At that time, NPR ran a headline that read, “Evangelical voters grapple with controversial image of Herschel Walker.”
This begs the question: if the Herschel Walker controversies caused them to “attack each other”, then what, exactly, would send them sprinting the other way? The man’s opponent was a real, literal pastor – and evangelical Christians still didn’t know who to vote for?
Walker lost Tuesday’s runoff election to that opponent, incumbent Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D), by just under three percentage points from the current tally. “We put up a hell of a fight,” he said in his concession speech.
What has been the campaign of Herschel Walker, football star, groping for pain, Donald Trump, anointed, alleged abortion provider and total quagmire? Did we dream it? Did it make us dream? It was a fiasco from the start, when the Associated Press reported that Walker had once violently threatened his ex-wife – until the end: Monday, the day before the election, an ex-girlfriend alleged he grabbed her by the throat and tried to hit her (he missed, she said, and hit the wall).
Also this week, Business Insider reported that Walker had served as a spokesperson for two charities that appeared to engage in “little, if any, charity.” Also this week, Walker slammed an unspecified “they” for “introducing pronouns into our military,” but then added, “I don’t even know what a pronoun is.”
“I think Herschel Walker will probably be one of the worst candidates in our party’s history,” Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan told CBS News in an interview over the weekend.
And yet: the run-off election was only necessary because in November’s general election, Walker and Warnock were neck and neck, each winning nearly 2 million votes. GOP establishment figures continued, in the weeks that followed, to support their man. The senses. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Lindsey O. Graham (SC) showed up at a rally on the home stretch of the campaign. “Do you know why they go after him so hard?” asks Graham. “They are afraid of him. It is a liberal nightmare.
The campaign was definitely kind of a nightmare. That’s right.
What now has been this campaign?
The Herschel Walker campaign was a slow-motion train wreck. But it was also an inevitability, something set in motion a long time ago. The logical outcome of what happens when a wacky former president thinks he’s a kingmaker but prefers buffoons for the job – Dr Oz, Sarah Palin.
The campaign was what happens when a party decides ‘winning is a virtue’, as right-wing commentator Dana Loesch once said when explaining her support for Walker – that it is, in fact, the only virtue worth pursuing, to the detriment of integrity, consistency, truthfulness. Herschel Walker’s campaign was like an evil political scientist boiling down the essence of a typical Trump nominee to his essential goop, leaving behind the distilled dregs of a political philosophy that focuses mostly on spouting pronoun nonsense. and enlightenment and reproductive rights and how climate legislation was useless because there were “enough trees around here”.
Throughout the campaign, various commentators sparked thoughtful conversations about Walker and what his candidacy said about political fitness. What his candidacy said about the cult of athletes. What he said about white America and how white Americans might use Walker for their own ends “I don’t particularly care that Herschel Walker doesn’t seem to know he’s being used,” she wrote. “I care that America let him go too Granted, Walker himself would have been better off had he remained retired as a beloved sports personality, in which case his personal demons might have remained private, rather than as a political figure. confusing, in which case they have become fair game for public digs.
In the end, those conversations could have had an impact – the man lost, after all, but not much. Less than 100,000 votes out of over 3.5 million votes.
This (relatively) narrow result was yet another inevitability, which has to do with another unfortunate reality of our politics: the quality of candidates matters, but only at the margin. Walker is not heading to the Senate, but nearly half of Georgia’s electorate was ready and willing to send a man like him to the government’s so-called ‘largest legislative body’ at the behest of a former president and of his core supporters, who might have voted for three bags of MAGA hats in a trench coat if Trump said he was a “great fighter.”
The candidate could have been anyone, and it was Herschel Walker.
This is not the “controversial image” of Walker that voters, evangelicals and otherwise, should be wrestling with. It’s the fact that when faced with this disaster of a campaign, they felt the need to struggle.
