The ads were dark and ominous: grainy footage with a message that screams “you are not safe.” You likely know exactly which ads I’m talking about because the Republican party spent more than $150 million on these ads this midterm election cycle.
Of all the battleground states, Georgia saw one of the most relentless crime-focused campaigns from Republicans in their attempts to unseat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. Their message sought to capitalize on voters’ legitimate fears about public safety. But instead of siphoning off the independent voters they badly needed to flip that Senate seat, they failed. Their tried-and-true playbook of the last 40 years came up short.
And with crime on the rise these past two years, it wasn’t hard to predict that the GOP would return to this strategy to close the campaign. However, in the end, the Republican strategy backfired. They didn’t just lose the Senate race in Georgia, they failed to pick up a single Senate seat, flipped only one governor’s race and gained fewer than 20 House seats, most of which were rigged due to gerrymandering.
