DAY TWENTY-NINE - RAFAEL WARNOCK

Sep 28

Day Twenty-Nine | Rev. Dr. Rafael Warnock | Georgia Senate
687 Sawbuck Patriots | $7173 pledged today | $237,717 donated overall

Team:

THE SITUATION: Georgia has two Senate races going on. One of them is simpler; Jon Ossoff is our candidate in it, we raised him over $10,000 a week ago, and the race between him and his sole R opponent will be decided during the November election.

The other one - today’s focus - is a knife fight in a phone booth compared to the Ossoff race, that requires calculus and exponents and a smudging stick to figure out.

How’d we get here? Senator Johnny Isakson retired on December 31, 2019 due to health concerns. (Narrator voice: “99 other Senators who did NOT resign as 2020 arrived are slightly jealous of Isakson, because 2020.”) President Tantrum told Gov. Brian Kemp to appoint Rep. Doug Collins, but Kemp appointed someone else - we’ll get there in a second.

This race is supremely fragmented and unpredictable. Anything could happen, and because it’s 2020, everything probably will.

THE COMPETITION: Kelly Loeffler. Where to start? She’s America’s richest Senator, worth (along with her husband) over a half billion dollars. She’s never stood for public election or worked in government before arriving in the Senate in January. She and her husband live in Atlanta’s most expensive home, in a place called - no kidding - Tuxedo Park. She is planning to spend $20M of her money on her race. She’s married to the founder of International Exchange, a Fortune 500 company that runs financial exchanges all over the world. She votes with Trump exactly 100% of the time.

Pro-wall, anti-choice, pro-Comey Barrett, and, of course, the subject of an investigation after she and her husband dumped a lot of stock at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, before alerting Americans that they might be alarmed enough to to - you know - dump stock.

She’s running to be elected in her own right, but isn’t the only R in the race. Rep. Doug Collins is also in the race, as are a couple Democrats. Why? Because they’re all running to fill out Isakson’s term, and November is not the general election, it’s actually a PRIMARY. If someone gets 50% plus one vote in November, they’ll be named Senator and speedily installed. But that’s not expected to happen; nobody’s polling over 25% these days.

OUR CANDIDATE: Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of the famed Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, is the leading Democratic candidate in the race. Warnock, Loeffler and Collins are basically bunched together in the manymanymany polls that have been taken, some with Loeffler leading, and some with Warnock leading. There’s a fellow named Matt Lieberman (also a D) in fourth, substantially behind the top three. There are 21 names in all on the November third ballot, and these are the four polling above asterisk level.

President Obama and other D leaders have recently been calling upon Lieberman to drop out of the race, to help ensure that a runoff with two Rs doesn’t come to pass, which is a possibility. It’s very likely, based on various trends and prevailing narratives, that Warnock will outpoll Lieberman (son of former Senator and former Democrat Joe Lieberman) in November, so the race has become a matter of coalescing behind the strongest Democrat. As one NYT story said a couple days ago, Lieberman “...is resisting calls from just about everyone that he withdraw” to help Warnock and the D party. So far, he's resisting those entreaties.

Dr. Warnock holds multiple masters degrees and a doctorate, has worked to increase voter registration, has, through his ministry, joined the topics of climate change and religion, and has served as a moral voice of clarity for many public and private leaders over the years. Knocking off the fabulously wealthy appointed Senator in Georgia will take a unified effort; I’m asking the Sawbuck Patriots to get behind our best chance to do so.

The math here is complicated, given the race’s dynamics and status. But when an incumbent Senator is polling at 25% or under, the math says that SOMETHING can happen - and we all know that the Senate is suddenly existentially important.

With Georgia serving as a huge battleground state, where Dems are attempting to wrest it away from Trump and to Biden, and where another well-funded Senate battle is driving up registration and turnout, the math says that we have to try - and it is important to help Jaime Harrison, Mike Espy, and Rafael Warnock win their Senate races in the American south in 2020.

Sawbuck Patriots, it’s go time: click HERE and send $10 (or more) to Rafael’s campaign. Our collective effort will invest $7173 today.

Thank you.

- Alex

Alex Clemens

DAY TWENTY-NINE - RAFAEL WARNOCK

Sawbuck Patriots, it’s go time: click HERE and send $10 (or more) to Rafael’s campaign. Our collective effort will invest $7173 today.

DAY THIRTY - CAL CUNNINGHAM

DAY TWENTY-EIGHT - AL GROSS

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