ANAHEIM, Calif. — The Dec. 6 showdown in Georgia’s runoff election carries the themes of recent years: divisive politics, money and hotly contested political territory.

Orange County Democrats have been deployed to the final high-profile battleground of the midterm elections, intent on preserving incumbent U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock’s, D-Ga., seat over retired football player Herschel Walker.

The stakes are high for Democrats, who were foiled on some key policy goals by U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WVa., a centrist with a voting base willing to back him even when he throws in with his Republican colleagues. While Democrats technically would have a lead in the upper chamber, even with a Warnock loss, Manchin’s propensity to play spoiler has increased the stakes.

The runoff, Warnock’s second in consecutive years, has been fought along headline issues like abortion. Walker has collected the evangelical vote and the endorsement of Donald Trump, whose support of other candidates who lost Nov. 8 has raised speculation that his brand has weakened. Walker, a newcomer to politics, has been able to hang with Warnock, anyway.

The task now is to find swing votes and try to draw out voters who stayed home.

“This is a persuasion and turnout operation where we're trying to turn out Democrats during a Democrat presidency and that’s going to always be a little bit of a battle,” said Ajay Mohan, executive director of the Democratic Party of Orange County. That means lots of people. Mohan and his staff are planning to fly out to help campaign Warnock, adding three or four people to a growing army of canvassers.

But many of the Orange County ground forces for Democrats have come from the local hotel union.

Ada Briceño, the chair of the DPOC, is also the co-president of UNITE-HERE Local 11, a hotel union representing 32,000 workers. The union has already sent at least 300 workers from the county and is prepared to send more.

“These are people who are trained and who were working in Arizona or helping get [Los Angeles Mayor] Karen Bass elected,” Briceño said. “We need as many people as we can to send to Georgia. If I had 10 people tell me they want to go today, my job is to find out how to get them there.”

Briceño expects the money to be there and said the Warnock campaign has confirmed that it will foot the bill for campaign workers to fly in.

Thomas Holyoke, a political science professor at California State University, Fresno, said the organizing task for both parties is daunting.

“I can’t imagine that they’re really going to be able to coordinate enough things for these people to do,” Holyoke said.

But both candidates will benefit from existing statewide campaign apparatuses from the gubernatorial race. Brian Kemp, R-Ga., defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams a second time, and has shifted his resources in support of Walker. Abrams, whom many Democrats have lauded for her campaign work in helping the party win both of Georgia’s Senate seats in 2021, has been a celebrated campaigner.

“They should be able to run relatively effective campaigns because all that infrastructure is still around for the general campaign,” Holyoke said.

Both parties have people, and both have plenty of money.

In a September report, campaign finance watchdog Open Secrets projected state and federal elections spending would surpass $9 billion. That number was nearly doubled in a Nov. 3 report by the nonprofit, which projects spending to surpass $16.7 billion. Federal candidates and political committees are expected to make up $8.9 billion of the total.

But with all that money and campaign staff, Holyoke wonders who will be listening.

“You have a fatigued electorate who probably doesn’t want to be bothered by this, so whoever energizes their voters most will probably be the one who wins,” he said.