Morning Joe reporter Daniela Pierre-Bravo talks with Georgia Gen Z voters ahead of the Senate runoff between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker to find out what matters to them.
Morning Joe, MSNBC
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Incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock has an apparent lead over GOP challenger Herschel Walker in the race that will decide the final balance of power in the chamber, according to a poll released Monday by UMass Lowell’s Center for Public Opinion.
The survey found Warnock leads 51% to Walker’s 46% among 1,300 respondents identifying as likely voters in the Georgia runoff election to be held tomorrow, Tuesday, Dec. 6. Less than .5% of respondents said they would be voting for another candidate, which is not possible under Georgia’s election law, while 2% said they were undecided. …
Other poll findings bode well for Warnock. Forty-nine percent of respondents view him favorably, 45% view him unfavorably. In comparison, 39% of respondents view Walker favorably, 51% view him unfavorably. CONTINUED
Center for Public Opinion, University of Massachusetts Lowell
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Donald Trump’s continued presence on the American political scene is one of the reasons Republicans underperformed in this year’s midterm elections. The former president’s debilitating effect on his party was perhaps no more evident than in Georgia, where Trump’s Republican nemesis Gov. Brian Kemp cruised to reelection, while his preferred Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, was forced into a runoff with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.
Now with the Georgia Senate runoff just two days away, those problems are clearer than ever. Trump’s unpopularity in Georgia is causing him to stay out of the state in the campaign’s final days and is part of a deeper reshaping of political alignments in America. CONTINUED
Harry Enten, CNN
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The immediate stakes for Tuesday’s Senate runoff in Georgia are not especially huge. The Democrats already know they will control the upper chamber of Congress since they flipped Pennsylvania’s Senate seat with John Fetterman’s win.
But looking ahead to 2024, Georgia’s seat looks a lot more important as a way for Democrats to bank an advantage with a potentially daunting road ahead. Two years from now the Democrats will be defending a lot more turf than Republicans, and some states look like they could be particularly difficult terrain.
Let’s start with the most basic figures. Democrats or Democrat-leaning independents hold 23 of the 33 Senate seats with elections in 2024. CONTINUED
Dante Chinni, NBC News
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… Voters with no religious affiliation supported Democratic candidates and abortion rights by staggering percentages in the 2022 midterm elections.
And they’re voting in large numbers. In 2022, some 22% of voters claimed no religious affiliation, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 94,000 voters nationwide. They contributed to voting coalitions that gave Democrats victories in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. The unaffiliated — often nicknamed the “nones” — voted for Democratic House candidates nationwide over Republicans by more than a 2-1 margin (65% to 31%), according to VoteCast. …
For all the talk of the overwhelmingly Republican voting by white evangelical Christians in recent elections, the unaffiliated are making their presence felt. CONTINUED
Peter Smith, Associated Press
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The role of extremist white nationalists in the GOP may be approaching an inflection point.
The backlash against former President Donald Trump’s meeting with Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist, anti-Semite, and Christian nationalist, has compelled more Republican officeholders than at any point since the Charlottesville riot in 2017 to publicly condemn those extremist views.
Yet few GOP officials have criticized the former president personally—much less declared that Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and Ye, the rapper (formerly known as Kanye West) who has become a geyser of anti-Semitic bile, renders him unfit to serve as president again.
Even this distancing from Fuentes (if not Trump) comes as House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, the putative next speaker, is poised to restore prominent committee assignments for Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, two House Republicans who have publicly associated with Fuentes. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic
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