FactChecking the Georgia Senate Runoffs

Two months after Election Day, control of the U.S. Senate in the 117th Congress comes down to two races in Georgia on Jan. 5. None of the four candidates on the ballot garnered 50% of the vote on Nov. 3, which forced separate runoffs.

In one of the contests, Georgia’s senior senator, Republican David Perdue, is defending his seat against Democrat Jon Ossoff, a media executive and investigative journalist, who ran for a House seat in 2017. In the other, Georgia’s junior senator, Republican Kelly Loeffler, who was appointed to her seat in December 2019, is trying to win a special election against Democrat Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Democrats have labeled the Republican candidates selfish politicians more interested in serving themselves than their constituents, and Republicans have branded the Democratic challengers dangerous liberals trying to change America. Below we recap the facts behind the claims made in some of the many attack ads released by the campaigns and outside groups in the last nine weeks.

Facts: Warnock did not use those words to describe all law enforcement.

In a 2015 sermon, Warnock talked about police in Ferguson, Missouri — where Michael Brown, an unarmed, 18-year-old Black man was shot and killed by a white officer in August 2014 — “showing up in a kind of gangster and thug mentality.” He added, “You know you can wear all kinds of colors and be a thug. You can sometimes wear the colors of the state and behave like a thug.”

In an email, Warnock’s campaign told us, “This is very clearly in reference to a specific incident in Ferguson, Missouri and the behavior of some in the Michael Brown shooting, not at a comment on all police officers.”