Thou, too, sail on, O ship of state, Sail on O union, strong and great; Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

I hope you get to see Raphael Warnock’s victory speech last night. He is quite the preacher/speaker. Talked of his mother in Waycross, picking other people’s cotton and gathering other people’s tobacco. His father in Savannah, fixing cars during the week and fixing souls on Sunday morning. He is, he said, Georgia, “I am an example and an iteration of its history, of its peril and promise, of the brutality and the possibilities.” And “…. a vote is a kind of a prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children.”

There is a lot of writing this morning about the takeaways from this run off election. I have some thoughts which I haven’t yet seen expressed elsewhere.

1. Turnout was strong – both early and day-of voting. This in spite of changes in the voting laws of the state which tend to discourage voting by some. This is a product of good organization, and a compelling cause.
2. I doubt that there were very many who voted for Walker in the general election and who voted for Warnock this time around, and I’d bet you a dollar there no one who voted for Warnock in November voted for Walker in December. But Warnock’s lead almost tripled yesterday from his lead in November. Where did that come from?
3. To some extent, Warnock’s lead may have come from an increase in the turn out. But equally, or more, importantly, it came from the Libertarian vote. Chase Oliver, the Libertarian candidate in November (who was not involved in yesterday’s run off) received 81,365 votes, or just over 2% of the votes cast in the election. In the run off it appears that very few of those Libertarian voters cast their votes for Herschel Walker and, to the extent that they did vote this time, that they voted for Warnock. I say this because I watched the county by county vote results last night as reported by Steve Kornacki on the MSNBC Big Board, and in those counties which had a November Libertarian vote, the difference in the Warnock vote in the two elections seemed to mirror the November Libertarian votes in those counties.

As Edie and I were watching MSNBC last night (watching, not listening most of the time), we wondered what would have happened if the Republicans had run a more qualified candidate. The knee jerk response is to say that, in Georgia, they probably would have beat Warnock. It is of course true that they might have, but I don’t think that it is clear that they may have. Would the black vote that turned out so strongly for Warnock have voted Republican? Probably not to any great extent. And if about 70% of white voters did in fact vote for Walker (as the recent CNN poll suggested that they were going to), how many more would there be to cast a vote for a different candidate? I have not seen any reporting about a significant number of Republicans staying home and not voting because the candidate was Walker. The Georgia Lieutenant Governor said that he did that, but I haven’t heard that from or about anyone else.

And, after all, who would that other candidate have been? Herschel Walker was the Republican candidate for Senator because he won the nomination in the May Republican primary. The Republicans had six candidates on the Senate ballot in May, one being Herschel Walker. Walker won – and he didn’t squeak through with 20% of the ballots, edging out an opponent or two. Herschel Walker got 68.2% of the vote, with the second place candidate receiving only 13.4%. Herschel Walker was the Republican candidate of choice, not of default or quirk. We know he was endorsed strongly by Donald Trump. But he was also endorsed by Mitch McConnell, Marjorie Taylor Greene (is she still Greene?), Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity and Franklin Graham. And again, 70% of likely white voters in the State told CNN that he would get their vote.

So, yes, 1.7 million Georgians voted for Herschel Walker. They were almost all Republicans, and they were almost all of the Republicans in the State.

What does that tell us about the ship of state?