Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat and a pastor, told Georgia voters that they deserve a serious and honest person to serve them in the Senate and warned that his Republican rival, Herschel Walker, has shown that he “is not that person.”
In a jab at the pastor, Mr. Walker claimed to be the real “warrior for God, running against a wolf in sheep’s clothing and a hypocrite.”
“The Lord has prepared me for a moment like this, and I’m ready to go out there and fight for all of you,” Mr. Walker said. “It’s time we return this seat to the people.”
With less than a week before Election Day, candidates in pivotal Senate races are delivering their closing messages to voters and trying to land knockout punches.
Republicans are focused on repudiating President Biden and the left-wing-inspired woke agenda that they say is destroying America. Democrats are warning that Republicans are anti-abortion zealots and Trump-inspired threats to democracy.
President Biden drove home the latter point on Wednesday in a speech from Capitol Hill, saying voters of both parties must join together to defeat Republican candidates linked to former President Donald Trump.
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“You know, American democracy is under attack because the former president of the United States refused to accept the results of the 2020 election,” he said. “Democracy is on the ballot for all of us.”
In this way, both sides are finishing the campaign in traditional fashion by making last-ditch pitches to their party bases.
The Senate is split 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris providing the tiebreaking vote that gives Democrats control of the chamber.
Polling shows that the races in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania are on a knife’s edge. With that as a backdrop, candidates and their troops are doing everything they can to build themselves up and chop their opponents down.
In Arizona, Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat running for his first full six-year term after winning his seat in a 2020 special election, is touting his independence and reluctance to get bogged down in partisan fighting.
“Partisan politics aren’t going to secure our water supply or lower costs for Arizona families,” said Mr. Kelly, who is courting independents and disaffected Republicans in a bid to hold on to a Senate seat that Republicans had held since 1969. “That’s why I do things differently: working with Republicans and Democrats to find common ground and solve problems for Arizona.”
Republican Blake Masters has been railing against the “modern radicals running the Democratic Party” and casting Mr. Kelly as a “rubber stamp” for Mr. Biden’s agenda, which he blames for the rising costs of living and the chaos on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“I think they don’t care what you are paying for a tank of gas,” Mr. Masters said at a campaign stop. “They don’t care if you are paying $6 [or] $8. You give Mark Kelly any more time in office to rubber-stamp Biden’s agenda, you will soon be paying $10, $12 for a gallon of gas, and [Secretary of Transportation] Pete Buttigieg will look you in the eye and say good because you should be driving an electric car.”
“They caused inflation by surrendering our energy independence,” he said.
Republican Adam Laxalt is leaning into a similar argument across the state line in Nevada. He says the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, is trying to hide her support of Mr. Biden “every step of the way” and “now inflation is rising, our economy is tanking, & gas & grocery prices are through the roof.”
“This economy that Sen. Masto has voted for — all of these Biden bills — has made our state absolutely unaffordable,” Mr. Laxalt said at a recent town hall event. “It is unsustainable.”
Mr. Laxalt blames Masto-baked policies on the economy, crime and the southern border for “crushing our state.”
Ms. Cortez Masto, meanwhile, is playing up her endorsements from Republicans. She accuses Mr. Laxalt of embracing antisemitic figures and radical positions against abortion.
“He’s an anti-choice extremist, and I have no doubt that he would support a federal abortion ban,” Ms. Cortez Masto said. “He’s out of step with our state, and we need to work together to stop him.”
In the race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Patrick J. Toomey in Pennsylvania, Republican Mehmet Oz, a celebrity TV doctor, is promising to “fight to make the nation energy-independent.” He is also knocking Democrat John Fetterman’s “scary record of being soft on crime.”
“You walk through the streets of Philadelphia and most of the large cities in Pennsylvania, it is the same story: People feel like the folks in charge value the criminals more than the innocent,” Mr. Oz said recently. “The families are in pain, no one seems to care.”
“When you side with the criminals over law-abiding citizens, people get upset,” he said.
Mr. Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, accused Mr. Oz of wanting “local political leaders [in] charge of women’s health care decisions.” He said the Republican is “a fraud” with a track record of enriching himself on the backs of the working class.
“Pennsylvanians deserve a leader who will fight for them — not millionaires and billionaires — in Washington,” Mr. Fetterman said in a Fox News op-ed. “Oz sympathizes more with rich CEOs than he does the average Pennsylvanian.”
“How can we expect Oz to fight for Pennsylvania if he doesn’t know Pennsylvania and doesn’t understand the problems we are facing?” he said.
The stakes of these hotly contested races are magnified by a foregone conclusion that Republicans will flip control of the House, bringing an end to four years of Democratic reign in Washington and throwing a wrench in Mr. Biden’s plans for the next two years.
Things will get only more miserable for Mr. Biden if Democrats fail to defend the Senate.
Mr. Biden has been mostly relegated to the sidelines for the closing weeks of the most crucial Senate races, though he is slated to appear at a rally over the weekend on behalf of Mr. Fetterman.
Most of the candidates have concluded that the risk of campaigning alongside the deeply unpopular president outweighs the potential reward.
Several of the embattled incumbents have instead turned to former President Barack Obama. They hope he can energize disillusioned voters and rekindle their faith in Democrats’ ability to make people’s lives better.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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