National Review Online
Wednesday, December 07, 2022
Herschel Walker’s defeat in Tuesday’s
Senate runoff in Georgia was as predictable as it was avoidable. Even
before the 2022 election cycle got under way, smart observers of Georgia
politics predicted the following: If the former Georgia football star ran for
Senate, he would be unbeatable in the Republican primary, but would have a
tough time in the general election given his enormous personal baggage and thin
grasp of politics and policy. Nonetheless, Donald Trump recruited Walker into
the race because he was a celebrity who was loyal to him. Most Republicans went
along, either banking on Walker’s celebrity or considering it futile to fight
him. And last night, as Walker lost a runoff to progressive Democrat Raphael
Warnock in an otherwise red state, we got yet another reminder of how
destructive it would be for the Republican Party to tie its future to Trump.
As most readers will recall, in the 2020 election, Trump
lost Georgia in the presidential election, but Republicans still had a chance
to retain the Senate were they to hold onto just one of the two Senate seats
that were going to a runoff. This should have been an easy task, considering
that David Perdue had beaten Jon Ossoff by nearly two points in the general
election, coming just about three-tenths of a point away from avoiding a
runoff. Instead of uniting the party with the goal of retaining the Senate and
providing Republicans with a veto over President Biden’s radical agenda, Trump
spent the crucial period before the runoff election perpetuating fantasies that
the election was stolen, insisting that Georgia voting was rigged, and
attacking fellow Republicans led by Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State
Brad Raffensperger in an effort to pressure them into trying to overturn the
will of the voters. It isn’t surprising that Republicans lost both Senate seats
amid depressed Republican turnout, and Democrats gained narrow control of the
Senate. The destructive real-world consequences of this became quickly clear
when Democrats passed an inflationary $1.9 trillion spending plan shortly after
Biden took office.
Trump went into the 2022 election with the goal of
defeating Kemp and Raffensperger in the Republican primary, an effort that
proved unsuccessful. But he did succeed in convincing Walker to run. Walker,
who had a troubled personal background and struggled to answer basic questions
about his political positions, exemplified the drawbacks of Trump-backed
candidates.
There are, no doubt, a multitude of reasons to explain
Walker’s loss. He was heavily outspent by Warnock, a testament to the fact that
Republicans have yet to replicate the success of the Democrats’ Act Blue
fundraising apparatus. It also reflects unwillingness of Republicans to develop
a strategy around mail-in and early voting, which, again, is not helped by
Trump’s repeated claims that these methods are hopelessly corrupt. Republicans
can complain about it all they want, but both methods are here to stay in some
form, and Republicans better find a way to compete with Democrats on this front
or they’ll continue to lose close elections.
All of that said, other Republicans in the state were
playing on the same field as Walker, and every other Republican running statewide won. Kemp
was reelected by eight points, and Raffensperger by nine. Republicans also
comfortably won races for lieutenant governor; attorney general; commissioner
of agriculture; commissioner of insurance; school superintendent; and
commissioner of labor. Republicans also significantly outpolled Democrats in
holding both houses of the state legislature and nine of its 14 House seats.
And yet Walker lost by somewhere between two to four points, as swing voters
who voted for other Republicans ran away from him.
Georgia, of course, is not an isolated example. In
Arizona, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, Trump’s hand-picked candidates lost
Senate races that could have been won, and the same was true across the country
in congressional districts and governor’s races. When the primary qualification
for the Republican nomination is loyalty to Trump, it not only saddles the
Republican nominee with unpopular positions, but also forecloses the normal
vetting process that occurs during competitive primaries that are supposed to
weed out bad candidates. In 2024, Republican voters are going to have to decide
how many winnable elections they are willing to lose to massage a single man’s
bruised ego.
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