WNBA players are working to defeat Loeffler in Georgia runoff. Here’s how. And why
Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler recently unleashed a tirade against the Rev. Raphael Warnock, portraying her Democratic opponent as an “anti-police Marxist who will destroy America,” ahead of the state’s senatorial runoff election in January, CNN said.
Warnock, the 15-year leader of Martin Luther King Jr.’s church in Atlanta, dismissed her attack as a “distraction.”
The race, one of two Senate runoffs in Georgia, is drawing national interest, including from an ally in Warnock’s corner: players from the Women’s National Basketball League.
During the summer, Loeffler, who owns a 49% stake in the Atlanta Dream, wrote a letter to WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, objecting to players in the league protesting the police-involved deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Both Floyd and Taylor are Black.
“The truth is, we need less — not more politics in sports,” she wrote. “In a time when polarizing politics is as divisive as ever, sports has the power to be a unifying antidote. And now more than ever, we should be united in our goal to remove politics from sports.”
From that moment, Loeffler went from being a “hoops junkie to WNBA villain,” the Washington Post wrote.
“We realized, ‘Oh, she wants us to get mad,’” said Sue Bird, Seattle’s veteran guard, regarding Loeffler, to the New York Times. “She wants us to try and kick her out. That would give her more attention. This is what she wants.”
“We had to find a better way.”
Players homed in on Warnock as the person to replace Loeffler, and are standing behind him.
“It was clear to us immediately,” Bird said to the NYT. “He stands for everything that we stand for. You could literally go down the line of all the things we care about, and we were aligned with him. It was like, ‘Wow, we want this guy in the Senate. This is the candidate that we want in the Senate.’”
Before players started boycotting Loeffler in August by wearing T-shirts that read “Vote Warnock” during warmups, the Democrat was only polling at 9%. But in the November election, Warnock secured the most votes with 32.9%. Loeffler received 25.9%.
Since no candidate won 50%, both Warnock and Loeffler will have a runoff election on Jan. 5.
“I think it was helpful,” Warnock told USA TODAY Sports of the WNBA players’ endorsement. “It was one of many turning points in the campaign. It gave people a chance to look a little closer and say, ‘Who is this Warnock guy and what is he about?’ “
The Loeffler-Warnock runoff is just one of two senate races in Georgia — the other being Republican David Perdue against Democrat Jon Ossoff — that will decide which party will control the U.S. Senate.
This story was originally published November 18, 2020 at 7:04 AM with the headline "WNBA players are working to defeat Loeffler in Georgia runoff. Here’s how. And why."