The Sunday Runoff

The 2022 United States Senate election in Georgia was held on November 8, 2022, to elect a member of the U.S. Senate to represent the state of Georgia. Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock won his first full term in office, defeating Republican former football player Herschel Walker. Under Georgia's two-round system, Warnock was re-elected in a runoff election on December 6 after neither candidate received over 50% of the vote on November 8. Warnock's win was the only statewide victory for Democrats in Georgia in 2022. Warnock, who won a shortened term to the seat in a 2020–21 special election, was nominated in the May 24 primary with 96% of the vote against minimal opposition. Walker, who was endorsed by former president Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, won the Republican nomination with 68% of the vote over former state agriculture commissioner Gary Black. It was the first U.S. Senate election in Georgia history and among five nationwide since the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913 in which both major party nominees were Black. In the November 8 election, Warnock received 49.4% of the vote and Walker received 48.5%, triggering the December 6 runoff. Warnock defeated Walker by a 2.8% margin in the runoff, becoming the first African-American from Georgia elected to a full term in the U.S. Senate and the first Democrat to win a full term at this seat since Wyche Fowler in 1986. Warnock's victory also secured an outright majority for Senate Democrats for the first time since 2015, with a net gain of one seat in the 2022 midterms. This was the first time since 1998 that Georgia voted for different parties for U.S. senator and governor in the same election cycle. It was the third-closest Senate election of the 2022 midterms after Nevada and Wisconsin.