Georgia Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock’s re-election campaign is probably breathing a sigh of relief. The Peach State Democrat is leading in the polls against Republican Herschel Walker. However, Georgia is still chock full of Republican voters, it’s an off-year, the economy is bad, inflation is high, Joe Biden is unpopular—and Democrats are starting to lose their grip in some races. Like any politician, they all think they will lose in the next election, even those in safe districts. Warnock believes he dodged a bullet because Walker’s dirty laundry has been discovered. He allegedly paid for a girlfriend’s abortion, which the Daily Beast wrote about recently:
A woman who asked not to be identified out of privacy concerns told The Daily Beast that after she and Walker conceived a child while they were dating in 2009 he urged her to get an abortion. The woman said she had the procedure and that Walker reimbursed her for it.
She supported these claims with a $575 receipt from the abortion clinic, a “get well” card from Walker, and a bank deposit receipt that included an image of a signed $700 personal check from Walker.
The woman said there was a $125 difference because she “ball-parked” the cost of an abortion after Googling the procedure and added on expenses such as travel and recovery costs.
Additionally, The Daily Beast independently corroborated details of the woman’s claims with a close friend she told at the time and who, according to the woman and the friend, took care of her in the days after the procedure.
Walker’s son, Christian, also torched his dad on social media, calling him absent, among other things, though he also campaigned with him and procured a nice following from that activity.
This was bound to happen eventually. Everyone in DC knew about the kind of oppo they had on Herschel Walker since the second he announced pic.twitter.com/impzqXSoOO
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) October 4, 2022
Then you shouldn’t have campaigned all out for him and gained hundreds of thousands of followers off of it. https://t.co/LQ5RUVQ8ri
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) October 4, 2022
Like look at this…. This is the same person he’s talking about. Completely deranged. pic.twitter.com/1wdc1ldhJw
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) October 4, 2022
Also, why was Christian Walker campaigning for his father all this time if these tweets he’s sending now are true? Just bizarre all around and embarrassing for the party as a whole.
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) October 4, 2022
The family drama with Walker was an incoming missile since he announced his Senate campaign. The abortion story is something else, but the social media flame war between Herschel and his son appears to be driving the despair factor regarding state Republicans, or at least that’s what Georgia native Erick Erickson is suggesting. Yet, for Democrats trying to weaponize the abortion allegations against Walker, they should know that it’s not a scandal. There was no crime if it happened, and FiveThirtyEight is not so high on this story being a decisive event:
The question is, how much will this controversy hurt Walker? Given the salaciousness of the story and the turmoil it has reportedly plunged his campaign into, it’s tempting to think it might torpedo his chances. But that’s hardly a guarantee.
It is true that scandals tangibly affect candidates’ chances of winning elections. I keep a database of scandals, and based on an analysis we did in 2018, we found that scandal-plagued incumbents did 9 percentage points worse in their next general election than they would otherwise be projected to do. That analysis included a variety of factors such as the candidate’s previous margin of victory, the partisan lean of their district, generic-ballot polling, congressional approval ratings and the incumbent’s congressional voting record. This finding led us to include whether or not a candidate faces a scandal as a variable in our midterm forecast.
But this new revelation about Walker, who has denied the allegation, hasn’t affected our forecast of the Georgia Senate race — at least not yet. That’s because, for one, it doesn’t meet our definition of a scandal. As our forecast defines it, a scandal is a credible accusation of objective criminal or ethical wrongdoing. While Walker’s decision to pay for an abortion may have been hypocritical, it wasn’t illegal. And if being hypocritical were enough to qualify as “scandal-tarred,” most politicians would be slapped with the label!
[…]
According to our polling average of the race, Warnock is currently polling 2 points ahead of Walker, so even if the controversy doesn’t hurt Walker, if it prevents him from gaining, that’s a problem for the Republican.
But on the other hand, there might not be many voters left to turn on Walker. Democrats have been airing ads for weeks reminding voters of Walker’s past scandals. And Georgia is also a highly inelastic state, meaning it doesn’t have a lot of swing voters. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has also said it will continue campaigning hard in Georgia. Many Republican and Republican-leaning voters in Georgia may feel that too much is at stake (i.e., control of the Senate) for this latest allegation to sway their vote.
That should throw some cold water on those who think politicians being exposed for hypocrisy is groundbreaking. The leak that needs to be shut down is the fight between the college football hall of famer and his son. Someone somewhere has to broker a sit-down and confiscate the kid’s phone until after Election Day.
One notable thing here — it wasn't the Daily Beast story that has gotten GA-GOP types into despair mode. It's Herschel Walker's son's Twitter thread that served as the admission against interest for Walker and it's all down hill from there. https://t.co/sXy38M7AMM
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) October 4, 2022
I don’t think it matters much at all in this race as long as his son stops rage tweeting and feeding into the Dem machine https://t.co/MWRfJnK1w0
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) October 4, 2022
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