Some Lessons from Herschel Walker’s Campaign Debacle in Georgia

The Senate candidate’s weak performance relative to his fellow-Republicans provides strong evidence that the biggest impediment to his campaign was himself.
Herschel Walker and Julie Blanchard walk off stage after his concession speech.
Herschel Walker with his wife, Julie Blanchard, after delivering his concession speech on Tuesday night, in Atlanta.Photograph by Alex Wong / Getty

After one of the most calamitous political campaigns in recent times, Herschel Walker, the Heisman Trophy winner whom Donald Trump helped talk into running for a Senate seat in Georgia, seemed strangely serene when he appeared on Tuesday night at the College Football Hall of Fame, in downtown Atlanta. He acknowledged his wife, Julie Blanchard, noting that she’d been through a lot. He thanked his donors, who helped his campaign burn through tens of millions of dollars during the midterm election and subsequent runoff. He thanked God, whom he described as “a good guy.” And he acknowledged his defeat at the hands of the Democrat Raphael Warnock, saying, “There’s no excuses in life, and I’m not going to make any excuses now because we put up one heck of a fight.”

Walker was probably relieved it was over. Since last May, when, with Trump’s support, he defeated five candidates in a G.O.P. primary, he had spent nearly seven months undergoing a very public form of political torture—largely at his own hands, but also at the hands of reporters and, presumably, Democratic opposition researchers, who had a target-rich environment in which to operate. Beyond his storied past as a running back who rushed for more than five thousand yards at the University of Georgia, Walker had virtually no campaign platform. His verbal miscues were so frequent that his campaign managers eventually restricted his public appearances. When they did send him out to face the cameras, it was sometimes alongside more experienced G.O.P. dissemblers, such as Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.

As the campaign proceeded, Walker’s past turned into a huge burden. Reports emerged of abusive relationships with his ex-wife and girlfriends, which allegedly included domestic violence and death threats. There was the protective order that a Texas judge issued, in 2005, which barred him from owning a gun. And the allegations that he paid for two women to have abortions—allegations which seemed to make a mockery of his support for a federal abortion ban, and prompted even his own son, Christian Walker, to disown him. (“I was sold lie after lie after lie,” the younger Walker said, in a video that he posted online.)

“Herschel was like a plane crash into a train wreck that rolled into a dumpster fire,” the Georgia Republican operative Dan McLagan, who advised one of Walker’s rivals in the G.O.P. primary, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And an orphanage. Then an animal shelter. You kind of had to watch it squinting between one eye between your fingers.” A Walker staffer told the same newspaper that his campaign felt like a “death march.” And yet, after all that, with more than ninety-five per cent of the vote counted, Walker has received more than 1.7 million votes, or 48.6 per cent of the total cast. How could so many Georgians have voted for such a flawed candidate? The answer lies in the polarization of the current moment; the Peach State’s demographics; and an attempted rescue mission by a popular Republican governor.

In recent years, Georgia has grown less rural and less white, with suburban neighborhoods around Atlanta, Savannah, and Augusta all growing rapidly. In the 2020 census, 51.9 per cent of the population identified as white alone, the lowest figure on record. But, among Georgians who vote, the proportion of whites remains higher. In the midterms, according to the AP VoteCast survey, sixty per cent of the electorate identified as white, and more than half of these voters don’t have a college degree, which, these days, makes them statistically more likely to vote Republican. All told, sixty-eight per cent of white voters supported Walker on November 8th, according to the survey.

To put it another way, even as some long-term trends seem to favor Democrats, the G.O.P. still has a formidable base in Georgia, and one which was sufficiently energized to support the Party’s candidates in this year’s midterms. In addition to the U.S. Senate race, there were seven statewide elections: for governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, commissioner of agriculture, commissioner of insurance, state school superintendent, and commissioner of labor. Republican candidates won all of these races comfortably, with their smallest margin of victory being about five points. (That was in the contest for lieutenant governor.)

Clearly, many Georgians voted for Walker because they wanted to support a Republican—any Republican. Still, on November 8th, he was the clear outlier in the Party, with his vote share coming in close to five percentage points behind Brian Kemp, the incumbent G.O.P. governor, who defeated his Democratic challenger, Stacey Abrams, by more than seven percentage points. Walker’s weak performance relative to his fellow-Republicans provides strong evidence that the biggest impediment to his campaign was himself rather than changing demographics, or a brilliant Democratic campaign, or anything else.

Walker’s defeat on Tuesday came despite the fact that Kemp made an effort to bolster his runoff campaign. With Trump having targeted the Governor for refusing to participate in his seditious effort to overturn the 2020 election, the relationship between Kemp and Walker was a problematic one, and, in the run-up to November 8th, Kemp didn’t endorse Walker. But, after the Senate race went to a runoff, the Governor did finally throw his support behind Walker, appearing beside him on the stump, and recording a campaign ad in which he said that the former footballer wouldn’t be “another rubber stamp for Joe Biden.”

Kemp’s late endorsement helps explain why so many Republicans did turn out for Walker again, but it wasn’t enough to repair the self-inflicted damage he’d already done. Last week, the Warnock campaign released an ad that simply showed voters reacting to some of Walker’s public statements, including the one in which he said that he’d prefer to be a werewolf than a vampire. In a last-minute campaign appearance with Warnock, Barack Obama made the most of that statement, too, but, in one way, it illustrated something significant, and even somewhat reassuring. In an environment of hyper-partisanship and all-out political warfare, individual candidates still matter. ♦