On Thursday’s conference call, Graham, Newt Gingrich, Hailey Barber and Todriketts were reported to be co-chairs of Walker’s campaign finance committee, which is still expanding but includes seven participants. Rep. and Sen.-elect Mark Wayne Mullin (R-Okla.), according to a document obtained by POLITICO.
Mori. Rand Paul will lead Walker’s libertarian outreach in the runoff. Libertarian candidate for November. Election 8 siphoned off 2% of the vote, preventing either Walker or Senator. Raphael Warnock won more than 50% of the vote to avoid a runoff.
Graham and Gingrich told those on the phone, Donald Trump and the governor of Florida. Ron DeSantis is expected to provide support for the Walker campaign.
This week, after disappointing midterm elections, as prominent Republicans across the country took aim at Trump, Senate Republicans — already divided over how to run this year’s campaign — had to save most of their bickering for the after the final election. Scott had planned to challenge Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for the leadership, but after failing to win key Pennsylvania and New Hampshire seats and losing his chance in an election that was supposed to usher in a red wave, Scott is now Unlikely to do so.
Shortly after the call, the Republican Senate office received an email from the NRSC with talking points about Herschel-Walker and Georgia’s runoff election and asking for members’ help in serving as Walker’s agent. “We have some losses, but we’re still on track to win the majority,” read one talking point in the email.
Scott donated $500,000 from his leadership PAC to a super PAC in Georgia that supports Walker and spent most of the past two days on the phone with the donor. and Mori. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer began making fundraising calls in person in Georgia on Thursday, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Republicans have already launched an “all-out” call for Georgia, as was the case when the Louisiana GOP appealed to GOP supporters in an email Thursday. The State party asked members to volunteer to knock on doors in Georgia, or to call and text from home on Walker’s behalf.
In Ohio, JD Vance, who won Tuesday’s Senate race, began using his list of supporters to raise money for Walker — money that will be split between the two campaigns.
Super PACs have begun to return to airwaves in Georgia, with a major Democratic group taking an early look at the state. American Bridge will roll out a seven-figure television, radio and digital offering in the state this weekend targeting voters outside the Atlanta media market.
The campaign launched with a pair of TV commercials, which were first shared with POLITICO. The first ad featured a series of women calling Walker a liar on a litany of issues. In the ad, two women single out reports that Walker paid his then-girlfriend to have an abortion.
“Through these ads, American Bridge once again seeks to help Georgia voters understand that Herschel Walker’s hypocrisy and lying make him dangerous and unfit for office, especially as the outcome of this runoff election could determine control of the Senate or the expansion of democracy party majority,” the group’s president, Jessica Floyd, said in a statement.
The group’s second ad featured a Marietta, Ga., woman who said she had “voted for Republican candidates in the past,” then said she didn’t think she could do it anymore, reinforcing the liar’s theme : “I’ll pray for Herschel Walker, but I won’t vote for him,” the ad ends.
Both ads will begin airing in the state on Saturday.
While pre-election polls were unclear on whether a pair of October scandals involving two of Walker’s former associates who said Walker urged and paid for women’s abortions would be enough to remove Walker from office, Election Day results showed Walker trailing the Republican governor by nearly 5. percent. Brian Kemp.
Republicans, too, have begun to hype. The NRSC began rerunning TV ads on Thursday, along with a new one attacking Warnock, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact.
Meanwhile, vote counting is underway in Arizona and Nevada.
In Arizona, hundreds of thousands of ballots are still outstanding. As of Friday morning, the secretary of state’s office estimated the state had more than 500,000 ballots left to be counted.
The largest batch of ballots remains in Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, which still has about 350,000 ballots to count. Election officials in the county had said before the election that they hoped to have the vast majority of ballots counted by the Friday after the election. But at a news conference Thursday night, they acknowledged that was not the case.
“The goalposts have changed,” said Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. He said the county had to readjust its expectations as mail-in ballots flooded voting centers on Election Day.
Those ballots — about 290,000 of them, 70 percent more than previously submitted at polling places on Election Day — have slowed down the tally because of the time-consuming process of verifying them. If historical voting patterns hold, the last batch of votes is expected to be dominated by Republicans.
Gates did not specify how long it would take to count all the votes, but said he expected the daily tally to be about the same as Wednesday and Thursday, ending up between 62,000 and 78,000 votes.
Those ballots will also be among the last to be counted, as Maricopa and many other electoral jurisdictions practice a “first-in, first-out” counting method, where ballots that arrive earlier are counted first. Counting votes this way is the historical norm in Maricopa, where elections are presided over by a Republican-dominated county board of supervisors and a Republican county recorder.
Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake used the extended timeline and the fact that late ballots were finally counted to attack election officials and lay the groundwork for her failure, should she lose.
She continued on Newsmax on Thursday, accusing election officials of “delaying” the campaign and “trying to delay the inevitable.” She also indicated that legal action could be taken in the future, noting that she had “a lot of lawyers” on call.
“Frankly, it’s offensive for Carilek to say that these people behind me are doing it 14 to 18 hours a day and they’re doing it slowly,” Gates said at a news conference on Thursday. “
Nevada also has a large number of unresolved ballots, with at least tens of thousands more to be counted. Many of those ballots came from Clark County, the state’s largest. Joe Gloria, Clark County’s registrar of voters and chief elections official, said Thursday that he expects the county’s count to be completed Saturday.
But if the margin is very narrow, the Senate race’s conference call could be delayed until next week. Voters with a defective ballot — an unsigned ballot, or election officials unable to verify the signature on the ballot — can be “cured” by voters until Monday by confirming their ballot with election officials. Provisional ballots, ballots from voters registered at polling places, will not be valid until Wednesday.
Burgess Everett contributed to this report.