“The dog had a lot of work to do. He was co-starring in a political ad that had to showcase the candidate’s good-natured warmth. But the ad also needed to deflect an onslaught of racialized attacks without engaging them directly, and to convey to white voters in Georgia that the Black pastor who led Ebenezer Baptist Church could represent them, too,” Shane Goldmacher from The New York Times reports.
“’The entire ad screams that I am a Black candidate whom white people ought not be afraid of,’ said Hakeem Jefferson, a professor of political science at Stanford, who studies race, stigma and politics in America.”
“While there is no singular factor responsible for victories this narrow — Mr. Warnock won by less than 100,000 votes out of roughly 4.5 million and the other new Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, won by even less — there is bipartisan agreement that the beagle played an outsized role in cutting through the clutter in two contests that broke every Senate spending record.”
Denver Public Relations Blog 