Holy shit! Herschel Walker (R. GA) said something honest for once:
The highly anticipated debate is less than a month away, but Walker downplayed himself when asked what he is doing to prepare for the showdown against Warnock.
“I am getting out talking to people and talking to you (referring to the media),” said Walker. “I'm a country boy. I'm not that smart. He's a preacher. (Warnock) is smart and wears these nice suits. So, he is going to show up and embarrass me at the debate Oct. 14th, and I'm just waiting to show up and I will do my best.”
But when asked about why he declined to debate Warnock initially, he became aggravated and said he had to hunt down Warnock and told him to “put his big man pants on.”
“He may not even show up for that one,” said Walker. “He has made every excuse not to show up. I begged him until I chased him down and then he decided he was going to show up Oct. 14. I didn’t agree to do his debate because it wasn’t fair. A fair debate is doing it in front of the voters, and I’ve agreed.”
A spokesperson with the Warnock campaign responded by saying the Republican nominee was sent an invite over the summer.
“Shortly after the May 2022 primary, Reverend Warnock was the first to announce that he would participate in three debates and in June, named the three debates he agreed to and invited Walker to do the same…for nearly two months, Walker continued to dodge committing to any debate, a complete reversal from his previous statement that Reverend Warnock could, ‘Call the time, he make the place, I’m ready to go.’ Then, Walker went out of his way to accept a totally different debate than Reverend Warnock.”
Latest polls show Warnock leads Walker 52% to 46%, according to Quinnipiac University.
This sounds like Walker is already conceding that he is going to lose his debate. With his record, I can’t blame him for that:
When Herschel Walker is asked about his history of violence against his ex-wife, the Republican U.S. Senate hopeful often says he’s been transparent about the tumultuous period when “my mental health was at its worst.”
Instead, at campaign events and in interviews he often dodges questions about his abusive relationship with Cindy Grossman by saying he addressed his behavior in his 2008 memoir, “Breaking Free.”
But the 264-page book never mentions violence directed at Grossman. In fact, it seems to suggest there were no altercations as it describes his struggle with mental illness.
“I can’t point to any major blowups between us, but I felt like things had eroded,” he wrote, discussing the end of his marriage.
Walker’s failure to address the violence undermines his repeated claims of transparency at a time when his history is facing sharper scrutiny. Republican and Democratic groups have aired ads featuring news clips of Grossman describing Walker physically assaulting her and holding a gun to her head.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock’s campaign last week for the first time launched an ad featuring footage of Grossman in the 2008 interview, along with snippets of court documents and police reports detailing the charges.
“The guns and knives. I got into a few choking things with him,” Grossman said in the interview. “He held the gun to my temple and said he was gonna blow my brains out.”
Rather than speak about what happened during their tumultuous marriage, Walker instead alludes to his struggle with dissociative identity disorder and stresses that Grossman helped him through a rocky time in his life. He calls attempts to bring more attention to his past a descent into “gutter politics.”
“My opponents think they’re hurting me — but I am glad they did this ad,” he says in a video response to the ad. “Because it gives me an opportunity to end the stigma around mental health.”
And Walker has certainly set himself up for ridicule:
Comedian Cedric The Entertainer is appearing in a new political in which he mocks Georgia Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker as crazy, on creatine and kinda like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates.
“Lord, you know they said life is like a box of chocolates,” he says in the one minute, 27-second spot. “Well, Hershey’s Walker is one of these chocolates that you don’t want. You know the ones where you get a box of chocolates and you like (gagging)? That’s him.”
There’s more:
The Original Kings of Comedy star then compared Walker to a sitting member of Congress from the Peach State: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“I mean, some of the stuff he is saying — we just got to be very concerned about the educational system, one. Two: We already got senators that’s, like, you know, Marjorie Taylor, that’s crazier than a mug. We don’t need to add no more crazy to that mix, you hear me? Especially not this, not with the haircut and the extra muscles. I think he on creatine. I think he still from back in the day when they was shooting stuff up and trying to put in their muscles. Something going on where it turned off a switch.”
The comedian then got specific about some of Walker’s more head-scratching comments.
“I mean, the man talking about ‘If humans are from apes, why do we still got apes?’ What, Herschel Walker? Come on, man. ‘You know, our bad air floated over to China and mixed with they good air and turned in — it was a recycling air situation.’ What, bruh? I don’t know what this man talking about! Guys, we got to defeat him, got to beat him — we got to stop him! Y’all know what it is. Let’s go! Let’s get involved.”
Yes, Walker should be easier to beat but Warnock and grassroots organizations understand why it’s not that easy:
It seems inexplicable, even in modern American politics—not just that Walker could win, but that his race against the incumbent, Raphael Warnock, is even a close contest. “Well, let’s say this: It’s Georgia. So yeah, I believe it’s close,” says Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster and strategist who worked on both of Barack Obama’s winning presidential campaigns. Belcher is not being condescending or simplistic. Quite the opposite. He is acknowledging that Georgia has become one of the country’s most politically complex and least predictable states. It remains to the right of center but went, crucially, for Joe Biden against Donald Trump in 2020. The state is a fascinating mix of urban and rural—with one of the largest percentages of Black residents nationally—whose demographics are being continually scrambled by an influx of new residents, many of them from the North.
“Georgia remains a partisan state, even with two Democratic senators and a Republican governor, and the margins are always going to be close,” says Warnock’s campaign manager, Quentin Fulks. “We know that. What the outside world sees of Herschel Walker is a lot different from the people who grew up watching him play football. The only way to combat that is to accept it.”
Walker, despite his multiple flaws as a first-time candidate, was ahead in several late-summer polls, buoyed in particular by three factors. Conditions have changed somewhat recently, especially after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, but 2022 remains a tough midterm environment for Democrats, with Biden’s unpopularity a drag on races across the country. Far more locally, Walker is a college football legend. “This race has been going on forever, and the big question is, why hasn’t Walker tanked?” says Doug Heyl, a Democratic strategist who has worked on multiple Georgia statewide campaigns. “Do not underestimate University of Georgia football voters. There’s a perception of him as a hero that is hard to shake.” Walker wore red as a Bulldogs running back; it’s his current red Republican jersey that’s more powerful, however. “Tribalism is the only thing he’s got going,” Belcher says. “He is a terrible candidate, but so was Donald Trump. Regardless of how incompetent Walker is, how unprepared for the job, those MAGA Republicans are going to look at him and go, ‘He’s for our tribe.’”
LaTosha Brown chooses a different image. “Herschel Walker could be Kermit the Frog and this would be a close race,” she says. Brown is a cofounder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter Fund; she and the organization played a significant role in Warnock being elected to the Senate in the first place, in a 2020 special election that dragged into a January 2021 runoff. “You’ve got a Black guy affirming the Republican anti-everything agenda. Ultimately, this is really not about the betterment of Georgia. It’s about a few of the white elite that seek to control a state that is increasingly more diverse and younger. So they’re using Herschel Walker to try to create division in the community.”
Georgia’s communities—of race, of income, of geography—are hardly monolithic, and there is a sizable, key percentage that’s up for grabs. “The swing in Georgia is by and large white, north Atlanta suburban voters, predominantly women, many of them northern transplants,” says Kendra-Sue Derby, a veteran Georgia Democratic consultant. “Plus progressive whites in the Black Belt, places like Macon and Columbus.” Warnock doesn’t necessarily need to win over all those voters—but he does need them to at least skip voting for Walker, even if they pull the lever for incumbent Republican governor Brian Kemp in his rematch against Stacey Abrams. Her presence on the ballot adds yet another complicating factor: If Abrams expands the electorate, as she did in 2018, it could add a couple of points to Warnock’s numbers.
And while the GOP does have an attack strategy they want to keep focused on Warnock:
To defeat Raphael Warnock this fall, Republicans have to pull off a tricky feat: Making the pastor of Martin Luther King Jr.'s home church come off like any other self-serving politician.
The GOP’s failure to successfully frame the Democratic senator as a radical socialist during Georgia’s 2020 special election has prompted a strategic shift to negatively define Warnock — with his state again crucial in the battle for the narrowly divided Senate. Now Republicans are going after Warnock’s financial gains since he took office, as economic conditions worsened for average citizens.
Warnock’s opponents are zeroing in on a unique $7,400 monthly housing allowance he receives as pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. The stipend amounts to nearly $90,000 in income that appears to far exceed his housing costs back home, money that’s exempt from income taxes, according to IRS rules.
It’s one piece of a broader financial attack the GOP is launching this fall, from ads to earned media. But dinging Warnock as quick to use taxpayer and campaign donor money to cover personal expenses is a risky play given the liabilities of GOP nominee Herschel Walker — a former football star prone to gaffes with a history of alleged domestic violence. And not every Republican is embracing the tactic.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), for one, said “there’s way too much focus on personalities in politics, and I would prefer us to talk about the differences in policies.”
Warnock says he has “followed all the appropriate processes.” His aides have cleared the housing stipend arrangement with the Senate Ethics Committee.
It’s also kind of hard to pull off when clowns like this go off message:
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said he prayed for Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) to win their 2021 runoffs so people would more readily believe claims of election fraud.
Lindell made the remark while speaking to a crowd at former President Trump’s Youngstown, Ohio, rally on Saturday, according to a clip posted online by Mediaite.
“All of a sudden, I started praying,” said Lindell. “I go, ‘God, please let them take both of these senators.’ ”
Lindell on Saturday said Democrats would have been “smart” to win only one of the two Georgia seats, because some Republicans may have backed off their unsubstantiated belief of fraud since the party would have retained control of the Senate, moving their focus to win in 2022.
“I’m a marketer, and I’m going, ‘If I was working for that evil, I would say give them back one of these senators so they shut up about the election,’” he said.
Meanwhile, over in the Governor’s race:
Stacey Abrams, Georgia Democrats' nominee for governor, is launching an intensive effort to get out the vote by urging potential supporters to cast in-person ballots the first week of early voting as she tries to navigate the state’s new election laws.
The strategy, outlined to The Associated Press by Abrams’ top aides, is a shift from 2018, when she spent generously in her first gubernatorial bid to encourage voters to use mail ballots. It also moves away from Democrats' pandemic-era emphasis on mail voting, a push that delivered Georgia’s electoral votes to President Joe Biden and helped Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff win concurrent U.S. Senate runoffs to give Democrats control of Capitol Hill.
Republicans, including Abrams’ opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, answered in 2021 with sweeping election changes that, among other provisions, dramatically curtailed drop boxes for mail ballots, added wrinkles to mail ballot applications and ballot return forms, and made it easier to challenge an individual voter’s eligibility. But it also expanded in-person voting.
“It’s self-evident we have to have a big early vote in-person,” said Abrams campaign manager Lauren Groh-Wargo, arguing the new mail ballot procedures make it risky for Democrats to rely too heavily on that option. “What’s not self-evident,” Groh-Wargo continued, “is how the hell you do that.”
Also:
After a digital flier featuring the logo of the Republican Party of Forsyth County, Ga., urged residents to rally against Stacey Abrams, alarming and infuriating local Democratic leaders who said its message sounded dangerously evocative of the county’s notoriously racist past, the Forsyth Republican Party announced that it was calling the rally off.
Using inflammatory language as if Ms. Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor, were an invading enemy, the flier issued a “call to action” encouraging “conservatives and patriots” to “save and protect our neighborhoods.” It emerged this week in response to news that Ms. Abrams would be campaigning alongside other members of the Democratic ticket in the area on Sunday.
“The moment is at hand,” the flier read, calling Ms. Abrams and Senator Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Georgia Democrat seeking a full term, “the designers of destructive radicalism and socialism” and warning that they would be “crossing over our county border” and into the county seat, Cumming. It said they would appear at “OUR FoCal Center,” referring to a county arts building.
Mr. Warnock is not expected to appear alongside Ms. Abrams, Democratic officials said.
The text of the flier surfaced on Wednesday on a local online conservative news outlet, which said it had spotted it on the Forsyth G.O.P. website, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the flier Friday morning after county Democrats circulated it to journalists.
As of midmorning Friday, the flier did not appear on the Forsyth Republican Party’s website or Facebook page.
Reached by text message late Friday afternoon and asked four times whether the county party had produced or distributed the flier, Jerry Marinich, the group’s chairman, did not answer. He said only that the party “does not plan on participating in any rally on Sunday.”
Late Friday evening, the party issued a statement saying it would no longer hold the rally.
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