Today’s the GOP Senate primary in Georgia and Herschel Walker is expected to win decisively, crushing his opponents who all possess more political experience then he does, but unfortunately have never played college football. Recent polling averages show Walker with 63.6 percent of the Republican primary vote. That’s more than enough to avoid a runoff or, worse, someone on Walker’s staff having to explain to him what a “runoff” is.
Maybe the polls are all wrong, though? That’s the last refuge of the truly desperate. Andra Gillespie, political science professor at Emory University, doesn’t think Walker’s opponents should expect any miracles.
“The fact that it’s different kinds of polls, public polls and partisan polls, polls with sampling methodologies I trust and ones whose sampling methodologies I don’t trust, they all come up with the same numbers,” she said. “I don’t see how someone could think they could get Walker below 50 percent.”
It’s not just that Republican primary candidates can’t beat a woefully unfit candidate who’s admitted to playing the home version of Russian roulette. They can’t even prevent a majority of voters from casting a ballot for him.
PREVIOUSLY: Proud Russian Roulette Survivor Herschel Walker Thinks You’re Just Jealous Of How Awesome He Is
Walker’s strongest competitors are Gary Black, Georgia’s commissioner of agriculture, and Latham Saddler, a former intelligence official. Black’s averaging 7.7 percent of the vote and Saddler 3.1 percent. The remaining candidates are under three percent.
These guys are actually campaigning, we guess. They must have posters and yard signs with their names on them. Yet they’re still losing to this guy.
Saddler’s called out Walker for skipping debates. He claims voters “don’t respect that,” although there’s no evidence of this in the polls. We guess Black and Saddler assume Democratic incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock is more formidable than the two of them combined, because they keep saying Walker’s current strategy of coasting on name recognition won’t work in the general election.
PREVIOUSLY: Strap Yourselves In, Folks: Herschel Walker’s Gonna Explain Evolution To You
Walker is not without scandal. He reportedly once threatened to blow his ex-wife’s brains out, and his current wife Julie Blanchard might’ve voted illegally in 2020. He’s also made repeated false claims about his business dealings and academic credentials. No wonder Donald Trump likes this guy. Get the two of them together and maybe 10 percent of what they say is actually true.
And there’s more! The Grio reports that last December, Walker filed paperwork that listed his and his wife’s joint earnings as $927,886, but we guess it must’ve just slipped his mind that he’d also earned $3.2 million from H. Walker Enterprises, bringing his total earnings from late 2020 to the end of 2021 to $4.1 million. He tweaked his candidate report last week, days before the primary.
It was also recently revealed that Walker heavily embellished his involvement in a veterans program. He’s at different times claimed he’s founded, co-founded, and even directly operated a program called Patriot Support, which he says has taken him to military bases around the globe.
“About 15 years ago, I started a program called Patriot Support,” Walker said in an interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt last October. “People need to know I started a military program, a military program that treats (thousands) of soldiers a year,” he told Savannah TV station WTGS in February.
According to the Associated Press, Walker was little more than a glorified celebrity spokesman for Patriot Support, a “for-profit program that is alleged to have preyed upon veterans and service members while defrauding the government.”
Nonetheless, University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock predicts, “I think this is going to get called really early on election night. It may be the first thing statewide that does get called.”
Black, Saddler, and the rest will be the first to lose tonight. That’s something to tell the grandkids: “No one lost quicker than we did.”
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean Warnock has an easy race ahead of him. No matter how ridiculous Walker’s candidacy seems, he still poses a serious threat. The Real Clear Politics polling average has Walker with 47.3 percent of the vote to Warnock’s 46.8 percent. The world is absurd.
[Georgia Recorder / AP]
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