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It’s another day, so naturally, there is another Herschel Walker scandal. Since he launched his improbable candidacy for the U.S. Senate this year, he has been caught lying about everything from COVID to his professional experience to how many children he has.
And now the Daily Beast is reporting yet another bombshell, alleging that in 2009, Walker urged his then-girlfriend to get an abortion and reimbursed her for the procedure.
This, of course, should not be a scandal. If true, he and his then-partner had every right and perhaps every reason to pursue an abortion, and one could argue it was almost chivalrous of the ex-NFL star to foot the bill. But the irony is that Walker has been running a virulently socially conservative campaign, chastising others for their family-planning decisions and calling for a total ban on all abortions in the United States with no exceptions for atrocities like rape or incest, as well as the health of the mother.
His own 23-year-old son has taken to Twitter to condemn his father. Christian Walker, an outspoken conservative in his own right, who had previously supported his father’s Senate run, has declared he’s “done” with his father after the allegations reported by the Daily Beast.
And yet, despite all of this, Walker—a man who has been accused of holding his ex-wife hostage at gunpoint, a man who had refused to debate his Democratic opponent until recently, a man who has demonstrated no coherence whatsoever when it comes to national or state-level issues—has a very good chance of winning the election the U.S. Senate this November.
If anything, his reaction to the Daily Beast story may win him more support from his GOP base. Taking a page right out of the Donald Trump playbook, Walker played the victim—allegedly that the story was part of some kind of Democratic plot and threatening to sue the Daily Beast for libel.
It will be an uphill legal battle—should he follow through with it, which I doubt he will—because the Daily Beast has receipts. While the woman who’s come forward has sought to shield her identity, she did provide the publication 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.”
But what is “evidence” to a Republican voter these days? There is no evidence that there was substantial fraud in the 2020 election, and yet, nearly two years later, an overwhelming majority of Republicans insist there was.
Call it cynical or clever or both, but Republicans have not only managed to convince their voters that any election they didn’t win is legitimate, but they also have argued that any story that paints them in an unflattering light is “fake news.”
Among the GOP right-wing zealots who still support Walker after the latest shocking allegation is Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.
Walker’s incoherent ramblings about “bad air” flowing from China and the theory of evolution are either ignored or accepted by people who know better like Mitch McConnell because ultimately it’s more important to them that a crucial Senate seat is held by someone who calls themselves a Republican and votes the way they want them to.
There is no doubt Walker would do that. He managed to easily win the GOP nomination for Senate in Georgia after doing little more than demonstrating that he would be the most devoted to Donald Trump of any of the candidates running. There are some who have speculated that Walker’s promotion from convention guest speaker to U.S. senatorial prospect was a deliberate attempt to siphon off Black voters from incumbent Democratic Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock, who also happens to be African American, but if that was part of the calculation, it isn’t paying off.
Warnock, who has proven himself to be an effective senator—helping to pass historic reductions in the cost of insulin—and one of the Democratic Party’s most charismatic orators, maintains the support of the overwhelming majority of Black voters across the state of Georgia, and so Walker’s best hope for victory is the conservative white voters of the state.
So far, the Republican Party and its backers have now evinced, at least publicly, any qualms about how Walker has comported himself not just in his past but over the last few months on the campaign trail. If it didn’t bother them that Walker blamed the tragic Uvalde, Texas, high school shooting on “young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at social media” will this Daily Beast story phase them?
This will be a true test of whether their supposed deeply held convictions on the issue of abortion are really that deeply held at all. Republican supporters may not be willing to vote for Warnock, who is unapologetically pro-choice, but will they leave Walker’s box blank to make a statement that is at least consistent with the national party’s embrace of criminalizing abortion?
Only time will tell. But nothing whatsoever can change the fact that Herschel Walker’s candidacy has been one of the biggest hot messes in recent political history.
This commentary was originally published in The Grio.
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