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US midterms: Georgia Senate run-off looms after bitter campaign


On Tuesday, Georgia's seven million registered voters will go to the polls for the fifth time in four years.


That's thanks to a quirk in the state's election law that requires winning candidates for state-wide posts in general elections not just to get more votes than everyone else, but to get fifty percent of the votes cast.


Twice in the past four years candidates from both parties have fallen short of that mark. Hence the need for a run-off election in 2021 for both Georgia's US Senate seats and another one this time around.


Incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock, a southern Baptist preacher from Dr Martin Luther King Jr's old church in downtown Atlanta, will face the Republican former football star Herschel Walker, a man backed by former President Donald Trump who has faced accusations that he paid for wives and girlfriends to get abortions despite avowing a profoundly anti-abortion stance.


The pair will go head to head for the chance to represent a state that's been at the epicentre of political upheaval in recent times.


True, the midterm elections have already decided 99 of the 100 seats in the Senate and the Democrats have 50 to the Republicans 49. Given the constitutional rule that the vice-president can break a tied vote in the chamber, Georgia's run-off will not change who has control.

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