OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
It looks like Democratic Sen. Rafael Warnock of Georgia, who is facing off against a Trump-backed GOP challenger in a few months, did not take long to become part of the political establishment he railed against during his 2020 election.
According to a Tuesday report, Warnock took money for that campaign from a private-sector firm that is buying up private homes to then rent out after he warned about corporations doing that very thing during his campaign.
“Warnock recently sounded the alarm on big corporations buying up swathes of homes in his state. However, he’s taken campaign donations from Wall Street executives at a private equity firm engaged in that very practice,” The Daily Caller explained.
The report added:
Warnock’s campaign has raked in almost $38,000 since 2020 from executives at Blackstone, a Wall Street firm with a roughly $130 billion market cap buying up homes in Georgia and across the U.S., according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. At the same time, Warnock said in a July hearing Georgia is “in the middle of a housing crisis” and raised concerns “over large institutional investors,” which some experts say are driving up rent prices and displacing minority communities.
“Georgians don’t have the luxury of waiting several years for home prices and rents to fall,” the Democrat said during a Senate Banking Committee hearing last month, which focused on how corporations and big-money investors were snatching up homes in his state while boosting the cost of property.
“I think we need research to effectively understand how private equity is impacting markets in Atlanta and Georgia and across the country, and I look forward to introducing legislation very soon to address that very issue,” Warnock said during the hearing, according to The Daily Caller.
In an email to the outlet, Brian An, a Georgia Tech School of City and Regional Planning professor, said that neighborhoods being targeted by corporate home investment firms are often majority black residents and home sellers.
“When this happens, African American (would-be) individual homebuyers fare relatively worse than other race groups in terms of bidding/purchasing for those homes considered by corporate investors,” said An, who helped author a study that was released last month on how black homeownership tends to be falling in regions where corporate investors have bought up homes.
“When corporate landlords convert those properties to rental stock, new renters for such renovated single-family apartments are likely to be non-African Americans,” added the professor, according to The DCNF.
Stephen Lawson, a Georgia-based GOP strategist, blasted Warnock’s hypocrisy.
“In the typical Washington Way, Raphael Warnock is lining his pocket with campaign cash while Georgians get kicked to the curb and struggle to pay for gas groceries as a result of his disastrous voting record,” he told the DCNF. “Warnock is playing evictor in chief — but come November, the voters will have the final say, and it’ll be Warnock who gets left out in the cold.”
“Raphael Warnock will do anything he can to keep his seat in Washington, even if it means abandoning the people he is obligated to represent,” a spokeswoman for the Georgia Republican Party also told the outlet.
Warnock is facing off against former NFL great Herschel Walker, who won the Heisman Trophy as a running back for the University of Georgia in 1982. According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls, Walker trails Warnock by two points, which is within the margin of error for most of the surveys.
Meanwhile, in a separate report earlier this month, The Daily Caller noted that Warnock’s campaign also took thousands of dollars from corporate PACs that he swore off during his 2020 campaign, though he has claimed he’s “never taken a dime of corporate PAC money” and would never do so:
Warnock’s campaign took $29,600 during the first and second quarters of 2022 from Democratic leadership PACs that have in turn accepted $1.6 million from corporate-backed PACs since 2003, according to Federal Election Commission records (FEC) reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Raphael Warnock is the ultimate actor,” Lawson, the GOP strategist, said at the time. “Whether it’s in terms of his voting record for billions in wasteful spending or taking huge sums from liberal corporate mega-donors. He’s the ultimate hypocrite and I think Georgia voters see through his lies and his hypocrisy.”
