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Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia slipped right into becoming a part of the political establishment he spoke out against during his 2020 election.
According to a report on Tuesday, Warnock took money for his campaign from a private-sector firm that is buying up private homes to rent out after he warned about corporations doing that very thing during his campaign.
Warnock is facing a Trump-backed GOP challenger in a few months, during the general election in November.
The Daily Caller said that “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.”
They reported:
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.
In a Senate Banking Committee hearing last month, Warnock said, “Georgians don’t have the luxury of waiting several years for home prices and rents to fall.”
“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.
Brian An, a Georgia Tech School of City and Regional Planning professor wrote an email to the Daily Caller and 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 racial 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.”
Stephen Lawson, a Georgia-based GOP strategist blasted Warnock for his 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.”
Warnock is facing off against former NFL great Herschel Walker in the midterm elections coming up. Polling data shows that the race between Warnock and Walker is extremely close. Some are predicting that the race could end up in a runoff.
