A day after The Daily Beast revealed that Herschel Walker had gotten a girlfriend pregnant in 2009 and paid for her abortion—which sparked his son Christian to publicly slam his father—Republicans were still bracing for the full fallout of the bombshells on one of the country’s most pivotal Senate races.
Operatives and observers spent Tuesday alternately dismissing the impact of the story, spinning it as a positive for Walker, or simply accepting the chaos that had engulfed the Georgia battleground and wondering whether it would define the final month of the contest.
“I don’t think people motivated to vote in this race give two [poop emoji] about the candidates,” one Georgia Republican texted The Daily Beast.
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Others went so far as to defend the Georgia football legend, with one GOP campaign operative telling The Daily Beast that “it sounds like he did the honorable thing” by helping the woman obtain an abortion. (Walker has strenuously denied the story.)
Another Georgian simply responded via text with a GIF of Elmo, the Sesame Street character, raising his arms while surrounded by flames.
Without doubt, the fallout from Walker’s abortion revelations have deeply shaken his campaign. Top Republican officials and powerful outside groups have been forced to go on the record defending him and reiterating their support for his campaign to unseat incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA).
But in a hyper-partisan era when seemingly no scandal has the power to bring down a popular politician—especially in Donald Trump’s Republican Party—Walker is testing the limits of how much a politician can get away with in the name of simply stopping the other party.
Before Walker ran for Senate, news outlets reported on credible allegations of domestic violence women made against him. In a primary in which his lead rival made those allegations a key issue, Walker won with 68 percent of the vote.
In the general election, The Daily Beast reported on the existence of several secret children he had never acknowledged. Then came the story that laid bare his apparent hypocrisy on abortion, a conservative article of faith, and his son’s raw and explosive allegations striking at the heart of the candidate’s character.
Through it all, Republican leaders have stuck by Walker, the candidate they are hoping will deliver them the Senate majority by flipping Georgia. It seems the GOP faithful in Georgia have, too, despite—or perhaps in spite of—the latest seismic story.
“Nobody is voting for a father or husband of the year here,” Marci McCarthy, chair of the DeKalb County GOP, told The Daily Beast. “The people I’m talking to don’t care.”
In that sense, Walker may share something in common with his key benefactor, who also happens to be the politician who rewrote the playbook on political scandal: Trump.
The ability of these men to brush off scandal, say Georgia Republicans, is partially rooted in celebrity; within the football-crazed state, Walker is a legend to generations of fans. Indeed, Walker’s abortion bombshell was quickly compared to Trump’s fateful “Access Hollywood” moment, the supposedly fatal blow to his 2016 campaign that did not end up being so fatal.
“I’ve seen some spectacular collapses in the past—whether it was Chrstine O’Donnell in Delaware (“dabbling in witchcraft”) or the ‘legitimate rape’ guy, Todd Akin—but because of how Trump has so cheapened political discourse in this country, I’m not sure if the old rules still apply,” Jim Manley, a former top Senate aide to Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid, told The Daily Beast.
“I think they still do, but national Republicans, for right now at least, are doubling down,” Manley continued. “Words don’t necessarily matter anymore.”
Quietly, however, there’s a reluctance among some Republicans to bet that Walker will make it through the campaign without changing course. The cumulative weight of the candidate’s drama, some believe, has reached a point that he will need to address it more directly and clearly with voters than ever before.
All the while, Walker is losing precious time to hammer Warnock on the issues—the economy, crime, immigration—that Republicans believe will win them control of Congress in 2022.
“The window of opportunity for Walker to pivot back to his message is rapidly shrinking,” said Jason Shepherd, a longtime GOP activist in the state and a former chair of the Cobb County GOP.
While Republican campaign players were quick to back Walker, the favor was not returned by Gov. Brian Kemp, who is on the ballot with the football star this fall as he hopes to earn a second term. Asked if Kemp would continue to back Walker, spokesperson Cody Hall simply said the governor is “laser focused on sharing his record of results and vision for his second term with hardworking Georgians” and ensuring GOP victories “up and down the ticket.”
Whether or not the abortion bombshell convinces voters to switch who they’re supporting or just stay home, the story will almost certainly refocus the conversation for the last month of the race on abortion—an issue where Democrats believe they have the advantage.
Notably, on Tuesday night, Stacey Abrams—the Democrat challenging Kemp—leveraged the governor’s proximity to Walker and the abortion scandal to spotlight his views.
“The truth is that under Brian Kemp's anti-choice agenda, the choice at hand on this issue would not even be possible,” Alex Floyd, an Abrams spokesman, told The Daily Beast.
“Brian Kemp must answer for his own extreme record on abortion—including his support for members of his ticket who have apparently displayed shocking hypocrisy on the issue, carving out exceptions for themselves and no one else,” Floyd said.
Still, the ultimate risk for Walker, operatives in both parties said, is that enough voters are turned off by the steady stream of troubling revelations about him that they either vote third party or don’t vote in the race at all. Given the narrow margins in a battleground like Georgia—Warnock won his runoff in 2021 by two percentage points—even minor swings could have a decisive impact on the outcome.
With Republicans on the ropes in a must-win state, some Georgia insiders feel Democrats should go for the jugular on Walker and make this latest revelation a key issue.
“If Democrats are smart, they’d be hitting at character all day,” said Baoky Vu, an anti-Trump former Republican official in Georgia. “That’s the issue Republicans used to talk about.”
To this point, Democrats have not been squeamish about attacking Walker’s character. They have bankrolled ads—which are inescapable on the state— highlighting the domestic abuse allegations lodged against him.
So far, the Democratic response to the latest revelations has been muted, as party figures seem to weigh how they might capitalize on yet another story that questions Walker’s integrity.
When asked directly about The Daily Beast story after it broke Monday night, Warnock told reporters he wouldn’t opine on how it might impact the race. Instead, he used the opportunity to reiterate his support for abortion access. Walker supports banning abortion without any exceptions.
Asked to weigh in on the Walker drama, the Warnock campaign did not return The Daily Beast’s request for comment. At an event on Tuesday, Warnock told CNN he hadn’t yet read the report. The Georgia Democratic Party declined to comment.
Some Democrats believe there’s not much they can do, or need to do, at this stage to amplify personal concerns about Walker. “It’s not like Warnock can do anything more devastating than what Christian Walker is doing on Twitter,” one Democratic aide told The Daily Beast.
Once the dust clears, don’t necessarily expect Warnock or his allies to blanket Georgia TV airwaves with ads highlighting Walker’s abortion contradiction or his family drama.
“I don’t think Democrats who think this is a silver bullet understand Republican voters or understand how Senate races work,” said one Democratic operative with experience in Senate races, who referenced the party’s past struggles to run that playbook against Trump. “It can’t just be, ‘Herschel Walker is a bad guy because of this story.’”
“It has to be a double track of, this is why Democrats need to come out and vote for Warnock,” the operative added.
It looked like a prime opportunity for Republicans to cut their losses.
Yet the same morning as Walker’s son, Christian, ratcheted up his condemnations of his father to his more than 450,000 followers combined on Twitter and TikTok, both former President Donald Trump and GOP brass lined up behind Walker.
“We are full speed ahead in Georgia,” Steven Law, president of the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund, said of Walker, while Trump denounced the media “trying to destroy a man who has true greatness in his future, just as he had athletic greatness in his past.”
With early voting starting on Oct. 11, the GOP’s wagon is thoroughly hitched to Walker’s prospects heading into Election Day. The stakes of flipping the 50-50 Senate leaves rationalization as the only option, Manley said.
“The only thing they care about is getting the votes necessary to take over the Senate, and they have convinced themselves, for better or for worse, that supporting this guy is their only option.”
