The Sweep: Digesting Turkey and Midterm Data

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker speaks to supporters at a campaign rally on November 16. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images.)

I’m back home in Houston for Thanksgiving already and the fajitas are calling me. But there are still a few nuggets of news I think we should check in on:

Georgia Runoff

Polling has this race neck-and-neck heading into the December 6 runoff. But there’s a lot more happening beneath the surface. NBC reported that “Democrats have outspent Republicans by a more than a 3-to-1 margin in the initial stretch of the Georgia Senate runoff. … But [the McConnell-aligned] Senate Leadership Fund has reserved $8.2 million in airtime ahead of the Dec. 6 runoff, fueling a GOP spending advantage in future reservations.” 

Of course, it doesn’t help when Republicans raising money off the Walker race aren’t actually giving the money to the Walker race. “President Donald Trump’s Save America sent out an email that asked prospective donors to “contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to the Official Georgia Runoff Fundraising Goal and increase your impact by 1200%,” reported Marc Caputo at NBC, but “if donors didn’t see a link that said ‘click here for details or to edit allocation,’ they wouldn’t have noticed that 90% of their contributions automatically went to Trump, with the remaining 10% going to Walker.”

And it wasn’t just Trump. More fundraising pitches with the same 90-10 split came from “the North Carolina Republican Party and the campaign committees of newly elected GOP senators J.D. Vance in Ohio and Ted Budd in North Carolina.” The Walker campaign actually put out a memo asking people to stop.  (After NBC published the story, the Trump team and the North Carolina GOP started splitting their hauls 50-50.) 

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