Ben Gray/AP Photo
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) gestures next to an empty podium set up for Republican challenger Herschel Walker, during a debate with Libertarian Chase Oliver in Atlanta on Sunday night.
Flashing a badge, apparently, does not render its bearer any braver. So Herschel Walker, Georgia’s Republican Senate candidate, skipped a second debate on Sunday with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and the Libertarian candidate, Chase Oliver. The Georgia Public Broadcasting-Atlanta Press Club producers took advantage of the opportunity to include numerous camera angles of the two men and the empty podium during what proved to be a civil, mostly informative forum. It was a far cry from last Friday’s Nexstar Media forum that showcased how polluted the American political ecosystem has become: a carnival of sound bites, aggressively crammed into ad-worthy one-minute responses and 30-second rebuttals. In the waning weeks of the country’s midterm election campaigns, no scene could be more cringeworthy than a shuckin’ and jivin’ Herschel Walker flashing an honorary badge as if it gave him superhero crime-fighting powers.
Walker was manifestly unable to explain why he should be sharing the stage with an actual U.S. senator, while Warnock exhibited the restraint one might expect from a preacher-turned-politician. In the postgame feeding frenzy, reporters and pundits jostled among themselves to count the jabs that landed and the ones that missed, as if some Rosetta Stone level of analysis was necessary for what was essentially a pitiful version of the dozens.
Walker’s campaign decided that it has glommed onto something, so this week the candidate took off galloping down the campaign trail with his honorary badge, touting his nonexistent law enforcement credentials—which after the George Floyd uprisings is quite a surreal development for African American voters, unless that candidate is making a big play for the fearful white vote, as Walker has to do to win in Georgia.
Between SB 202, the notorious election law designed to suppress Black and Democratic turnout, and a healthy showing by white Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters, Walker is not out of the running. (One of the Friday forum questioners cited a Brennan Center analysis to support the factoid that the 2022 primary’s turnout increased dramatically over primaries in 2018 and 2020, but failed to drill down into the center’s essential conclusion: Save for 2020, turnout in the 2022 May primary featured the biggest gap between Black and white turnout in at least a decade—with more whites casting ballots than Blacks.)
The only winners in Georgia’s democracy-in-decline comedy of errors are the white supremacists who made it all possible. They include former President Donald Trump, of course, but also Georgia’s white Republican establishment, which wanted a Black empty suit to run against Warnock, and finding a mannequin, Walker, sent him off for the fitting. Further complicating the contest is the possibility of a runoff, with Libertarian Oliver plausibly helping to deliver one. (In Georgia, a candidate needs 50 percent of the vote to win in congressional and statewide races, so Oliver could send the race into a second, Warnock-vs.-Walker round.)
Why is Walker still a factor? After all, his sleazy personal history meshes neatly with the stereotype many Republicans hold of an African American man with multiple women and children on the side. He is also wealthy, so he can pay for a girlfriend’s abortion while denying that right to countless other people. He holds positions and espouses beliefs about other issues that would be disqualifying factors in other states. But all this does not add up to a runaway contest for Warnock in Georgia.
The only winners in Georgia’s democracy-in-decline comedy of errors are the white supremacists who made it all possible.
The Heisman Trophy winner’s résumé bears little resemblance to those of the 11 African Americans who have served in the U.S. Senate, nine of them post-Reconstruction with distinguished pre-Senate careers. Of the four Black Republican senators, two were Reconstruction-era Mississippi politicians: Hiram Revels, a minister who recruited Black troops during the Civil War, and Blanche K. Bruce, who started his political career as a supervisor of elections, and held statewide and local political positions. In 1966, liberal Republican Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, an Army veteran and attorney, became the first Black person elected to the Senate since Reconstruction. Nearly 50 years later, South Carolina Republican Tim Scott, a county and state lawmaker, was elected to the Senate after serving in the House.
For all the cackling about Washington insiders and the need for outsider perspectives, all a Walker voter would get from a Sen. Walker would be to have their interests represented by seasoned Washington insiders. It is hard to envision Walker being left to his own devices to work on issues like saving a deal to bring an electric-vehicle battery manufacturing plant to Georgia or to work on legislation to steer tax credits to solar companies, as Warnock has done.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (as the likely leader of the GOP Senate minority or majority) and the Scotts, Rick of Florida and Tim of South Carolina, would likely draw Walker-minding duties. And Walker would likely get along fine with Alabama’s junior senator, Tommy Tuberville, a former college football coach, who recently declared that Democrats “want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.” As for the rest of his Capitol Hill operation, Republican operatives winnowed from a roster of campaign staffers and lifer congressional aides would, no doubt, run his office and outreach.
One electoral advantage for Warnock, who as a U.S. senator and heir to Martin Luther King Jr.’s pulpit appears to be the sum of all white Georgian fears, is that Walker’s support among African American Georgians is practically nonexistent. A revealing New York Times portrait looked at his tarnished reputation in his hometown of Wrightsville for failing to speak out about racial injustices in 1980. One resident said that Walker would be “in over his head as mayor” of the small town.
The Sunday debate that Walker skipped was an eye-opening contrast to last week’s debacle, providing somewhat of a boost to Warnock and certainly one to Oliver, a 37-year-old gay white Libertarian businessman. The moderator found multiple opportunities to ask the two men to outline the questions they would have asked Walker if he had shown up. During one exchange, Warnock offered, “Well, if Mr. Walker were here, I’d ask him about this disturbing history of violence that we’ve seen from him and we’re not just talking about one woman, but multiple women.”
Oliver held his own, taking full advantage of his message-sending 60 minutes, box-checking his support for such conservative touchstones as balanced federal budgets and market-driven technological solutions to both the climate crisis and high health costs. A gun owner (“I’m a member of the Pink Pistols; armed gays are harder to oppress and they’re harder to bash.”), he outlined opposition to red-flag laws and gun confiscation; Warnock countered with support for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and universal background checks.
If Oliver gets enough votes to hold the November leader’s vote total under 50 percent, a runoff between the top two vote-getters would be held on December 6.
