- 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.
Of course, Alvin the beagle couldn’t have known any of that when he went for a walk with the Rev. Raphael Warnock last fall as a film crew captured their time together in a neighborhood outside Atlanta.
Tugging a puffer-vest-clad Mr. Warnock for an idealized suburban stroll — bright sunshine, picket fencing, an American flag — Alvin would appear in several of Mr. Warnock’s commercials pushing back against his Republican opponent in the recent Georgia Senate runoffs.
In perhaps the best known spot, Mr. Warnock, a Democrat, deposits a plastic baggie of Alvin’s droppings in the trash, likening it to his rival’s increasingly caustic ads. The beagle barks in agreement, and as Mr. Warnock declares that “we” — he and Alvin — approve of the message, the dog takes a healthy lick of his goatee.
“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.”
Republicans and Democrats in the state marveled at the ad campaign’s effectiveness. “I know a lot of people who did not vote for Raphael Warnock but they didn’t dislike him or despise him,” Mr. Lake said.
Dr. Jefferson, the Stanford professor, said Mr. Warnock’s sustained likability was all the more impressive considering that “his opponent is tossing all this vitriolic — dare I say racist — criticism that aimed to highlight his Blackness and his otherness to Georgia voters.” Mr. Warnock countered with “this cute little dog” and scenery that evoked a “white aesthetic.”
However unlikely it seems, Dr. Jefferson said, objects — puffer vests, picket fences, beagles, suburbia — have racial associations: “It’s the same thing as a pumpkin spice latte.”
When the campaign commissioned its next poll after that ad, it included an open-ended question to gauge what voters thought about Mr. Warnock. Mike Bocian, the pollster, made a word cloud of the responses and could hardly believe the results.
“I saw ‘puppy’ and I saw ‘dog’ and I saw ‘poop,’” he said. “This is crazy.”