect Joe Biden by more than perhaps any other Democratic candidate in the country.

There are a slew of factors that likely impacted Omar's race, including a third party on the ticket, a supremely well-funded Republican opponent, and the fact that she was virtually guaranteed to win reelection.

But Democratic operatives and Minnesota politicos told Insider that Omar's underperformance was largely in line with down-ballot Democrats across the state, who underperformed Biden, particularly in the suburbs.


Rep. Ilhan Omar, a progressive Minnesota Democrat, handily won a second term this month, but underperformed President-elect Joe Biden by more than perhaps any other Democratic candidate in the country.

While Biden won 80% of the vote in Minnesota's fifth congressional district — one of the most progressive in the country — the outspoken congresswoman won 64%, a 14-percentage point drop from her 2018 election.

There are a slew of factors that likely impacted Omar's race, including a third party on the ticket, a supremely well-funded Republican opponent, and the fact that she was virtually guaranteed to win reelection. But Democratic operatives and Minnesota politicos told Insider that Omar's underperformance was largely in line with down-ballot Democrats across the state, who underperformed Biden particularly in the suburbs.

A pro-marijuana alternative and a well-funded Republican

Experts chalked up much of Omar's underperformance to pro-marijuana legalization third parties, which recently achieved major party status and made it onto the ballot this year. The pro-cannabis candidate in Omar's district won 10% of the vote, most, if not all, of which pollsters say would have gone to Omar.

Donna Victoria, a Democratic pollster, called the third-party candidate the "single biggest factor" in Omar's underperformance. She said many voters likely felt compelled to vote for Biden given how competitive Minnesota's presidential race was expected to be, but may have felt more confident in casting a symbolic third-party vote in Omar's race as she was virtually guaranteed reelection.

"I don't think it's a very sexy answer, I think it's a structural answer," Victoria told Insider. "With Trump insisting he was going to win Minnesota, you weren't going to risk skipping Biden."

Tim Lindberg, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, said Omar was hurt most by the pro-marijuana third-party, which siphoned votes from Democrats across the state, and the significant money and negative messaging leveraged against her. Like fellow progressive freshman congresswomen of color, who call themselves the "Squad," Omar has attracted outsize national attention — and vilification — over the last few years.

"Whether it was the more xenophobic, racist kind of messages - 'go back to your country,' or whether it was more of a message of corruption or of nepotism, she was really targeted because of her role as part of the Squad and as a lightning rod for Republicans everywhere, but also for President Trump," Lindberg said.


—Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 25, 2020

Her reelection race reflected that dynamic: Omar's Republican opponent, Lacy Johnson, raise almost double the amount of money she did -- $10.1 million to Omar's $5.4 million.
In 2018, Omar's Republican opponent spent just $23,000. 

Suburban ticket-splitting

Down-ballot Democrats in Minnesota particularly underperformed Biden in the suburbs.

Minnesota was at the center of the nationwide protests for racial justice and against police brutality. It was George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May that sparked months of Black Lives Matter protests, some of which involved rioting and violence.

Some moderate Democratic voters were likely put off by Omar's call to dismantle the Minneapolis police department, criticism of her campaign payments to her husband, and a series of anti-Semitic remarks she's made. Omar also attracted a well-funded moderate primary opponent, whose attacks likely stuck with some portion of Democratic voters.

Blois Olson, a Minnesota-based political communications strategist, pointed to Biden's success and Omar's lackluster support in the wealthy Minneapolis suburb of Edina — a longtime bastion of country club Republicans that flipped blue nearly a decade ago. Olson argued Omar's underperformance in Edina is an indication that some suburban voters were turned off by Omar's more progressive politics and polarizing profile.

"One of the takeaways is, Democrats can't go that far or they will begin to lose the suburbs quickly," Olson told Insider. "She's a bridge too far for upper middle class suburban voters."

Supporters attend a campaign event with Dr. Jill Biden, wife of Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Joe Biden, at Utepils Brewery on October 3, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

But across the state, Republican state legislative candidates won down-ballot even when the same voters picked Biden over Trump.

This came as voter turnout in Minnesota jumped by about 11 percentage points to a staggering 80% this year — the highest turnout of any state in the country in a year when more Americans voted than ever before.

Biden did much better against President Donald Trump in Minnesota than Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Biden won the Midwestern state by about seven percentage points — a nearly six point swing against Trump from 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the state by 1.5 points.

Biden ran up his lead in Omar's district, which had among the highest turnout of any in Minnesota.

Omar's spokesperson, Jeremy Slevin, told Insider that Biden's large lead in Hennepin County had much to do with the Omar campaign's get out the vote effort.

Slevin said Omar's general election campaign devoted nearly all of its manpower and resources to boosting turnout for Biden. The campaign primarily worked with the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, knocking doors even while most Democratic campaigns across the country halted door-knocking during the pandemic.

"We didn't campaign for ourselves after the primary," Slevin said. "Biden vastly overperformed Clinton in 2016 and we're proud of that. That's what our goal was. Our goal wasn't to pad our numbers."

Olson credited Omar, who endorsed and campaigned with Sen. Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary, with the surge in turnout in Minneapolis.

"That's what she did, she delivers the grassroots," Olson said.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Biden Promises Bill Providing Pathway to Citizenship for 11 Million Illegal Immigrants in First 100 Days


Zachary Evans  NATIONAL REVIEW
Wed, November 25, 2020



Joe Biden vowed on Tuesday to send a bill to the Senate that would set up a path to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants.

The president-elect’s team has already indicated that Biden will attempt to overturn much of President Trump’s immigration agenda, including reinstating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and rescinding the Remain in Mexico policy.

“I will send an immigration bill to the United States Senate with a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people in America,” Biden told NBC’s Lester Holt.

Such a bill would likely be dead on arrival if Republicans hold on to their Senate majority. Georgia senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are both facing runoffs on January 5, and if one of them wins, Republicans will hold 51 seats in the chamber. However, if Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff both win the runoffs, the Senate will be tied 50-50, allowing vice president-elect Kamala Harris to serve as the tie-breaker.

Biden also plans to implement a 100-day freeze on deportations before reinstating Obama-era guidance that limits deportations to criminal offenders.

Once Biden takes office, his administration will likely be preoccupied with vaccine distribution and economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. While the Biden administration will eventually attempt to overhaul Trump’s immigration agenda, the process will still take time.

The Trump administration had an extraordinary preoccupation with immigration issues and they invested an enormous amount of attention and single-minded focus on immigration,” Doris Messiner, a former immigration official, told CBS earlier this month.. “An administration that wants to undo those changes would have to devote a similar amount of time and effort — and arguably more, because you don’t want to just be undoing things.”

More from National Review

Biden to Rescind Major Trump-Era Immigration Restrictions through Executive Orders

Biden Promises Zero Deportations in First 100 Days of Office

NAACP releases report on Breonna Taylor case

Tonya Pendleton THE GRIO
Thu, November 26, 2020

Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron showed a pro-police bias in his presentation of the case to the grand jury, according to the NAACP

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund has released a report that revealed new findings in the Breonna Taylor case. The report entitled “Justice Denied: An Overview of the Grand Jury Proceedings In The Breonna Taylor Case” said that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron showed a pro-police bias in his presentation of the case to the grand jury.

On Sept. 23, jurors declined to charge two of the three officers in the Taylor raid which took place on March 31. Acting on a ‘no-knock’ search warrant, the officers entered Taylor’s residence after midnight. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, a legal gun owner, fired a warning shot at the officers coming into their apartment and they returned fire, killing Taylor.

Breonna Taylor and Kenneth Walker (Credit: Taylor family)

Only one officer, Brett Hankinson, who was fired for not following proper police procedures in June, was charged. He was charged with three counts of wanton endangerment for shooting blindly in to Taylor’s apartment building, thus endangering the other residents. That meant that none of the officers in the raid were found to be liable in Taylor’s death.

Read More: Something is fishy about Daniel Cameron and the Breonna Taylor case

NAACP LDF report said Cameron “did not make a fair and comprehensive presentation to the grand jury about the involved officers’ conduct that led to Ms. Taylor’s killing, but instead displayed an inappropriate bias in favor of the officers.”

Protesters carried signs in support of justice for Breonna Taylor on September 23, 2020 in Chicago, Illinois. Across the country, protesters have taken to the streets after the grand jury’s decision to only charge one Louisville Metro Police officer in the raid in which Taylor was killed. (Photo by Natasha Moustache/Getty Images)

The NAACP also said that Cameron did not provide grand jurors with video or audio evidence that was taken at the scene, nor did he explain why the evidence wasn’t made available. And perhaps most damning, the report said that the grand jury testimony that had a heavy impact on the trial, came from one witness, whose testimony was contrary to the accounts of multiple other witnesses.


The Louisville Courier Journal · BT Sept. 21 – 1.MP3

In October, CNN reported that three grand jurors came forward anonymously to say they didn’t believe they were presented with enough information to fairly determine the facts of the case. One, who CNN identified as a white male on a call with the media, said that there was an “uproar” when jurors realized that no murder charges would be possible.

“Was justice was done? No, I feel that there was there’s quite a bit more that could have been done or should have been presented for us to deliberate on,” said grand juror 1, the white male.

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron stands on stage in an empty Mellon Auditorium while addressing the Republican National Convention on August 25, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

A second grand juror, a Black male, expressed his feelings about the proceedings, which line up with the findings of the report.

“We were open the whole time to listen to everything they presented, and it would have been nice if they had presented every charge, but they only presented those three charges, ” said the second grand juror.

The third juror concured that they had no other charges, aside from wanton endangerment, to consider.

Read More: BLM leader in Breonna Taylor protests fatally shot in carjacking

The report concluded by requesting, in line with the wishes of Taylor’s family, that another grand jury be convened so as to include other charges for consideration. The report recommends that the governor put into law the appointment of a special prosecutor in cases involving “potential criminal wrongdoing” by law enforcement to avoid any possibility of partiality in those cases.

Trump campaign sued for attempting to disenfranchise Black voters

Crystal Hill·Reporter
Wed, November 25, 2020

The Trump campaign has repeatedly attempted to use the judicial system to overturn the president’s defeat to President-elect Joe Biden, filing more than two dozen unsuccessful lawsuits since Election Day.

But the president’s campaign now finds itself on the other side of a legal case in a newly filed federal lawsuit alleging that it violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 when it sought to “disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters,” particularly African Americans in metropolitan areas of Michigan.

“It’s not even about the success of President Trump and the Trump campaign’s attempts to overturn the election,” Monique Lin-Luse, assistant counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, which filed the lawsuit, told Yahoo News. “The very attempt ... to overturn it by disenfranchising and de-legitimizing Black voters is what we believe is unlawful, and it's also dangerous and corrosive to our democracy.”

President Trump at the White House on Tuesday. (Susan Walsh/AP)

The lawsuit, filed Friday in a Washington, D.C., federal court, was brought on behalf of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and three Detroit residents over Trump’s apparent efforts to sway local officials in Wayne County, Mich., and state legislators to hold off on certifying votes or interfere in the electoral process.

President Trump met with Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey at the White House on Friday in what was viewed as an attempt by Trump to convince the GOP legislators to cooperate with a plan to override the will of voters in Michigan.

The lawmakers said after the meeting that they intend to “follow the law” regarding the selection of Michigan’s electors. Shirkey told the Associated Press that Trump talked about Michigan election results with them, but added that the meeting was harmless, the AP reported Tuesday.


Shirkey confirms to @AP Trump talked about Mich. election results with GOP delegation. He says at 1 point, Trump got Giuliani to call in & Giuliani repeated the Wayne County allegations he had raised in a news conference last Thursday. Shirkey says meeting was 'innocuous'
— David Eggert (@DavidEggert00) November 24, 2020

In Wayne County, Trump reportedly tried to pressure the two Republican members — Monica Palmer and William Hartmann — of the county’s four-person Board of Canvassers not to certify the results of the election there.

Palmer and Hartmann initially voted against certification, sparking outrage on social media, then backtracked and voted to certify the results. The AP reported that the president then personally called the two officials, after which they filed affidavits seeking to rescind their certification, which can’t be done, court records show.

“During the meeting, one of the Republican Canvassers said she would be open to certifying the rest of Wayne County (which is predominately white) but not Detroit (which is predominately Black),” the complaint said.

The lawsuit also cites a press conference last Thursday in Washington, during which Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s lawyers, claimed without evidence that the campaign had identified 300,000 illegitimate ballots.

“These ballots were all cast in Detroit,” Giuliani said, according to the complaint. “It changes the result of the election in Michigan, if you take out Wayne County.”

The case points to several tweets from Trump alleging fraud in Detroit. “Voter Fraud in Detroit is rampant, and has been for many years,” Trump tweeted on Nov. 19.

In Detroit, there are FAR MORE VOTES THAN PEOPLE. Nothing can be done to cure that giant scam. I win Michigan!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 18, 2020

Yahoo News sent an email to the Trump campaign seeking comment, and court records don’t yet list an attorney in this particular case. NPR reported Tuesday that the campaign denied going after Black voters. Senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis told the station that their only goal is “to ensure safe, secure and fair elections.”

The Michigan Board of State Canvassers voted Monday to certify the state’s election results, after days of speculation over whether outside influence from Trump’s campaign or false allegations of voter fraud would complicate a fairly routine process. Black people account for roughly 39 percent of the population in Wayne County, the largest county in the state, which includes Detroit, according to the most recent census data. Biden won there by more than a 2-1 margin, and won the state by more than 150,000 votes.

The civil case goes beyond Michigan, alleging a strategy from the Trump campaign to disenfranchise voters in cities with large swaths of Black voters.

A drive-by rally to certify the presidential election results in Lansing, Mich., on Nov. 14. 

(Paul Sancya/AP)

“President Trump and his campaign have repeatedly — and falsely — raised the specter of widespread fraud in Detroit and other cities with large Black populations, including Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta, in an effort to suggest votes from those cities should not be counted,” the complaint says.

Court records show that the case was assigned Tuesday to Judge Emmet Sullivan, the same judge who presided over the criminal case against former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn and who in early November ordered the U.S. Postal Service to sweep facilities in states including Georgia and Michigan to ensure that mail-in ballots were delivered.

The new lawsuit asks the court to declare that Trump’s campaign engaged in conduct that violated the Voting Rights Act and seeks to prohibit the campaign, and anyone acting in concert or on its behalf, from “continuing to exert pressure on state or local officials to disenfranchise Plaintiffs or other Black voters by not certifying the results of the November 2020 election, or by appointing an unlawful slate of electors that disenfranchises Plaintiffs or other Black voters.”

“To cast doubt on the election & to use Black ppl as a vehicle for that doubt is one of the most destructive ways to handle defeat in an election.” -⁦@JNelsonLDF on Trump’s odious maligning of the integrity of ballots cast by Black voters. ⁦@allinwithchris⁩ ⁦ pic.twitter.com/SCBrszs22G
— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sifill_LDF) November 25, 2020

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told Yahoo News that voter suppression is “alive and well” in the country. “What’s different about this,” she said, “is that this may mark the first time in recent history when we've seen a voter suppression effort orchestrated by a sitting president, that aimed to cancel out the votes of black voters on a massive and unprecedented scale.”

The lawsuit also raises the question of what, if any, consequences the Trump campaign and its allies could face in court for the state and federal civil cases they’ve filed that have yet to produce credible claims or evidence of widespread voter fraud.

“I think that a court could discourage frivolous litigation,” Justin Levitt, an elections expert and professor at Loyola Marymount University, told Yahoo News via email. “But it’s extremely unlikely that a court not presently hearing the litigation will be the court to engage.”

In other words, any sanctions against the Trump campaign in court would most likely come from a judge in one of the campaign’s election cases. Generally, sanctions are pursued by one of the parties, who files a motion detailing as much and a judge eventually rules on whether to grant it. Sanctions can include requiring the plaintiff to pay legal fees for the defendant.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani speaking at the Republican National Committee headquarters last week. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

Last week, lawyers for the city of Detroit sought sanctions against the Trump campaign’s counsel in federal court in the form of striking from the record the two affidavits submitted by Hartmann and Palmer in Wayne County in a federal lawsuit and a voluntary motion to dismiss from the campaign that falsely said the county declined to certify the results of the election, court records show.

“The affidavits and the text in the notice were submitted for an improper purpose: to make a gratuitous, public statement about their purported reason for voluntary dismissal, before the court could reject their baseless claims of election fraud,” the Nov. 19 legal filing said.

Clarke said that in one of the now-dismissed cases involving Maricopa County, Ariz., the judge essentially invited the county to seek to recoup legal fees from the campaign. An example, she said, of a court finding the campaign’s conduct to be “irresponsible and inappropriate.”

“Some [courts] have been making quite clear that they find the claims meritless, and if the meritless litigation continues, defendants may well seek sanctions in the cases where they are sued,” Levitt said.

Legal and elections experts have for weeks stressed to Yahoo News and other news outlets that the Trump campaign’s unsubstantiated allegations of fraud and voter irregularities will only serve to undermine voters’ confidence in the electoral process.

“They’re frivolous in the sense that the legal claims are baseless,” Clarke said. “They’re not frivolous to the extent that we have a sitting president who's placed a target on the backs of Black voters. It’s hard to ignore the grim racial reality driving this effort.”
_____

The 2020 election wasn’t ‘stolen.’ Here are all the facts that prove it.

Archbishop Gregory stood up to Trump. 

Now he's about to be the first Black cardinal in U.S.

Tracy Wilkinson Wed, November 25, 2020

Archbishop of Washington Wilton Gregory, center, walks past parishioners at St. Augustine Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. In a ceremony Saturday, Gregory and several others will be elevated to the cardinal's rank; he'll be the first Black American to reach that position. (Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)More

Few of his parishioners were surprised when Washington, D.C., Archbishop Wilton Gregory took on President Trump.

Gregory isn't known to speak out often about issues specifically facing Black Americans. But when he does, it is unambiguous and forceful — in words unusually strong for a man of the cloth.

In June, racial justice demonstrators outside the White House had just been tear-gassed so Trump could stand for a photo-op in front of the iconic St. John's Episcopal Church, awkwardly waving a Bible. In a statement the next day, Gregory condemned the president's actions as an attempt "to silence, scatter or intimidate" crowds "for a photo opportunity in front of a church."

Then he took aim at the largest lay Catholic organization in the U.S., the Knights of Columbus, which hosted Trump the following day at the St. John Paul II Shrine in northern Washington.

Archbishop Wilton Gregory, left, greets parishioners after Mass at St. Augustine Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. (Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)

"I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles," he said.

On Saturday, Pope Francis will elevate Gregory to cardinal, the first Black American to reach that position, the highest rank in the Roman Catholic Church and part of an elite that chooses popes and is the final word on doctrine.

In selecting Gregory, 72, Francis is rewarding a man who over the decades took courageous stands to end sexual abuse by clergy. They were positions that at times seemed to sideline his career, but that put him, his supporters say, on the right side of history and on a firm moral footing.

Over the years, Archbishop of Washington Wilton Gregory, 72, has spoken out against clergy sexual abuse and in June condemned the tear-gassing of antiracism protesters to clear the way for President Trump's photo-op outside an iconic church. 

(Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)More

Like most Black people in the United States, Gregory was not born into the Catholic faith, growing up in a Protestant denomination. It was largely with the great migration of Black Americans from the South to the North in the first half of the 20th century that many turned to Catholicism, drawn partly by its educational opportunities and social work in urban areas.

As a child on the South Side of Chicago, the young Gregory so admired the nuns who taught him in the grade at his Catholic school that he decided he wanted to become a priest. He informed the school's head father of this ambition, according to a story Gregory often relates. He was told: Well, maybe you should become a Catholic first.

And so he did, taking his first communion while in elementary school.

Msgr. Wilton Gregory, archbishop of Atlanta, left, embraces Msgr. Joseph F. Naumann, archbishop of Kansas City, Kan., inside St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican in 2005. 

(Pier Paolo Cito / Associated Press)

He was ordained a priest in 1973 in Chicago, a bishop a decade later, and legendary Cardinal Joseph Bernardin took him under his wing. Rather than send Gregory to head up a Black parish, or to take an auxiliary position in a large, prominent diocese, Bernardin dispatched him to a small and very troubled predominantly white diocese in rural Illinois.

It was there in Belleville, Ill., that Gregory got the on-the-job training that would inform the rest of his ministry. The community was plagued with numerous cases of priests who had allegedly sexually abused minors but gone unpunished. In Gregory's first year there, 1994, nine priests were removed from duty, nearly 10% of the roster of active clerics in the city.

Years later, when he was chosen to be president of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference from 2001-2004, he carried forth the same campaign to crack down on clerical sexual abuse, a widening scandal worldwide. He spoke of "zero tolerance" long before the Vatican adopted that policy. The Holy See continued for the most part to prefer to deal with abusive clergy privately, often transferring them rather than allowing them to be arrested.

Gregory was undaunted, his friends and colleagues say. He pushed all the way to the Vatican the Dallas Charter, a 2002 document that made it easier to remove sexual abusers. Praised in some circles as a trailblazer, Gregory's actions also stirred up antagonism against him among the church's more conservative factions.

Some in the church leadership say that the more conservative U.S. prelates chose to punish him, sending him to Atlanta as archbishop in 2005. While Atlanta was a perfectly fine, fast-growing archdiocese, it was not considered a natural stepping stone to being promoted to cardinal or winning other accolades.

Msgr. Edward Branch, now retired, has known Gregory for decades and worked with him in Atlanta, where Branch credits him with bringing organizational efficiency to the sprawling, million-member diocese. He established "priest Tuesdays," when any priest could drive into the archdiocese office, knock on the chancery door and have a private exchange with Gregory.

"He drips with confidence. He does not suffer fools gladly," Branch, 75, said. "He is not mean. but he knows what he wants and you know who is in charge."

Archbishop of Washington Wilton Gregory, left, hugs Noah Tanner at St. Augustine Catholic Church in Washington in 2019. Gregory "drips with confidence," retired Msgr. Edward Branch says. "He ... knows what he wants and you know who is in charge."

 (Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)More

Finally it was Pope Francis, who leads a more progressive wing of the church, who tapped Gregory as archbishop of Washington last year. Because of the ranking of the D.C. diocese, any archbishop is almost guaranteed to be elevated to cardinal. For Gregory, that opportunity came when Cardinal Donald Wuerl resigned in May 2019, after being named in a Pennsylvania grand jury report for bungling cases of abusive priests.

Though expected, Gregory's elevation represents a milestone for Black Catholics, who still represent a minority in the faith — about 3 million out of 70 million Catholic adults in the U.S.

"This was Francis' way of saying this guy got on the right side of history," said Jesuit Father Thomas Reese, a prominent commentator on the church and Vatican. Gregory "has the courage to take the tough decisions and not be afraid to lead."

And though the timing of Gregory's appointment was not tied to the protests against racial hatred and violence targeting Black people that swept the U.S. this summer, the moment could not have been more appropriate, activists say.

"He has this love for the faith and also for his African heritage," said Sister Barbara Spears, past president of the traditionally Black St. Francis Academy Catholic high school in Baltimore. "He is able to blend the two [seamlessly]. Not everyone has that gift."

Spears, 79, meets with Gregory periodically when a contingent of Black nuns, priests and deacons gets together as the Black Catholic caucus to discuss the trials and tribulations facing their congregations.

"He has love and respect for family, and when we African Americans talk about family, it's not just the blood family," Spears said. "It's about widening his tent. We are small but powerful. We hold onto God and each other."

Gregory rarely wades into politics, but his criticisms of Trump have been pointed — and welcomed by Black Catholics and many others.

After his installation as archbishop last year, now perched in the heart of the nation's capital with its large Black population, Gregory decried in his first statement after the ceremony that Trump's divisive rhetoric had "deepened divisions and diminished our national life."

"I have stressed that I am a pastor and fellow disciple of Jesus, not a political leader," he said in the same statement. "There are, however, sometimes, when a pastor and a disciple of Jesus is called to speak out to defend the dignity of all God's children."

His willingness to speak out only grew as Black men and women were being shot by police in questionable circumstances, including the death of George Floyd as a police officer kneeled on his neck in Minneapolis on May 25.

As his voice grew, so did the backlash. Some conservative Catholics, a group successfully courted by Trump, said it was unseemly for a priest to meddle in politics.

But Gregory compared his actions to clergy who marched in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s.

"If we don't work together, I believe we will miss perhaps the most significant moment for real national transition I've experienced," he said in a virtual panel discussion in June.

The recent comments are as "emotive" as Gregory gets, said Msgr. Kevin Irwin, a professor at Catholic University of America, who has known the cardinal-designate since the two were studying liturgy as graduate students at the Pontifical University of Sant'Anselmo on the Aventine Hill of Rome in the 1970s.

Though Gregory is generally measured in public, "when it is the time to act or do, he will strike," Irwin said. "And there is no question he is in the right."

Others disagreed. Brian Burch, president of a pro-Trump organization called CatholicVote, shot back that it was "regrettable" that Gregory chooses "to engage in a partisan attack on the president, especially when the country is in desperate need of healing and unity."

The White House also slammed Gregory for criticizing Trump's photo op, saying that it was shameful for the archbishop to "question the president's own deeply-held faith."

As the ceremony approaches in which he will receive the distinctive blood-red cardinal's cap, Gregory's supporters are rallying to defend him.

"He is not radical — he is principled," said Father John Cusick of Chicago, who has known Gregory since they were in seminary together at St. Mary of the Lake, near Chicago, in the early 1970s.

Often it's the church itself that is part of the problem, with its own history of racism and sexism, Sister Spears said.

Gregory "may not be able to change that," she added, "but he is a beacon of hope to call on the church to face racism, to acknowledge it," Spears said. "It's a journey, sometimes along a well-paved road and sometimes along a bumpy road."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Rev. Raphael Warnock considers vote sacred as pastor and Senate candidate

Warnock is promoting his plans to address issues of the poor that he recalls from his days growing up as the 11th of 12 children of Pentecostal preachers in public housing in Savannah.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock has adopted a VOTE mask he uses when out talking with the community. Image courtesy of Rev. Warnock Flickr November 13, 2020

By Adelle M. Banks

(RNS) — Many clergy, having risen to occupy the pulpit once held by Martin Luther King Jr. and his father, “Daddy King,” might consider their careers made and not look beyond the Kings’ historic, 6,000-member Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Many a politician, closing in on taking the top spot in a wide-open primary for a U.S. Senate seat, might take a few days before Election Day off from work to campaign.

Then there is the Rev. Raphael Warnock. In the days before Georgia voters gave Warnock, a Democrat, a seven-point victory and sent him into a runoff with GOP incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler, the pastor found time to participate in Ebenezer’s virtual worship services. In the prerecorded services, he immediately began cajoling viewers to get on social media to invite others to tune in.

“Maybe start a watch party,” he suggested, before making an announcement about free COVID-19 tests available on the church’s campus.

Warnock appeared online at his pulpit the following Sunday, looking crisp but relaxed behind “this sacred desk.” His runoff campaign was already underway, but he exuded the same ease he has shown over months of hard campaigning. (Inoculating himself against the kind of mudslinging Loeffler engaged in with her closest Republican rival, Doug Collins, in the primary, Warnock ran a parody negative ad against himself last week in which he admitted loving puppies.)

If the bald, bespectacled 51-year-old is conflicted about choosing between his prestigious pulpit or becoming Georgia’s first-ever African American senator, he doesn’t show it. Despite a direct question sent to his campaign by email, he hasn’t even made clear whether he will quit the job he has held since 2005 if he goes to Washington.

“It’s unusual for a pastor to get involved in something as messy as politics, but I see this as a continuation of a life of service: first as an agitator, then an advocate, and hopefully next as a legislator,” Warnock responded to Religion News Service on Wednesday through his campaign. “I say I’m stepping up to my next calling to serve, not stepping down from the pulpit.”

RELATED: Raphael Warnock, heir to MLK’s pulpit, heads for runoff for Georgia Senate seat

Indeed, it’s not always clear which role Warnock is inhabiting, pastor or politician. In church and on the campaign trail, he has compared voting to praying with stump-speech familiarity.

“We must vote because a vote is a kind of prayer about the kind of world that you want to live in,” he said at a Nov. 2 Democratic campaign rally in Atlanta before former President Obama took the stage.

Obama, who has spoken at Ebenezer, most recently at the funeral of U.S. Rep. John Lewis in July, praised Warnock at the rally for his 2014 arrest at a protest to expand Medicaid in Georgia.

Political and social engagement naturally comes with the pastor’s role at Ebenezer.

“King was deeply concerned about the issues facing everyday people,” said Marla Frederick, professor of religion and culture at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, recalling how the civil rights leader was assassinated as he made plans to march with sanitation workers seeking better wages.

“It’s the concerns about everyday people: living wages, access to health care, access to a good education, access to the democratic process, making sure that the democratic process is fair,” said Frederick. “Those are the types of things that King fought for. Those are the same types of things that Raphael Warnock wants to fight for in the Senate.”

These issues didn’t come to Warnock solely as part of King’s legacy but from his own experience as the 11th of 12 children of Pentecostal preachers, growing up in public housing in Savannah. He attended Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, starting on what Warnock called a “full faith scholarship” because he didn’t have sufficient funds. He then earned a master of divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1994.

As he pursued a doctoral degree, he served 10 years as a youth pastor and assistant minister at Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of New York’s most prominent Black churches, under Abyssinian’s longtime outspoken pastor, Calvin Butts. In 2001 he was called to lead Douglas Memorial Community Church, a 700-member congregation in West Baltimore. At 32, he urged the area’s clergy to be tested for AIDS to help remove its stigma and set a social justice agenda that included advocating for education.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock. Image courtesy of Rev. Warnock Flickr

At Ebenezer he has continued to pursue the problems that plague Black communities. A past social justice chair for the Progressive National Baptist Convention, he has represented the denomination in supporting Black farmers, advocating for prison reform and opposing Trump administration efforts to dismantle the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits explicit partisan activity by houses of worship.

On Juneteenth of 2019, Warnock and a group of interfaith partners launched the Multifaith Initiative to End Mass Incarceration in New York and Georgia. It is now expanding in other states.

“I believe that criminal justice is one of the unique areas where people on both sides of the aisle agree reform is desperately needed,” Warnock said.

Asked how he might help heal the country’s political and racial divisions, Warnock said his campaign was founded with a promise of “shared destiny” and unity.

“From day one, my campaign has been about representing all Georgians in the U.S. Senate, and that’s the kind of Senator I will be working with the Biden-Harris administration,” he told RNS. “We’re going to help our country live up to the highest meaning of its creed: equal protection under the law where everybody’s protected, where all of our children feel safe.”

An ally of the Black Lives Matter movement, he has tried to frame its goals as moral, not political. Since the pandemic closed his church, Warnock has opened the building to the public rarely, including for Lewis’ funeral and for that of Rayshard Brooks, a Black man fatally shot by a white Atlanta police officer. “Black Lives Matter is just a way of saying ‘see our humanity,'” he told those in attendance.

If he has gotten pushback for his progressive positions, said Justin Giboney, president of the AND Campaign, a nonpartisan think tank that promotes Christian civic engagement, it is from Georgia’s Black clergy. Some of his colleagues in the state, Giboney has heard, were disappointed that Warnock hasn’t challenged the Democrats’ broad support of abortion rights.

“I think if you talk to a lot of Black Christians there would be some distinction there,” Giboney said. “I think there would have been more pushback but for the Trump factor.”

Warnock, who has been endorsed by NARAL and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, pointed to his “lifelong work to protect and uplift human dignity,” including protecting women and families, and the racial divide in rates of maternal and infant mortality. “Black women are three times more likely to die as a result of childbirth,” he said. “People with any moral bearing should be deeply disturbed by that disparity.”

RELATED: Ebenezer pastor Raphael Warnock enters US Senate race

He also told RNS he wants to see the Senate pass the Equality Act, which features broad protections for the LGBTQ community with few exceptions for churches, charities and schools that object to same-sex marriage and homosexuality on religious grounds.

“Equality is a covenant that we share as Americans,” he said. “There is no such thing as equal rights for some.”

Rev. Raphael Warnock speaks to a crowd in Philadelphia after a Progressive National Baptist Convention march to the Liberty Bell. Warnock is the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Image courtesy of Gandhi Pinder

The Rev. T. DeWitt Smith, a former Progressive National Baptist Convention president, said Warnock’s stances on living wages, decent housing and voting rights will ensure that he will unite fellow clergy and his base alike. “I don’t think he would fumble the ball,” said Smith.

With Republicans’ options reduced to one candidate, Warnock now faces a tough battle in a state that gave Joe Biden an initial victory so narrow it has gone to a recount. And the negative campaigning has begun — Loeffler has raised an incident from 2002 when authorities accused Warnock of obstructing a child abuse investigation at a church camp. (“Law enforcement officials later apologized and praised him for his help in this investigation,” Warnock’s campaign told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week.)

As he headed to the runoff at the end of Election Day, Warnock expressed confidence in brighter days ahead — for his campaign and his state.

“Let us stick together, push through this dark night into the daybreak of a brand-new season,” he said. “The Bible tells us that ‘the light shines in the darkness. And the darkness cannot overcome it.’”

‘Not All Pastors Do That’: How Rev. Raphael Warnock’s Used His Pulpit to Fight AIDS
Sam Brodey, Scott Bixby DAILY BEAST

“We don’t like to talk about these things in church,” the Rev. Raphael Warnock cautioned the congregation at Atlanta’s storied Ebenezer Baptist Church in March 2010, but “I’m very convinced that if Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, he would be focused on the issue of HIV/AIDS.”

© Provided by The Daily Beast Getty

He then stepped back from the pulpit, sat down at a nearby table, and in front of the church’s 1,700 congregants, swabbed his gums to take a rapid OraQuick HIV test.

As Warnock campaigns in a historic U.S. Senate runoff amid the dark winter of the coronavirus pandemic, he has made addressing the virus—and its disproportionate effect on Georgia’s Black communities—a centerpiece of his run. But the 43-year-old Democrat has dedicated much of his life as a pastor and social justice activist to combatting another epidemic that has uniquely harmed Black Americans: HIV/AIDS.

“Not all pastors do that,” said James Curran, a professor of epidemiology and an HIV/AIDS expert at Emory University in Atlanta. “Early on, it was a very controversial topic in churches—that’s true in Black churches, white churches, evangelical churches, Catholic churches.”

Many churches didn’t want to touch the topic, Curran told The Daily Beast—or if they did, “they wanted to accept the sinner but not forgive the sin.”

As the respected pastor of one of the nation’s most revered Black churches—whose pulpit King preached from—Warnock has been in a unique position to fight what he frequently calls “the unholy trinity” of silence, shame, and stigma surrounding the virus. And he has taken on that project in a city where HIV/AIDS infection remains dangerously higher than elsewhere in the U.S.

Warnock’s campaign did not make him available to The Daily Beast for an interview in time for this article’s publication. But half a dozen HIV/AIDS experts and advocates in Georgia said that the reverend-turned-candidate has indeed walked the walk on preventing the disease, from dramatic gestures aimed squarely at stigma, to behind the scenes work on the finer points of policy—work that informs Warnock’s thinking on broader health inequities and the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding now.

In many respects, there are clear connections between HIV/AIDS and COVID-19. Like HIV, it has devastated Black communities in the state Warnock hopes to represent in the Senate—Black Georgians accounted for 80 percent of hospitalizations due to the virus when it first hit in March, researchers from Atlanta’s Morehouse College later found.

“We see in COVID the same sort of health inequities that we have seen for decades with HIV,” said Melanie Thompson, an Atlanta doctor who has worked on AIDS advocacy, research, and public policy for several decades. “If anything, COVID has magnified the existing disparities.”

But the pandemic has also cut across communities of every demographic in rural Georgia, where eight hospitals have been closed down due to lack of funding over the past 10 years, something Warnock has emphasized on the campaign trail.

“The virus has devastated the Black community in ways that are disproportionate,” Warnock told The American Prospect last month. “But as I move across disaffected, rural communities across Georgia, white sisters and brothers are suffering and wondering why the conversation in Washington is so disconnected from their actual lives.”

Warnock may soon get a chance to be one of 100 U.S. senators shaping policy on the COVID pandemic. But when it comes to the epidemic he’s already spent much of his life working on, few people in Georgia have had the unique kind of impact Warnock has, say those familiar with his work.

“My argument is that the symbolic precedes the structural,” said Charles Stephens, an HIV/AIDS activist in Atlanta and the founder of the Counter Narrative Project, an advocacy group for Black gay men. “I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss the value of symbolism… because of the number of people he can reach, because of what he represents.”

“That being said, that shouldn’t be the endpoint,” Stephens told The Daily Beast. “My hope for Rev. Warnock is that… he continues to use his platform to not only bring attention to HIV, and to inspire people to respond, but also to connect to HIV/AIDS as a racial justice issue, to look at institutional failures.”

Activists say that if Warnock is elected come Jan. 5, it may be the first time ever that a freshman senator arrives in Washington already steeped in the work of HIV/AIDS advocacy. And there are signs that Warnock, if elected, would make combating HIV/AIDS a key part of his portfolio as a lawmaker: his Senate campaign website, for instance, devotes a page to LGBTQ issues and touches on funding for PrEP, an HIV prevention drug.

Local HIV/AIDS advocates, like Jeff Graham, can’t remember the last time, if ever, that a U.S. Senate candidate in Georgia devoted prominent space on their platform to this issue in such a way. Graham, the director of the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Georgia, said he’d bring a unique perspective to the issue on Capitol Hill.

“Frankly, even though there’s been support from U.S. senators of both parties in the past, we haven't had that sort of strong personal connection and experience of what day to day life is for people with AIDS,” he said.

That connection began in Baltimore, two decades ago, when Warnock took the first head pastor job of his career, at Douglas Memorial Community Church. In the early 2000s, HIV/AIDS cases were on the rise, rising past the 10,000 mark in the city. Of all cases, nearly 90 percent were among Black men and women.

“Everything I do is theologically and biblically informed,” Warnock told the Baltimore Sun in 2001, weeks before he took the reins of one of the city’s largest and most influential churches.
And most influential churches. Quoting the Old Testament prophet Hosea—”My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”—Warnock warned that willful ignorance about HIV was hollowing out the communities that he was seeking to serve.

“That is literally the case with regard to HIV/AIDS,” Warnock said at the time. “People do not know what they need to know about the virus itself, and they do not know their HIV status. If the clergy went to get tested en masse, we could create a climate where you remove the stigma.”

Warnock’s passion for fighting the epidemic followed him to Atlanta, which has become a national hotspot for new infections, particularly among Black communities. Georgia ranks among the top five states for new HIV infections nationwide—it had the highest rate per capita of any state in 2018—and AIDS is the leading cause of death for Black men between the ages of 35 and 44 in the state. In 2018, Atlanta’s case rate reached such heights that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, likened the city’s rate of infection to those in sub-Saharan Africa.

Graham said that he served with Warnock on an HIV/AIDS advisory board in Atlanta, shortly after the young preacher first arrived there from Baltimore in 2005, at a time when focus centered on getting federal and state dollars toward prevention measures.

In sermons, public remarks and newspaper editorials, Warnock has frequently invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to push for greater national focus on the epidemic—particularly in light of the fact that, as he noted during a special interest session on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in 2008, “as the epidemic has swung to people of color, the money has not followed.”

“One can almost hear Dr. King’s voice thundering from the crypt,” Warnock wrote in a 2003 opinion piece in the Baltimore Sun in the leadup to the Iraq War. “‘A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.’”

Following in King’s example, Warnock would later take his work on combating the epidemic to those in power. In 2014, he was arrested outside the state capitol while protesting Republicans’ refusal to expand Medicaid. Three years later, he was again arrested in Washington, D.C. during a protest in the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building against President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts.

The budget would have slashed funding for PEPFAR—the federal program aimed at combating HIV/AIDS in the world's poorest countries—by 17 percent, and totally eliminated federal funding for AIDS education and training centers.

#Atlanta @RaphaelWarnock arrested w/other ministers at U.S. Captiol while demanding fair healthcare #blackclergyvoices #BlackClergyUprising pic.twitter.com/ke8SC6DMjU— TenishaTaylorMade (@TeeTaylorMade) July 18, 2017

After his arrest, he told reporters that “the national budget is not just a fiscal document, but a moral document,” and that in light of those who would suffer from the cuts to social and health services, “my getting arrested is a small price to pay.”

Allies of Warnock’s also say that his focus on HIV/AIDS is inextricably linked with the issue he’s putting at the forefront of his campaign, health care. Nan Orrock, a Democratic state senator who is a friend and neighbor of Warnock’s, talked about his involvement in the years-long push to expand Medicaid in Georgia, something that he has pledged to do on the federal level if elected.

A string of GOP governors in Georgia have successfully blocked the option to expand Medicaid, which would be backed by federal dollars under the Affordable Care Act, while deep-red states like Idaho and Nebraska have chosen to do so.

Advocates view that as a serious obstacle to HIV/AIDS treatment in Georgia. Expanding Medicaid, said Orrock, would be “critically important in the battle to protect people from HIV infection, and to provide life-saving health services when you’re battling HIV.” Warnock’s commitment on the issue—evinced by his arrests, said Orrock—“speaks for itself.”

But Warnock has also sought to work within government to address the HIV/AIDS crisis within Black communities, putting his considerable influence behind the National Black Clergy for the Elimination of AIDS Act, landmark legislation that would create targeted grants for faith-based organizations to provide HIV testing, prevention services, and community outreach.

If elected, HIV/AIDS advocates hope that Warnock would become one of the Senate’s most forceful advocates for increasing funding for the disease’s prevention and treatment—particularly for the Ryan White program, a federal initiative that provides treatment for roughly half a million people with HIV, usually from the neediest populations. The program has in recent years been funded at somewhat stagnant levels, experts say, though those in Georgia note that the previous occupant of the seat Warnock is running for, former Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), was considered a reliable ally in increasing funding.

In response to an inquiry from The Daily Beast, Warnock’s campaign said that working to lower the cost of HIV/AIDS treatment and prescriptions will be among his priorities in expanding health care access more generally.

If he defeats Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) in the runoff, Warnock will be thrust into office as Congress and President-elect Joe Biden, in all likelihood, strive to put together a sweeping COVID-19 relief package after months of fruitless negotiations and gridlock.

Observers can’t help but note how Warnock’s work on HIV/AIDS positions him as an uncommon voice on COVID-19. While the coronavirus carries with it hardly any of the social stigma of HIV, there remains distrust within the broader public, and within the Black community in particular, about treatment measures, such as a forthcoming vaccine. A Gallup poll released on Oct. 17 found that six in ten Americans would agree to take an FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine. But less than half of nonwhite Americans said they would agree.

The legacy of the Tuskegee experiment, in which U.S. government public health officials studied Black men with syphilis while denying them treatment in the mid-20th century, is alive and well, said Thompson, and several Atlanta public health experts concurred that the lingering deficit of trust is very real.

“I think building back that trust is not a matter of words and platitudes, it’s a matter of action,” said Thompson. “Warnock is the kind of guy who will walk the walk, put actions there that will help to rebuild trust.”

Harry Heiman, a doctor and professor of public health at Georgia State University in Atlanta, agreed, saying, “if there aren't targeted strategies specific to those communities being disproportionately impacted, we’re going to fail, in the same way we're trying to overcome historical failures in HIV/AIDS.”

Asked if Warnock might reprise his famous HIV test from the pulpit by taking a COVID test in front of congregants, or constituents if elected, his campaign said he will take a COVID-19 vaccine when available and recommended by medical professionals, and “in following science and trusted scientists, he will encourage others to do the same.”

Still, many experts couldn’t help but imagine the visual of Warnock reprising the display that turned his HIV advocacy into headlines, and spoke to his skill as a communicator. “Think about the politics of a Senator Warnock getting a COVID vaccination on television,” said Heiman. “He understands, literally, the power of the pulpit.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Georgia Senate candidate Raphael Warnock — and his dog — respond to smear ads

Catherine Garcia
Tue, November 24, 2020

In a clever new ad, Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock found a new way to drop the mic.

Warnock is running against Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) in the Jan. 5 runoff election. In a new ad he tweeted out Tuesday, Warnock is shown taking his dog on a walk. In an earlier campaign ad, Warnock predicted there would be lots of false claims leveled against him, and "that's exactly what happened," he said. "You would think that Kelly Loeffler might have something good to say about herself, if she really wants to represent Georgia."

Instead, Warnock continued, "she's trying to scare people by taking things I've said out of context from over 25 years of being a pastor." By this point, Warnock and his pup were at the end of their walk, and he was holding a bag of dog feces. As he dropped the bag in a trash can, Warnock said, "I think Georgians will see her ads for what they are — don't you?" His dog barked in agreement — and then approved the message. 

Watch the ad below.


I told you the smear ads were coming, but Georgians will see Sen. @Kloeffler’s ads for what they are. pic.twitter.com/0sgU8ndC63
— Reverend Raphael Warnock (@ReverendWarnock) November 24, 2020

Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock bet big on 'record-shattering turnout' in Georgia

Democratic Senate hopeful Jon Ossoff of Georgia holds drive-through event to ‘inspire people out to the polls’

Jon Ossoff, one of the two Democrats running for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, is looking to build off President-elect Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the state. By holding various socially distanced events all over Georgia to connect with voters, Ossoff hopes the more engagement he has with residents will translate to historic voter turnout in the Jan. 5 runoff.



Marquise Francis
·National Reporter & Producer
Wed, November 25, 2020

ATLANTA — Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the two Democrats running for the Senate in Georgia’s January runoff races, are looking to build off President-elect Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the state.

“Georgia voters recognize that our capacity to enact legislation ... depends upon winning these two Senate races,” Ossoff told Yahoo News on Tuesday, while hosting a drive-through yard-sign giveaway in downtown Atlanta.

As it stands, Republicans have 50 seats in the Senate, while Democrats control 48. If Warnock and Ossoff both win, Democrats will take control of the chamber in January because Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will be able to cast any tie-breaking votes.

But if either candidate loses, Republicans will retain their Senate majority — and their ability to block progressive legislation from becoming law.

Ossoff and Warnock face steep odds despite the fact that the state turned blue in the November election. For one thing, the party that wins the presidency tends to lose in hotly contested subsequent elections. Republican Chris Christie, for example, was elected governor of deep-blue New Jersey just months after President Barack Obama was inaugurated — a preview of the big Republican gains that occurred during the 2010 midterm elections.

But Democrats say they’ve figured out how to win in Georgia, a state that had voted Republican in six straight presidential elections between 1996 and 2016 and hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in 20 years. And Republicans have won all but one of the statewide general election runoffs in Georgia since 1988.

Georgia Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Raphael Warnock, left, and Jon Ossoff at a rally in Marietta, Ga., on Nov. 15. (Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

“What we are focusing on when we go and talk to voters in these communities, something that we learned from Stacey Abrams, is we go and ask them what they need, and when they answer … we let them know Rev. Warnock is on the ballot,” Terrance Clark, the Warnock campaign’s communications director, told Yahoo News. “Let them know the first step to getting those things done is voting.”

Democrats are hoping that if they can keep their voters enthusiastic and mobilized after Biden’s win while at the same time registering new voters, they can get Warnock and Ossoff to Washington.

Ossoff held a socially distant event on Tuesday, which was one of the many moves by the campaign to keep Democratic voters engaged ahead of the runoff. In addition to concert-style drive-in rallies, the campaign plans an aggressive voter registration effort, including targeting more than 23,000 young Georgians who were not 18 at the time of the Nov. 3 election but will be by Jan. 5, the date of the runoff.

The campaign is also working closely with progressive grassroots organizations such as Georgia Stand Up and Fair Fight, which is led by Stacey Abrams. Abrams, a former state legislator and gubernatorial candidate, had been laying the groundwork to flip Georgia blue for years, and was widely praised for her efforts in the aftermath of Biden’s victory.

To date, more than 762,000 absentee ballots have been requested in Georgia, according to WSB-TV. This figure already triples the amount of ballots requested in all of the state’s elections in 2018.

“I’m hearing voters are invigorated by Joe Biden’s victory here, who recognize that Trump is leaving,” Ossoff said. “And now we have the opportunity to define the next year in our history, but we can’t do that unless we win these two Senate races. … This is about energizing, unprecedented, record-shattering turnout here in Georgia.”

Ossoff waves after giving a yard sign to a supporter during a drive-through event on Nov. 22. (Austin McAfee/Icon Sportswire)

Ossoff feels Democratic enthusiasm is as high as it’s ever been in Georgia. But, he adds, winning both Senate seats is critical to Biden’s administration getting anything meaningful done.

Voter turnout is directly attributable to political engagement and trust in candidates, something both Ossoff and Warnock hope to build as they campaign all over the state. However, voter turnout tends to decrease substantially outside of presidential elections, in particular when it comes to special elections and runoffs.

“Of 171 regularly scheduled primary runoffs for U.S. House and U.S. Senate from 1994 to 2012, all but six of them resulted in a turnout decrease between the initial primary and the runoff, meaning that 96.5% of federal runoff elections had fewer people voting in the second round than in the first,” according to FairVote, a group that advocates for various election reforms. “The average reduction in turnout was 35.3%.”

Democrats say they understand that Black voters are the voting bloc most important to their success at the polls — and that, in Ossoff’s words, they “cannot be taken for granted.”

“The strength of Democratic candidates up and down the ballot these last five years in Georgia has been driven by powerful, determined turnout among Black voters in Georgia,” Ossoff said. “Black voters are the heart and soul of the Democratic electorate here in Georgia, the focus of our turnout efforts, and cannot be taken for granted.”

As senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. once pastored, Warnock is hopeful that his biography and charisma will take him across the finish line.

“It’s not all about reinventing the wheel, but putting the wheel on a new vehicle,” Clark, the Warnock communications director, said. “There is already a national enthusiasm, and you’re seeing it play out with the organic interest. … People see themselves in Warnock.”

Stacey Abrams, former candidate for Georgia governor, is trying to help Warnock win his Senate runoff. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)

Clark says his campaign is going back to knocking on doors — a strategy that many Democrats abandoned over the past year due to the pandemic but has long been understood as one of the most effective ways to recruit and mobilize voters. They’re also co-hosting events with small businesses, connecting with more rural communities in south Georgia and working to engage smaller but growing groups such as Asian Americans.

“Georgia is a diverse state, and many areas are changing,” Clark said. “It’s not the same Georgia of 2014, and Rev. Warnock is able to resonate with voters in such a way. … People see the electorate as just Black and white, [but it’s so much more].”

Warnock’s campaign has also emphasized social media, and his Twitter following has gained hundreds of thousands of followers since early November, surpassing the 400,000 mark in recent weeks. Print and digital ad buys on Hulu and YouTube have also been a focus of the campaign. You can’t turn on Hulu for too long in Georgia without seeing a commercial starring Warnock — with his small dog — criticizing his opponent, incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler.

I told you the smear ads were coming, but Georgians will see Sen. @Kloeffler’s ads for what they are. pic.twitter.com/0sgU8ndC63
— Reverend Raphael Warnock (@ReverendWarnock) November 24, 2020

Loeffler and Sen. David Perdue, the other Republican in the race, did not return a request for comment for this article.

While many critics say Democrats operate at a disadvantage in runoff races, Clark said this year will prove to be different.

“The reality is, year over year Democrats have performed better in these runoffs,” he said. “You can see what happened in 2018 [with Abrams]. The base is there. The floor is there. … We have a coordinated effort rather than the fearmongering on the other side.”

Election experts believe the Senate races will go down to the wire. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, told Yahoo News last week that he believes this is going to be a “tight, competitive race.”

“This election is going to be different,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta. “Now that we know there are roughly equal numbers of Republican and Democratic voters in the state, we can expect that both parties are going to do everything they can to get those people who showed up to vote [on Election Day] and before [in early voting] out to vote in the runoff election.”

Rallygoers in Atlanta's Freedom Park deliver the "Count Every Vote" message in the wake of the presidential election results on Nov. 7. (Marcus Ingram/Getty Images for MoveOn)

It’s a picture that is becoming clearer by the day to candidates on both the Democratic and Republican sides that only a few points may separate the winner from the loser on Jan. 5.

“When we get down to this, it will be a 1 or 2 point race,” Clark said. “We are looking to push it over the top with these moves.”

Below are key dates for Georgians to remember ahead of the state’s Senate runoff elections on Jan. 5, 2021:


Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images, Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images