How Alvin the Beagle Helped Usher In a Democratic Senate (Published 2021)
Senator Raphael Warnock was sworn in this week as Georgia’s first Black senator, and he arrived with a canny canine assist.
www.nytimes.com
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.
"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.
"The puppy ad got people talking," said Brian C. Robinson, a Georgia-based Republican strategist. "It made it harder to caricature him because they humanized him."
I have to chuckle, cause y'all just don't know the ads they were hammering Warnock with. They stopped just short of "jazz cigurettes" and "he going to rape white woman y'all". Not only the tone of them but they were on constantly, like you could watch an hour long show and the only ads you get were poltical ones. And it was worse on streaming, I stopped using pluto tv for 2 months because it was so bad.