By ordinary measures, Herschel Walker just experienced the worst week of any politician this cycle — maybe this decade.
The Republican Senate candidate and Georgia football legend is running as a staunch pro-life conservative opposed to abortion even in cases of rape or incest. Last week, however, an ex-girlfriend said he’d paid her to have an abortion and later pressured her to have another, dumping her after she refused. Walker’s son publicly denounced him for “destroying other people’s lives.” The news follows earlier revelations that Walker has fathered multiple children out of wedlock.
On Friday, he fired his campaign’s political director — never a good sign 30 days before an election, especially since control of the Senate may depend on the race’s outcome. In response to the maelstrom of Walker scandals, a Georgia Republican strategist texted a Bloomberg News reporter an image of a sinking ship.
There’s no doubting that the S.S. Walker hit an iceberg. It’s hit four or five just since Labor Day! There’s also no doubt that in an earlier era, this sort of rank hypocrisy would force a candidate’s swift withdrawal from the race or doom him to a lopsided defeat if he decided to stick around, as Walker has.
Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker campaigns Sept. 7, 2021, in Emerson, Georgia, north of Atlanta. Bill Barrow/Associated Press file
But Walker isn’t in any danger of being pushed out of the race. Republican officials have barely wagged a finger. Donald Trump has reaffirmed his endorsement. The new revelations don’t seem to be hurting his poll numbers. And conservative media figures are gleefully flaunting their support for a candidate they don’t even pretend is fit for office. “Herschel Walker today, if you put him under a lie detector, couldn’t tell you how many kids he has,” says Steve Bannon, the ex-Trump svengali and host of the “War Room ” podcast. “But Republicans have seen what happened, letting the Senate slip away in 2020, and they’re not going to let it happen again.”
Walker’s resilience may seem appalling, but it’s the sort of thing we should get used to. That’s the lesson of a new book by a team of political scientists on the shaping forces in the last election. In ” The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy ,” John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck wade through reams of survey data to measure how much the major news events in 2020 shifted voters’ perceptions of the parties and the presidential candidates. The answer is … not by very much.
The intense polarization in American politics is not news. But the authors found that it is now so entrenched and wide-ranging that it quickly subsumes pretty much every new event that comes along. The book’s big illustrative examples are the emergence of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd. In both cases, after a brief period of national unity and plenty of think pieces on how “everything is different now,” Republicans and Democrats went right back to diverging sharply on issues of race and policing and added the issue of Covid vaccines, as well. The authors dub this phenomenon “political calcification.” Our predispositions have become so hardened and rigid, they write, that “new events tend to be absorbed into an axis of conflict in which [partisan] identity plays the central role.”
One upshot of political calcification is that ugly tabloid scandals like Walker’s matter less and less to election outcomes. Republican voters who once would have recoiled in disgust and voted Democratic are no longer willing to do so because the prospect of Democratic Senate control strikes them as worse than casting a ballot for Walker.
“If you think of a candidate’s scandal as a news event, there’s no reason a voter would process it any differently than Covid or the Jan. 6 insurrection,” says Vavreck, the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at the University of California Los Angeles. “The thought process would be, ‘I may not like what’s going on, but the stakes are too high for me to abandon my party’.”
It’s entirely possible, of course, that Walker will lose anyway. The shrinking pool of independents don’t have the same partisan commitments, and in a race as close as Georgia’s, even minor defections could be decisive. And while partisan attitudes have hardened, they’re not immovable, even in red states. Four years ago, Roy Moore, the Republican Senate nominee in Alabama, lost a seemingly unlosable race after a flurry of reports that as a grown man he’d lurked at malls trying to pick up young teenage girls.
But Moore’s behavior cost him the support of prominent Republican and evangelical leaders, who withdrew their endorsements (though not Trump). So far, Walker hasn’t faced that problem. Rather than twist themselves into pretzels defending or excusing his behavior, many prominent conservatives have instead simply appealed to a more powerful argument, the one thing that could save Walker’s bacon come November: Republican voters’ own partisanship.
Waving off concerns about hypocrisy with clarifying candor, the conservative radio host Dana Loesch gave her listeners a particularly explicit version of this appeal: “I am concerned about one thing, and one thing only, at this point,” Loesch said. “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles — I want control of the Senate.”
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Joshua Green is a National Correspondent at Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency.”
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