ATLANTA — Racial appeals may drive the U.S. Senate runoffs over the next month – with white voters more likely to vote Republican and Black voters more likely to vote Democratic.
Some of them emerged in the final moments of Sunday's GPB debate between Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Kelly Loeffler.
"America needs to repent for its worship of whiteness," Warnock is heard saying in a sermon, played earlier this month on Fox News as a "gotcha" moment.
Warnock was preaching about America’s history of white supremacy
Loeffler used the line to attack the African American pastor in Sunday’s debate.
"Coming from someone who has divided America, continually, he has called for Americans to repent for their worship of whiteness," Loeffler said as Sunday's debate wound down.
She doubled down on it in a tweet a few hours later.
Loeffler's attack came after Warnock accused her of accepting an endorsement from a QAnon acolyte, Congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, and doing an interview with a white supremacist.
Earlier in the debate, the pair tangled over police reform. Warnock favors it in light of deadly force incidents against African Americans that took the lives of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. Loeffler tells Republican backers she "will always back the blue."
Loeffler can win on Jan. 5 if Republicans can turn out their base voters better than Democrats can. An 11Alive poll earlier this month showed Warnock leading. But it showed 67 percent of white Georgia voters are supporting Loeffler while 90 percent of Black voters are backing Warnock.
Loeffler has spent the first month of the election trying to drive up turnout of the mostly white voters who back President Trump. In a special election where turnout is likely to drop, Warnock has conversely pleaded with Black voters to vote one more time.
"It’s played out in every media, social media, Black press, that’s the message: The Black vote matters now more than ever. It’s really underscored how this is a racial thing," said Maynard Eaton, a co-founder of a longtime Atlanta cable program called Newsmakers Live.
Eaton said racial messaging can backfire. But he said it also works.
"It’s dirty, it’s nasty. It’s also what’s going to determine this race one way or the other," Eaton said.
Although this Senate runoff features a Black candidate and a white candidate, our poll shows a similar racial divide in the other U.S. Senate runoff between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican David Perdue
Both races will depend on who turns out as early voting starts in a week.