The Last Senate Race
Mary Harris: So, Jim, I’m wondering, we can start off with the wear wolves. Is that possible?
Jim Newell, Jim: You know, I don’t know if I ever really memorized the story, and I don’t know if this story was also told in a very clear way.
Mary Harris: This story wasn’t told in a very clear way, but Slate’s Jim Newell knows the basics.
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Watch a stupid movie late at night, hoping going to get better. Don’t get better, but keep watching it anyway.
Mary Harris: The werewolves in question were being discussed by Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia are.
Speaker 3: Watching a movie called Fright Night. Fright Night. Some guy tonight. But it’s about vampires. I don’t know if you know vampires and cool people, are they not? But I’ll tell you something that I found out. A werewolf to kill a vampire. You know that. I never knew that. So I don’t want to be a vampire. I want to be a werewolf. But then, anyway.
Mary Harris: Given that Walker is in a very tight runoff race for the last seat in Washington, you’d think he’d be focused on stuff like the economy, election, security. But that is not what comes across here. While this anecdote ends with a message about the importance of faith, it takes the long road to get there.
Jim Newell, Jim: You know, I think for people who weren’t sure if Herschel Walker was, you know, ready to be a senator, I don’t think that that really convinced them.
Mary Harris: Coming from a candidate who’d already fought off an abortion scandal and domestic violence allegations. This story became one more piece of evidence that Herschel Walker is unfit for office. Only this moment it was funnier than all the rest. Within days, this werewolves and vampires thing. It became a running gag. President Obama joked about it.
Speaker 4: Since the last time I was here. Since the last time I was here, Mr. Walker has been talking about issues that are of great importance to the people of Georgia. Like whether it’s better to be a vampire or a werewolf.
Speaker 4: This is a debate that I.
Speaker 3: Must confess I.
Speaker 4: Once had myself. When I was seven.
Mary Harris: Herschel Walker opponent, Senator Raphael Warnock, released an ad that simply features voters watching this werewolf speech. And some other notable gaffes and responding people. What the hell is he talking about? He’s serious. Is he for real?
Speaker 3: A werewolf.
Mary Harris: This weekend on Saturday Night Live. The opening bid was a simple five minute riff on how embarrassing Herschel Walker is. Maybe in the final push. Let’s lay low and focus on the message.
Speaker 3: Sadly, just like you.
Mary Harris: No, no. And on the issues, people care. Bad inflation, crime.
Speaker 3: Vampires, werewolves they’re scary little get go get, go. Yeah. We’re going to be looking into all of that.
Mary Harris: Yeah. I mean, one media consultant put it like this. They said, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Herschel Walker might be the most flawed Republican nominee in the nation this year.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah. I mean, there’s so many to choose from. But, you know, he’s the he’s the last one standing, so he’s going to get all the attention. Mm hmm. He’s kind of like the final exclamation point on on Republicans whole problem this year, which has just been bad candidates.
Mary Harris: If I look at all this, it looks like Herschel Walker has become something of a joke. But could he still win in this runoff?
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah, certainly. Having said all that, certainly.
Mary Harris: Today on the show, Georgia is going to the polls again. The results here won’t change the balance of power in Washington, but it might answer the question how purple is Georgia anyway? I’m Mary Harris. You’re listening to what next? Stick around. This Senate race, the one between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock, is sort of the final piece in the midterms puzzle. So for folks who haven’t been paying a ton of attention, I wonder if you can just step back a little bit. Update us on where we left off like the last time Georgians voted, which was November.
Jim Newell, Jim: Sure. So November 8th, you need to get 50% to avoid a runoff in Georgia.
Mary Harris: This is like just a Georgia thing.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah. I mean, you know, some other states have runoffs, but yeah, in Georgia, it was, I think about 49 to 48. Warnock. So no one broke 50. There was a Libertarian candidate who got, you know, a couple percent. So it was headed to a runoff. And I think that was even though it’s so close, you know, I think a lot of the campaign groups working in this race expected it to so, so withheld some of their their fire for the runoff. Hmm. Part of the idea was Brian Kemp is a is a pretty popular governor there. He was he beat Stacey Abrams pretty soundly. He got about 54% of the vote.
Mary Harris: So was the thinking he would kind of bring Walker up with him?
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah. Walker could kind of write his coattails and maybe he helped Walker to an extent. But Walker still got about 200,000 fewer votes than than Brian Kemp did.
Mary Harris: So it’s a just a real softness in this candidate. There are some crossover Republicans who are saying, look, I’m going to vote for that other guy instead.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah, I mean, it’s a soft candidate. And also, Warnock is the the best fundraiser for Senate Democrats, too. So he had, you know, plenty to work with there.
Mary Harris: Interesting.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah, it’s a combination of those couple of things. And, you know, Warnock is an incumbent, too. But you have to think anyway, if it wasn’t Herschel Walker, someone with so much baggage and someone who is not very good on the stump, that they they may have had an easier time and may have gotten it done.
Mary Harris: So let’s talk about strategy here for Raphael Warnock. We talked about how there were these signs that he was attracting crossover voters. So is his strategy basically let’s do more of that, Like let’s convince these folks who may feel a little uneasy about Herschel Walker that, you know, I’m their guy.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah, Well, I mean, they they have both approaches. They have, you know, organizing groups in in Georgia like New Georgia Project that had their kind of ten year plan to make Georgia Blue and were successful in 2020.
Mary Harris: And that’s about base turnout.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah. So they have that part of the equation there. You know, they’re still trying to putting a lot of money in the ground game and turning out the base. But yeah, there is a lot of persuasion efforts going on here. You’re seeing in some of these ads that they’re doing where maybe you get, you know, someone who may have been a Republican voter and they say, I just can’t vote for for Walker. I can’t bring myself to do it.
Speaker 3: I’m a lifelong Republican.
Mary Harris: I’m an independent. I usually vote Republican. But there is no way that I can vote for Herschel Walker.
Speaker 3: Belies the bizarre statements that I just don’t get.
Jim Newell, Jim: It. So you’re trying to, you know, help keep some of those swing voters there. And there’s also, you know, some of the people I talked to you in my story. They are putting resources into rural Georgia to just to they’re not going to we’re not it’s not going to win a lot of these rural Georgia counties, but they’re trying to at least minimize their their damages, their.
Mary Harris: Scheme, as many people as possible. And I guess that’s the yeah, that’s the approach. When you have a lot of money, you just try to get everyone everywhere because why not burn through it?
Jim Newell, Jim: All right. And it’s kind of a failsafe too. If you don’t get quite the metro Atlanta turn out you wanted, you know, if you can if you don’t seed those rural areas and allow them to go 80% against you or whatever, like a, you know, 500 votes here or a thousand votes there, like that all adds up to something.
Mary Harris: For Herschel Walker. What is his strategy?
Jim Newell, Jim: His strategy? You know, I wrote my story. He doesn’t really have that nice guy image to protect. He doesn’t have. You know, the friendly neighborhood passer image. Everyone’s seen the negative stories against him from his past. So his strategy is much more. The other guys are worse. He’s trying to take advantage of. It’s still being in its DNA red state and saying, you know, maybe don’t like me, Maybe you think we’re an a nice guy, but this is who the Democrats are. You know, he has ads about trans women in women’s sports and just like kind of hitting on these cultural issues that can motivate a lot of Republican turnout. So he’s not fighting, trying to fight on Dems terms. You know, his is much more don’t worry about me, fear the other guy.
Mary Harris: I’ve been surprised that in the past few weeks, Herschel Walker has squeezed even more scandal into this very compressed cycle. Like in the last few weeks, an official in Texas confirmed that Walker essentially was a Texas resident and was filing his taxes to confirm that, even though he is saying he’s a Georgia resident because he’s running to be a Georgia senator. That seems like kind of a big deal.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah, it’s just one thing after the other. I mean, I don’t know, maybe that’s kind of baked in already because people knew from the minute Walker got in that like. He was only very loosely, you know, a Georgia resident, as in not really at all, at least until, you know, he thought about he wanted to see. But there’s just more and more allegations against Walker. All the time, it feels like. And if he gets away with this and is able to take that seat, I mean, they really got away with something here.
Mary Harris: Huh? You mean like because he’s not he’s not even supposed to live there.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah. And there’s just so much like. I mean, he had a classic October surprise where the story comes out, Oh, this guy who says there should be no abortion, any cases like, you know, here’s the receipt from the woman like he he paid to get an abortion. That’s kind of like an archetype of like, you know, a candidate scandal and yet, you know, like.
Mary Harris: Hypocrisy one on one.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah. Yeah. And then just the domestic violence allegations, you know, in his past, it’s.
Mary Harris: In some ways it’s kind of impressive that he got, you know, what was it, 48% of the vote? It’s a lot.
Jim Newell, Jim: It is. I mean, it’s both impressive that, you know, it shows the power of polarization that, you know, that was maybe their baseline and he just got it. But, you know, he on the other side, he trailed other statewide candidates, Republicans, by by five points or so.
Mary Harris: Yeah. It was notable to me that this runoff was just cut from nine weeks to four weeks by a Republican backed law last year. And it made me wonder if Republicans regret doing that at this point, because it really gave them such a compressed timeline to, you know, reset things and push their candidate forward.
Jim Newell, Jim: I don’t know if they regret that. And I don’t know if more I don’t know if more time campaigning would have helped Herschel Walker I guess we can put it that way. If you look at a lot of his appearances now on at events and on TV and stuff, he’s not doing a whole lot of the talking his surrogates are. So I don’t think, you know, more time would have helped him necessarily. But, you know, Republicans, the condensed timeline meant that you could not register new voters just for the runoffs just because you needed to register 30 days before the runoff. And there were only 28 days after the election. So you were unable to get new voters, which was something that helped Democrats in the 2021 runoffs. They actually registered a lot of new voters in that period. So that that wasn’t done by accident. You know, the Republicans are trying to limit one of Democrats tools there. So I don’t necessarily know that they disagree with it. And they I think they just want to get it over with one way or another.
Mary Harris: In the end. Jim says the legacy of Republican election laws might end up as the most consequential element of this Georgia Senate race because, well, Herschel Walker is an imperfect candidate. Democrats are still having to campaign hard against him.
Jim Newell, Jim: When you go from four weeks of early voting to one week. And you make sure that all ballot drop boxes have to be moved inside government facilities which are only open during business hours, or you make it much harder to request an absentee ballot. I think those things will have a meaningful effect on the ultimate numbers here, like Democrats could. Can still win.
Jim Newell, Jim: Absolutely. But, you know, on the margins, like I think it’s be pretty clear that Democrats probably lost some votes because of that. And if you look at some of the stories from this weekend, too, where you have, you know, in early voting, there was, you know, people would show up in Fulton County or wherever, and there’d be two or three hour lines and then they’d just turn around and leave. And I think that, you know, that shouldn’t be dismissed if Democrats pull it out anyway. Like it was really I think it really did trim on the ability for people. And it just made people have to work that much harder to do the simple act of casting their ballot. So I’d like to see a quantitative analysis of what exactly the effect of it was. But yeah, my takeaway talking to people about this was that Democrats did not overhype the damage with that. You know, they can still win, but Republicans made it a lot harder for them to do that.
Mary Harris: After the break, who is lining up behind Herschel Walker and who isn’t? In these final days before the runoff. Jim Newell says Republican figures have been coming out of the woodwork to lend support to Herschel Walker. Texas Senator Ted Cruz has made trips to Georgia. So has Senator Lindsey Graham. But maybe the most consequential endorsement has come from Georgia’s recently re-elected governor Brian Kemp. After distancing himself from Walker during the general, Kemp is now showing up in full force with the confidence of a guy who has just won office.
Jim Newell, Jim: It was not that Kemp didn’t support Walker or something in November. He did, but he never held a rally for him. He was basically focused, understandably, on winning his own race, which even though he was favored, you know, is still Stacey Abrams. They still won by seven points. He ran a good campaign.
Mary Harris: Is it fair to say that he that Governor Kemp thought of Herschel Walker as, you know, potentially an albatross?
Jim Newell, Jim: I mean, he may have. I think that, you know, since the general election, Kemp has campaigned with Herschel Walker. He has shot. Footage of him campaigning, you know, has been used for a couple of different ads. And then there’s one direct a camera ad that he shot for one of the Republican super PACs. So he’s trying to use his relative popularity to drag Herschel across the line. And also, critically, he’s lent out his get out the vote operation, which he kind of built out of necessity to a Republican super PAC to help with that. That element of it.
Mary Harris: What’s in it for Brian Kemp to do all this work and open up the spigot of money for Herschel Walker?
Jim Newell, Jim: Well, one, in terms of opening up the spigot of money, you know, the money is going to go to Kemp’s team because the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC that’s borrowing his grass roots group, paid a couple of million dollars to Kemp’s organization for it for the, you know, the ability to use this. But I think Kemp also wants to he wants to show that he’s a good soldier, you know, that he is going to help do whatever he can to to get Walker over the finish line now that he doesn’t have to worry about any of that, you know, splattering back on him and his own campaign.
Jim Newell, Jim: And I think he just wants to show his ability as a kingmaker in Georgia. You know, he could make a narrative like Walker is dead in the water until he got my help and then I put him over the top. I don’t know what Brian Kemp’s future ambitions are. Maybe eventually he wants to run for for Senate or president, but it would be kind of another arrow in his quiver that he would have to show, you know, look what I was able to do.
Mary Harris: Yeah. And I guess if Walker doesn’t win, he has a nice plausible deniability of like, well, it just wasn’t the right candidate.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah, exactly. It was his fault.
Mary Harris: It’s interesting to me to look at who is not turning out to give Herschel Walker a boost in this race because, like, well, Herschel Walker is personally close with Donald Trump. He’s talked about them vacationing together at Disney World years ago. Trump has not shown up to stump during this runoff. Right. Do we know why?
Jim Newell, Jim: I think that was a joint decision between. Trump and the Herschel Walker campaign, which I’m surprised they were able to convince Trump to do that. But yeah, I think they determined that having Trump out there on the stump and getting, you know, all the attention would have just been difficult for them when they’re trying to to pick up, you know, the median voter.
Mary Harris: I guess you could make the argument that it’s like, good for both of them because. TRUMP You don’t want to be responsible if Herschel Walker loses, right? And Herschel Walker maybe is seeing or his folks are seeing the writing on the wall in terms of what happened in November. So let’s just call a spade a spade and agree to be friends again in January.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it was it was definitely the right choice for both of them. Trump doesn’t always make, you know, the right choice, though. Like, for example, he would not have courage, Herschel Walker to run for the Senate seat if he was always making the right choice. But it was a thing at the beginning of the middle of the runoff that it could be a repeat of the last election where.
Jim Newell, Jim: You know, Trump makes the runoff all about him, like in 2021. It was he was still on his stolen election kick. This time he was announcing his his presidential bid. There are a lot of Republican senators and stuff saying, please do not announce it. Do not make this all about you as we have another critical election in the swing state to win. But it seems like they’ve kind of gotten away with it a little bit and that Trump has been pretty. I don’t ever I don’t wanna say he’s been quiet. You know, he just had a like missive the other day about like undoing the Constitution, but he hasn’t really kind of made himself the the main character in politics in the last month in a way that some Republicans thought he would.
Mary Harris: Yeah, it does feel like the Democrats want this more, which I guess raises this other question, which is really about like what’s at stake in this election. Because this is the last Senate race and we already know that the Democrats have control of the Senate. This would just give them a little bit of a buffer when they’re coming up against a Joe Manchin or a Kyrsten Sinema. So does it just matter more to Democrats winning this thing or. I don’t know. How do you see it?
Jim Newell, Jim: Well, I think that. If you remember in October, when the first Herschel Walker paid for the abortion story came out, there was a lot of panic the first night. But by day two, you had Republican campaign groups and Republican surrogates are all saying, whatever we need to win the Senate, ignore everything else. Now this matters. We can’t let Chuck Schumer be majority leader again. So that’s kind of how they rationalized, you know, trying to get out the vote to support this candidate who had a lot of flaws. That’s completely gone now. I mean, Democrats already have you know, they’ll at least have the same majority they currently have, and now they have the opportunity to add a seat.
Jim Newell, Jim: So that’s a pretty big deal for Republicans that given how flawed this candidate as an individual is, you can’t tell people, you know, suck it up. We need it for the team. There are some smaller stakes. It’s better for Republicans to have 50 seats instead of 49 because you get, you know, much more advantageous position on committees. And you can slow up Democrats a little bit more. But, you know, people don’t necessarily understand all of that. So I do think, you know, I think both sides could have an issue with Senate control already being decided. There might be some. You know, Democratic voters, too, who are low propensity, who might think, okay, well, I read on the news every day about how the Senate control was decided. I guess I don’t need to show up anymore. But I do think it hurts Republicans more because they have the more flawed candidate. And so it’s if you don’t have that lever of you need to do this just for the overall number.
Mary Harris: Just suck it up.
Jim Newell, Jim: Yeah, it’s a lot harder, you know, on the margins to kind of get everyone out. They need to get out.
Mary Harris: You know, in the piece you wrote about Georgia this week, you said one could write a history of American politics from 2020 to 2022 through the prism of Georgia. So it’s only appropriate then with this runoff that the state gets to write the final chapter. Do you really think this is the final chapter?
Jim Newell, Jim: Well, no, but it continues. I mean, I do think so. After this, you will have Jon Ossoff will have another four years in his Senate seat. The winner of this runoff will have six years. There won’t be another governor’s race for four years. So there will be the presidential race. I mean, it’s a lot of money is going to go into it for the presidential race.
Jim Newell, Jim: But if you look at what’s happened in Georgia, where, you know, it was the center of the the universe with the runoffs and with Trump’s efforts to steal the election, there’s still you know, there’s DOJ and county level investigations into that ongoing still. There was the the Republicans voter law, which was a huge controversy in 2021. And you have Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp in this kind of heavyweight rematch for governor’s race. And then you have the most expensive, expensive Senate race in the country that, you know, won’t decide control. But, you know, is one of the the two or three most important. So it’s kind of been just a lot.
Jim Newell, Jim: And I think Georgia, it’ll it’ll be interesting to see kind of how Georgia proceeds from here. Is it going to take a path like Virginia where it kind of breaks that threshold of turning blue and then just gets pretty comfortably blue, at least in terms of federal races? Or is it going to be a a North Carolina where Obama won that in 2008 and Democrats really haven’t won a whole lot else there since? I know it’ll be interesting to see how that how that develops. But when I say it’s, you know, I do think that this runoff, it’s the end. I mean, it’s officially the end of the 2022 midterms. But I do think it ends a really distinct chapter here.
Mary Harris: Jim Newell. I’m super grateful for you coming on the show. Thanks for doing it.
Jim Newell, Jim: Thank you.
Mary Harris: Jim Newell is a senior politics writer for Slate. And that’s the show. What Next is produced by Elena Schwartz, Carmel Delshad and Madeline Ducharme. We are getting a ton of support from Anna Phillips, Jared Downing, Victoria Dominguez and Sam Kim. We are led by Alicia montgomery and Joanne Levine. And I’m Mary Harris. You can track me down on Twitter. Say hello. I’m at Mary’s desk. Thanks for listening. I’ll catch you back here tomorrow.
