Washington Post: “During home games, [Loeffler] sat at center court and devoured the minutiae of basketball. She noted how Cooper countered an opponent’s 2-3 zone, quietly catalogued the times her center got hacked in the paint and studied the halftime stat sheet. When the buzzer sounded, she congratulated or consoled a player with a hug before heading to the locker room to find Cooper. There they sat, tucked away in an office beyond the whiteboard and the shower stalls, breaking down the X’s and O’s from the game they both loved. Loeffler’s focus on basketball was hardly singular. She and her husband had donated a small fortune to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, and she had explored running for Senate in 2014 as a pro-business Republican who could appeal to suburban women. But to Cooper and others in WNBA circles, she was just another hoop head like them.”

“Then, in December, Loeffler, 49, was appointed to fill Georgia’s vacant seat in the Senate, and she immediately branded herself as ‘pro-Second Amendment, pro-Trump, pro-military and pro-wall.’ This made sense: She would be up for reelection within a year and, in an open special election, would have to fend off challenges from the right. But it also opened an uncomfortable gap between Loeffler’s two roles: investor in a predominantly Black basketball league that promotes itself as a coalition of progressive activists, and politician seeking reelection in President Trump’s GOP. This chasm only widened in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, when the WNBA, like the NBA, committed to amplifying social justice causes, wearing Breonna Taylor’s name on jerseys and displaying ‘Black Lives Matter’ on the courts in their Florida ‘bubbles.’ In the players’ activism, Trump’s supporters found an opening to renew their call for athletes to ‘stick to sports,’ a favorite culture-war battle cry. Loeffler joined the fight, sending a letter to WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert objecting to what she deemed the politicization of the game. Racism has no place in the United States, Loeffler wrote, but the ‘Black Lives Matter political movement’ does not align with the league nor her team. Now, as Loeffler is locked in a close race with Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.), a fervent always-Trumper, she is not backing down.”