The Georgia Senate races are among the most expensive Senate races in history
05 January 2021
The Georgia Senate runoff races are among the most expensive Senate races in history, according to advertising spend figures from Ad Impact.
The big picture: Collectively, nearly $500 million worth of ads targeting Georgia voters has been spent in two months.
Data: Ad Impact; Chart: Axios Visuals
- Overall, 9 of the top 10 highest-spending advertising Senate races were in the 2020 election cycle.
Republicans have outspent Democrats by more than $50 million across both races, thanks in part to large amounts of spending from outside groups.
- Spending from American Crossroads, the Senate Leadership Fund and the Peachtree PAC, a group affiliated with the Senate Leadership Fund, has helped to widen the GOP's spend lead, according to the data from Ad Impact. In total, those three groups have poured more than $110 million into the runoff races.
The bottom line: For Georgia residents, the barrage of political ads on television for the past two months has been overwhelming.
- Due to prolonged advertising blackouts on Facebook and Google, a vast majority of the advertising in the Georgia Senate runoffs races has been spent on local broadcast TV.
Go deeper: The battle for the Senate has triggered unprecedented fundraising
Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times
Section2Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.
Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.
The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.
- The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.
What the transcripts say:
- Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
- The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
- Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."
Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.