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Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker held a rally on Monday in Toccoa, Georgia, in the close runoff election after a week of absence from the campaign trail.
Walker also made an appearance in Cumming as he faces a close race against Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, with voting taking place on December 6.
Warnock continued to campaign over the Thanksgiving holiday and held six separate events as the Democrat battles to be elected to a full term in the U.S. Senate. However, his GOP opponent held his last public event of that week, on Tuesday, November 22.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Walker's lack of campaign events had "baffled many of his Republican allies" as the hotly contested race enters its final days.
In a tweet on Monday, Walker thanked supporters for "coming out in force" for a rally in Toccoa in Stephens County where he appeared with former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, among others.
"North Georgia is ready to #EvictWarnock and return this senate seat back to the great people of Georgia!" Walker tweeted.
The Republican also held a rally in Cumming in Forsyth County on Monday as he returned to campaigning.
Though Walker had no public events over Thanksgiving, he reportedly attended closed-door fundraising events and marked his mother's 85th birthday, sharing photos of the celebration to Twitter.
Warnock spent much of the holiday campaigning and held a "Souls to the Polls" march in Atlanta on Sunday that involved a few hundred of his supporters. The event marked the fact that a judge ruled Saturday voting in the runoff could go ahead.
Newsweek has asked the Walker campaign for comment.
Early voting has already begun in the Senate runoff, and signs appeared good for Warnock over the weekend. Early voting totals posted by the office for Georgia's secretary of state showed turnout surging in Democratic strongholds, while it appeared to lag behind in Republican-leaning districts.
No candidate won 50 percent of the vote in the Georgia Senate election on November 8, so state law required a runoff. The race will not determine control of the Senate as Democrats managed to secure a majority in the midterms, but a Warnock victory would bolster that.
Analysis from poll tracker FiveThirtyEight shows that a series of late-November polls indicate a close result in the Georgia race.
A poll conducted for AARP from November 11 to 17 showed Warnock leading with 51 percent support to Walker's 47 percent, while a Frederick Polls survey from November 23 to 26 found the race as a dead heat, with both candidates on 50 percent.
Walker led with 48 percent to the Democrat's 47 percent in a Phillips Academy poll for Abbot Academy Fund, conducted from November 26 to 27.
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About the writer
Darragh Roche is a U.S. News Reporter based in Limerick, Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. politics. He has ... Read more