On Jan. 5, Georgia voters will head to the polls again to decide whether Republican incumbents Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue will retain their seats or if their Democratic challengers Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff will prevail.
The run-off races for Georgia’s senate seats are being watched around the world since they will determine who has the balance of power in the congressional body.
With it begin called two of the most important Senate races in history, GOP candidates are doing everything they can to try and pull out a victory.
One of the most recent strategies by Loeffler’s campaign has been to launch vicious attacks on Warnock, who is the senior pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church (The church was once pastored by Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. and was heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement).
Ads from Loeffler’s camp accuse Warnock of him of celebrating hatred by allying with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the once longtime pastor of former President Barack Obama who came under fire for remarks from his sermons which included him saying “God d**m America” for its racist history.
In the sermon, Wright said the following: “When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. … The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God d— America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God d— America for treating our citizens as less than human. God d— America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme! The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent. Think about this, think about this. For every one Oprah, a billionaire, you got 5 million Blacks who are out of work.”
In the ads, the announcer calls Warnock a “radical’s radical and says “Warnock defended Jeremiah Wright’s hatred, then gave him an award for truth-telling. … Warnock celebrated anti-American hatred.”
However, the ad includes heavily edited footage from a Fox News interview from 2008 that omits key information and context, The Washington Post reported.
“But that snippet leaves off a long, nuanced explanation from Warnock. ‘We celebrate, uh, Reverend Wright in the same way that we celebrate the truth-telling tradition of the Black church, which when preachers tell the truth very often it makes people uncomfortable.’ He went on to say that ‘the country had been done a disservice’ by the airing of clips of Wright without the context in which he made these remarks,” the Post reported.
Loeffler’s campaign also has a website called Radical Raphael.com that calls Warnock, “The Most Radical and Dangerous Candidate in America.” Her ads also leave out the fact that it was the divinity school Warnock attended that honored Wright, not Warnock himself, Politifact reported.
The attacks, however, don’t seem to be working as a recent poll exclusively commissioned by 11Alive shows though the races are still too tight to call – Warnock is leading over Loeffler.
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According to the SurveyUSA Poll, Warnock leads Loeffler 52 to 45 percent. In the other race between Ossoff and Perdue, they each have 50 percent of the vote, with Ossoff having a 2 point lead.
Loeffler’s campaign has also painted Warnock as anti-Israel, but the reverend called the accusation false.
“I know Rev. Wright,” Warnock told MSNBC’s Willie Geist. “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’ve never defended anti-Semitic comments from anyone and Kelly Loeffler knows better … Any fair-thinking person would recognize that everything a government does, even the American government, is not consistent with God’s dream for the world.”
A spokesperson for his campaign doubled down on Warnock’s statements.
“The reservations he (Warnock) has expressed about settlement activity do not change his strong support for Israel and belief in its security — which is exactly why he opposes ending direct military aid to such a strong ally,” the spokesperson to the New York Post.
