Fuck his feelings:
Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker fails to see the humor in former president Barack Obama’s jokes about Walker’s preference to be a werewolf rather than a vampire.
Appearing on Fox News, the candidate claimed Obama did not “tell the whole story” when joking about comments Walker made in November where he said, “I don’t know if you know, but vampires are some cool people, are they not? But let me tell you something that I found out: A werewolf can kill a vampire. Did you know that? I never knew that. So, I don’t want to be a vampire anymore. I want to be a werewolf.”
The remarks prompted Obama to joke this past week at a campaign event for Sen. Raphael Warnock ahead of Georgia’s Dec. 6 run-off election. “Since the last time I was here, Mr. Walker has been talking about issues of great importance to the people of Georgia, like whether it’s better to be a vampire or a werewolf,” Obama said. “This is a debate that I must confess I once had myself … when I was seven.”
“Well, what’s sad is they’re always trying to mislead people,” Walker told Fox host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday after Obama poked fun at his comments. “That’s the same as you listening to… Obama talking about I’m talking about vampires and werewolves… Why don’t they tell the whole story?”
Also, this happened over the weekend:
As the U.S. Senate runoff between Sen. Raphael Warnock and football legend Herschel Walker reaches its final hours, an ex-girlfriend of Walker is sharing details of what she says is his abusive behavior toward her.
Cheryl Parsa, 61, told NBC News on Sunday that she was in a five-year relationship with Walker in the 2000s. During an argument in 2005, she said, Walker pressed her head against a wall, grabbed her throat, and cocked his fist to throw a punch that missed and struck that wall.
Walker's campaign has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
Last week, the Daily Beast first told Parsa's story.
She said she confronted Walker, also 61, in 2005, after she found him with another woman at a Dallas residence.
"He told me, you want to see a man," Parsa said in an interview. "I'll show you a man."
At that point, she said, Walker pressed his forehead against hers, which also pressed her head against a wall, and spoke so intensely that she was struck with his spittle.
"He had his hand on my throat, my chest, and then he leaned back to throw a punch," Parsa said. "And luckily, I was able to avoid that. And the punch landed on the wall instead of me."
Three of Parsa's confidants told NBC she told them about the incident before Walker ran for the Georgia seat.
Here’s the current state of the race:
There are other subtle positive signs for Warnock in the home stretch. He has dominated in fundraising and in advertising dollars spent. His campaign and outside Democratic groups have spent more than double that of their Republican counterparts, according to the latest spending report from AdImpact. In just the final week, Warnock’s campaign has spent $7.6 million on advertising compared to the Walker campaign’s $3.65 million in ad buys.
More than $30 million is being spent in the Atlanta media market alone by both parties in the final week, including Election Day, per AdImpact.
Republicans, meanwhile, are subtly betraying a loss of confidence in their candidate.
Gov. Brian Kemp, who romped to reelection in November even after clashing openly with Trump, got behind Walker early in the runoff. The Republican loaned his get-out-the-vote apparatus to Walker and cut an ad on his behalf that is still airing. But Kemp did not campaign with Walker the final weekend of the race.
Georgia Republican operatives have grown less hopeful in recent days. With Walker being significantly outraised and the candidate keeping a light schedule even in the final days of the race, allies are privately conceding that his chances of victory are slim.
The lack of optimism is even showing through in some of the GOP’s communications. Both Walker’s campaign and the Georgia Republican Party have sent out emails in recent days describing his Tuesday evening gathering as an “Election night party,” rather than a “Victory Celebration” party. It’s a minor difference in phrasing from Walker’s Nov. 8 election night event, but one that has raised eyebrows among party activists.
The weather report also looks grim for Republicans: Rain is forecast across Georgia on Tuesday. The GOP is relying heavily on Election Day turnout — and already struggling to motivate voters to go to the polls for the second time in a month.
And Democrats are working overtime to ensure a big win tomorrow:
The 2021 Republican-peddled voting “reform” bill, SB 202, made a lot of changes after President Joe Biden won the state in 2020, and Warnock and Jon Ossoff gave Democrats their narrow Senate majority in 2021. Even though, let’s remember, both Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rejected Donald Trump’s false claims that lax Georgia laws enabled fraud and cost him the election. They proclaimed the election clean and well-run – and then made umpteen changes to election law anyway. And as hard as Georgia Democrats fought to overcome the new barriers, in both November and December, they couldn’t surpass all of them.
Kemp and Raffensperger stood up to Trump on his phony claims. But they then went all in on a law that with surgical precision took aim at voting reforms that made casting a ballot easier for everyone, not just Democrats, during the Covid nightmare. For absolutely no valid reason, SB 202 cut short the election runoff period to four from nine weeks. It cut short, in both the general and runoff elections, the time to request and return absentee ballots. It limited the number of early voting sites as well as drop boxes where Georgians could return ballots they didn’t have time to mail.
Many Georgia voting activists are fuming about those unnecessary limits.
But most are still optimistic Warnock will win.
“It was hard to look at those incredibly long lines,” Care In Action executive director Hillary Holley confessed to me on Sunday morning, once early voting was over. On the last night it was allowed, at one polling place, she said, voters were still in line at 10:30 Friday night. Sure, that’s inspiring, but “we don’t know how many voters left those lines.”
Still, Holley feels good about Warnock’s chances. A record-breaking 1.85 million voters cast ballots early over the last week. And more than 76,000 voters who came out to early vote didn’t bother to vote at all in November. Warnock beat Walker by 37,600, but fell a fraction of a point short of winning outright and avoiding a runoff. No guarantee those new voters all go to Warnock, but it’s hard not to notice they make up roughly twice the senator’s November deficit.
They also represent the multiracial coalition he needs. As NBC News reported on Sunday: “Among Georgians under 30 years old, 15.5 percent of early runoff voters didn’t turn out for the general election. Additionally, 8.4 percent of Hispanics and 9.5 percent of Asian Americans who have shown up for the runoff didn’t vote in the Nov. 8 election.” Women made up 56 percent of early voters, and Black people 32 percent. More good news for Warnock.
Why didn’t so many vote in November? Some people say there was complacency – how could Warnock possibly lose to a candidate as weak as Herschel Walker? (That low turnout also doomed Stacey Abrams’s second run for governor, just saying.) But Holley believes it’s because the “outside groups” – community-based, not formally affiliated with any campaign – got better funding for the runoff, and were able to get their acts together even on such short notice.
In November, State Rep. Bee Nguyen told me she was disappointed that in the general election, when she ran unsuccessfully for Secretary of State, there was very little outreach to Latinos and Asian Americans in their languages. Nguyen and Holley say that changed, quickly. Last week, Warnock’s campaign released digital campaign ads in Vietnamese, Mandarin and Korean. Maybe too little, but hopefully not too late. Nguyen said no one came knocking on her door during the November general. She had many visitors over the last few weeks.
And there is so much on the line:
Since Democrats retook the Senate majority in 2021, Mr. Biden has undertaken his own successful counteroffensive, in tandem with Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader. Mr. Schumer’s Senate has actually confirmed federal judges at a faster rate than Mr. McConnell’s at the time of the first midterm election. So far, over 85 judges appointed by Mr. Biden have been confirmed, including a new Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson. The judges, overall, are traditional liberals, many of them younger and nonwhite. Mr. Biden and Mr. Schumer were willing to elevate judges who were former public defenders, an unlikely prospect in the law-and-order 20th century.
If Mr. Warnock wins, the Senate can move more rapidly and seek judges who are perhaps more progressive in their worldviews — the sort who could hit a snag if someone like Joe Manchin, the centrist from West Virginia, or Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is the deciding vote.
Democrats must evenly split committee members in the 50-50 Senate, giving Republicans the power to delay votes on judges. A 51-49 majority would be much more dominant: Committees like the judiciary would be stacked with Democrats, greatly speeding up the confirmation process. There are about 75 vacancies on U.S. District Courts and nine at the appellate level. That number is bound to grow as more judges retire in the next two years.
Democrats, with Mr. Warnock, could also be in position to replace a Supreme Court justice. The 6-3 conservative majority makes this seem less pressing, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death was a lesson that Stephen Breyer, who retired this year, seemed to heed: Once you’re of retirement age, it’s best to leave the court if an ideologically friendly president and Senate majority are in control.
Sonia Sotomayor is 68 and Elena Kagan is 62. Both can serve for decades, but Democrats have to think seriously about the practical advantage of installing liberal justices who are in their 40s or early 50s. Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed at 48; Neil Gorsuch was 49. Justice Breyer wisely gave way to Justice Jackson. Perhaps Justice Sotomayor, at least, should give thought to stepping aside with Mr. Biden in the White House and Mr. Schumer guiding the Senate. With 51 votes, Mr. Schumer could steer through a judge who is as progressive as either Justice Sotomayor or Kagan, helping to nurture a liberal minority that could theoretically expand someday.
And then there’s 2024. If Mr. Walker defeats Mr. Warnock, Republicans will have an enormous advantage in their quest to not only flip the Senate but also build a durable majority that could last a generation or more. The 2024 map is foreboding for Democrats: Assuming they run for re-election, three incumbents represent states that Mr. Trump handily carried in 2020. Mr. Manchin, resented by the left, will have to find a way to win in deep-red West Virginia (Mr. Trump carried the state in 2020 with nearly 70 percent of the vote). Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio (who has stated he will run) will have to win a state that has now twice voted for Mr. Trump and is sending J.D. Vance to Washington. Jon Tester of Montana has the daunting task of trying to win a rural state that has in recent years become inhospitable to Democrats for statewide offices.
A 51-49 majority is a better hedge against such a possible wipeout. It also gives Mr. Warnock a chance to shine on the national level and demonstrate whether he can become a formidable member of an expanding Democratic bench, the kind of senator who could end up president someday.
But we can’t let our guard down: