Sen. Raphael Warnock wins Georgia runoff
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) has held onto his seat, defeating Republican Herschel Walker in a runoff race, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, and The Associated Press project.
With about 95 percent of votes in, Warnock has 50.6 percent of the vote, while Walker has 49.4 percent. This runoff was held because neither candidate received more than half of the vote during November's election, when a third candidate was also on the ballot.
Warnock, who won a special election runoff in January 2021 to become Georgia's first Black senator, will serve a full six-year term, and his win gives the Democrats a 51-49 Senate majority. He is a senior pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.
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Walker, a longtime friend of former President Donald Trump, was a football star at the University of Georgia and later in the NFL. Over the course of the campaign, two women came forward and accused Walker of paying for their abortions, and his son Christian said he threatened to kill him and his mother.
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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