Americana

In Georgia, Herschel Walker runs his last play

THE NEWS

WOODSTOCK, Ga. — “You heard the story about the man who died early in life?” asked Herschel Walker. “Well, I’m gonna tell it to you anyway.”

Two hundred Georgians, huddled in a Black Rifle Coffee Company parking lot, heard the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate describe a dead man’s elevator tour of the afterlife. He traveled to hell, where there was “a party goin’ on,” then to heaven, where a duller crowd was “floatin’ around on clouds” and singing hymns.

Satan had “been campaigning,” said Walker, making eternal damnation look fun to dupe a lost soul into choosing it. Sen. Raphael Warnock was doing the same thing, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” who supported the “treason” of covid-19 vaccine mandates and the madness of “putting men in women’s sports.”

Georgia’s Dec. 6 runoff will determine the size of the Democrats’ U.S. Senate majority — another 50-50 tie that limits their influence, or a 51-49 advantage that would make Republicans less relevant. In the race’s closing days, Democrats out-spent Walker and built a lead in early voting, while Republicans asked voters who may not like their nominee to look past that and vote against the Biden agenda.

“Why the hell would you send Warnock to Washington to undercut everything that [Gov. Brian] Kemp is doing in Atlanta?” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham asked the crowd in Woodstock. When it was over, Graham joined Walker onstage for a friendly interview with Sean Hannity, the latest in a series of joint appearances between the candidate and his surrogates that he’s done in lieu of taking questions at his rallies.

Graham didn’t detail the accusations that have weakened Walker, like the abortions he denies paying for, or the threats against an ex-wife that Walker chalked up to his personal mental health struggles. But he reminisced about the fight to confirm Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, telling voters that there was “no bottom” to what liberals would say in order to smear a conservative.

Democrats are cautiously optimistic about the runoff after Walker ran 38,000 votes behind Warnock in the first round.

Polling has found a consistent, margin-of-error lead for the Democrat, and a much wider gulf in voters’ personal opinions of the candidates. On Friday, a CNN poll that put Warnock four points ahead found 50 percent of Georgia voters viewing him favorably, identical to the share of voters who told Nov. 8 exit pollsters that Warnock had “good judgment.” Just 39 percent of voters had a favorable view of Walker.

Warnock’s campaign has pressed that advantage every day, portraying Walker as a uniquely unqualified and dishonest right-winger who’d ban abortion and embarrass the state.

“We all know some folks in our lives who, we don’t wish them ill will, they say crazy stuff,” former President Barack Obama said at a Thursday night rally with Warnock in Atlanta, filling half of a rehabbed industrial complex that had been re-decorated with flags. “You don’t give them serious responsibility.”

The Republican finger-pointing over the Walker campaign began months ago, when his chief primary opponent said he’d lose to Warnock; it kept up through the early voting period, when outgoing Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan refused to vote for either candidate. But there’s a clear path to a possible Walker win.

The GOP needs to catch up on base turnout, which the Walker campaign believes it’s already doing, after Democrats — who won a lawsuit to get early voting options last weekend — dominated the first few days. It could convince some of the 200,000 Republicans who voted for Kemp, but not Walker, to grit their teeth and come back home for the runoff, along with some of the 81,000 voters who went for the Libertarian. On Monday, when early voting expanded, the highest turnout came in places where Walker had triumphed on Nov. 8, but the nearly 1.5 million Georgians who voted early were blacker and slightly younger than the electorate that voted early ahead of Nov. 8.

“We don’t march in a straight line,” state Sen. Randy Robertson told Walker’s supporters at another Thursday rally, in Columbus. “We don’t line up at church and get on a bus and let them drive us to the polls and let us vote for somebody who stands in the pulpit and advocates the murder of unborn children.”

Robertson had broached another reason the race has stayed close, with Walker as an underdog — a set of issues that helped the Democrats more than Republicans might have thought when the year began.

There was no mention of Warnock’s vote to codify gay marriage rights this week at Walker’s rallies, a demonstration of how some issues that made the GOP dominant in Georgia had faded. Warnock’s ads and speeches emphasized his vote for an insulin price cap and support for a child tax credit; Walker’s promise was to oppose the Biden agenda, full stop.

DAVID’S VIEW

The takes can wait until the votes are in, but I’ve been struck here by how solid the 2020/2021 coalitions still are. Republicans won every statewide race but Walker’s last month, improving in suburbs but not winning them. Biden isn’t personally popular, but the agenda Warnock voted for isn’t toxic. I only heard one mention, on the trail, of Warnock’s gay marriage vote this week — a reference to him opposing an additional GOP religious liberty amendment this week. Eighteen years ago, Georgia voted to ban gay marriage by a 54-point margin. The electorate is now only marginally in favor of Republicans winning the Senate.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Some observers think the real story is less Walker’s struggles and more that the Georgia GOP won its other statewide races, even after the Dobbs decision. Kemp’s clashes with Trump gave him more credibility with moderates, Eric Levitz writes in New York Magazine, which could be a danger sign for Democrats in 2024 and beyond. Less so if they’re facing Trump again.

NOTABLE

• The New York Times has more on GOP fears about the surprising lack of events Walker has participated in during the home stretch.

National: Thomas B. Edsall asks whether cities are entering a “doom loop” after a 30-year renaissance… Theodore Schleifer figures out where Peter Thiel’s money is going next… Jonathan Martin and Elena Schneider report that Democrats will bless Michigan’s bid to join the early primary calendar as Iowa gets the boot… Shelby Talcott marvels at the damage from Ye’s anti-Semitic media tour.

New Hampshire: Walter Shapiro makes the case for keeping the first primary first.

Washington: Daniel Marans profiles Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, after “talking like a normal human being” won her a House seat in Trump country.

Wisconsin: Jessie Opoien talks with the first openly gay senator about passing the Respect for Marriage Act.

Dark Brandon did it: He blew up the Democratic presidential primary. On Thursday, as DNC members met to start moving states around the the 2024 calendar, the president urged them to let South Carolina vote first.

“We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window,” Biden wrote in a letter delivered to members of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws committee (RBC) as they met for dinner.

Democrats have dragged out this process all year, punting it until after New Hampshire and Iowa elections, and after Republicans in both warned that Biden’s party was coming for their early-state states. Michigan continued to have the upper hand in the debate over an early Midwest primary, supplanting Iowa, boosted by a more diverse electorate that answered some Democrats’ concerns about two of the whitest states going first.

Biden undercut that, and had been thinking about it for a while, according to the AP’s Meg Kinnard. The DNC meeting was ongoing when this newsletter went out, but the committee was starting to debate a schedule that would start with an early February 2024 primary in South Carolina, continue with complementary same-day primaries in New Hampshire and Nevada, then move on to Georgia and Michigan to close out the month.

Democrats in both Iowa and New Hampshire were fighting those changes. Scott Brennan, the only Iowan on the RBC, told Iowa’s KCCI that the state should “go rogue” and tell the committee “we’re picking a date, here’s the date we’re going to go on” and deal with the consequences.

Warnock for Georgia, “President Obama: One More.” The Democratic Party’s second-most popular surrogate sticks to what’s worked for his endorsed candidates: Sixty seconds of glowing praise. (The party’s most popular surrogate, Michelle Obama, has recorded get-out-the-vote calls.) Obama doesn’t mention Walker at all, but says that “this is going to be a close race,” to dispel any over-confidence about Warnock.

Team Herschel, “Camp Farthest Out.” The runoff hasn’t given Republicans any new material to hit Warnock with, and Walker’s campaign has returned to damaging stories that emerged before the first round. The topic here first came up in Warnock’s 2020/2021 race, after an investigation into a camp run by Warnock’s former church revealed haphazard reporting of abuse. “What kind of pastor protects child abusers?” asks a narrator.

NRDC Action Votes, “Noise.” This environmentalist PAC barely spent on Warnock in the general election, and has upped its buy for the runoff, with this spot about a Walker comment that went viral on liberal Twitter. “What we need to do is keep having those gas-guzzlin’ cars,” he says; he continued to say that these cars “get good emissions,” but the ad cuts it there and contrasts it with Warnock’s votes for electric vehicle manufacturing.

The red wave Republicans dreamed about last month didn’t touch many swing states, but it transformed Iowa. Led by Gov. Kim Reynolds, who carried 95 of Iowa’s 99 counties, the GOP ousted Rep. Cindy Axne, defeated the longest-serving Democratic attorney general in the country, and retired a Democratic state treasurer who’d won his last race by 12 points.

After Nov. 8, just one Democrat was left in statewide office: State Auditor Rob Sand. He secured a second term by fewer than 3000 votes out of nearly 1.2 million cast, after publishing a damaging audit of the governor’s COVID relief spending, and after she urged voters to replace him.

This weekend, the Democratic National Committee is expected to push Iowa out of its spot at the start of the presidential primary calendar. Sand didn’t want to discuss that, but he had thoughts on why his party had done so badly in what used to be a swing state.

AMERICANA: How soon did you know that this was going to be a rough Democratic year in Iowa?

ROB SAND: Two big things were converging this year that guaranteed it would be tough. One of them was incumbency. This was the first cycle that two Republicans were running together at the top of the ticket as incumbents since 1992. And this was the first midterm for a Democratic president who’d lost Iowa in 60 years — you’d have to go back to Kennedy to find the last one. We weren’t even starting with a base of people who’d voted for the president.

AMERICANA: The national party basically triaged the governor’s race and didn’t invest in the Senate race. Did that hurt you?

ROB SAND: Those would be better questions for the folks at the top of the ticket. Obviously, I’m aware that the DSCC and the DGA didn’t target Iowa. But messaging matters. If you’re putting your dollars into contacting voters and running ads, it has an impact.

AMERICANA: After your report on Reynolds and covid relief funds, you faced a lawsuit from a conservative group that accused you of probing her for political reasons. How did you win despite that?

ROB SAND: There was a clear contrast for people between the establishment political smear campaign and the 30 Republican, conservative, and libertarian leaders that endorsed me. I think enough people saw through the flimsy attacks because there were a lot of people on the other side of the aisle who looked at the work that we were doing, and appreciated it. Kudos to them for being willing to say so. And the public records request lawsuit got dismissed before trial, a month or six weeks before the election. It was never credible.

Look, we had had two requests from the DNC, which is the only time you’re going to hear me say those three letters in this interview. They said: Hey, we want all allegations of wrongdoing by Kim Reynolds and other Republicans in the state of Iowa. We gave them the same answer that we gave the conservative organization who wanted allegations of wrongdoing, which is: We can’t provide that kind of information because it can be used to ID whistleblowers. We’re required to keep it confidential. My choice was to hurt the office’s ability to be trusted by whistleblowers or to fight it and have my name dragged through the mud for a year. I went with the latter.

AMERICANA: How did you build those ties with Republicans and libertarians?

ROB SAND: I’d worked with a lot of Republican attorneys and Republican prosecutors around the state. And I’ve always been really willing to listen to anyone. When I was in college, I put together a class on conservatism, because I was interested in it — not because I was conservative, in the broader American political sense, but because I felt like I wasn’t hearing much about it as a part of my education. People contact me on social media and ask me to meet them, and I do, at a time when a lot of people are accustomed to being ignored or shoved aside.

I’m also a big advocate for electoral reform. I think the two-party system is fundamentally broken. I personally prefer the idea of open primaries and then ranked choice or then review voting — you give every candidate between one and five out of five and the person who has the highest average is the winner. That would be a substantial improvement over what we’re doing now.

AMERICANA: But why did Republicans do so well?

ROB SAND: They continue to be effective at making Iowans scared of each other, utilizing fear to divide the state. That works great for them, even though it’s terrible for everybody else. In 2018, there was a young woman named Mollie Tibbetts who was killed by an undocumented immigrant shortly before the election. And even though her family literally asked them not to grandstand on that, they did anyway.

That still makes me mad. Like, why weren’t they talking about my second cousin who was murdered by her husband? Why weren’t they up in arms when one of my high school classmates was murdered? They choose to get angry when there’s a political advantage to divide people on.

AMERICANA: When that happens, how should Democrats respond to it?

ROB SAND: Just call it what it is. Say that this is something that they’re trying to make you angry about to control you. Look at all the issues that are being magnified for partisan reasons. Look at the number of school board officials who are being screamed at by residents of their own town for things that don’t even happen in their school district, because national partisan interests are pushing the issue. It’s tearing the social fabric apart, but they do it anyway, and that tells you what their priority is.

AMERICANA: What would you say to a Democrat who looks at the midterm results in Iowa and says, “Okay, wrap it up. That state’s North Dakota now, it’s not worth competing in.”

ROB SAND: I’d hold them by their ears, look them deep in their eyes, and say that outside of Vermont, there was no other state in the country that elected one party at the top of the ticket by such a large margin and elected someone from the other another party statewide by a wider differential. Then, if you still want to give up on a state that is a national leader in split ticket voting, I didn’t speak slowly enough.

Before the midterm elections, Republicans spotted Donald Trump a few points in the polls. They’d watched him beat expectations in 2016 and 2020, and got tired of being surprised. Trump fell to earth last month, though, and looks weaker compared to other potential GOP presidential nominees. This poll finds him losing independents in a hypothetical rematch with Biden, and running slightly worse with Republicans than DeSantis, who gained support throughout 2022 as voters outside Florida heard more about him.

• Four days until Georgia’s runoffs
• 39 days until a swing-seat special senate election in Virginia
• 84 days until Chicago’s mayoral election
• 122 days until Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election
• 703 days until the 2024 presidential election

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— Dave