The scandal-prone Republican candidate has faced other charges on the campaign trail, but in a hyper-polarized environment, it’s not clear that it matters.
The scandals facing Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, like defensive linemen trying to stop a fourth-and-goal rushing attempt, just keep piling on.
On Monday, The Daily Beast reported that Walker—the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner and former pro football star—paid a woman he had gotten pregnant $700 to get an abortion, contradicting his campaign trail opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest. After Walker denied paying for an abortion, his son, Christian, called him a liar and a hypocrite in a series of widely trafficked posts on social media in which he alleged that his father left the family behind to have sex with women and threatened them with violence.
«I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us,» he tweeted late Monday night after the story broke. «You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence.»
The fallout from the story was so great that even some of Walker’s most strident supporters in the media—like Atlanta talk radio host Eric Erickson—declared his run to be essentially finished, calling the abortion story and his son’s response a death knell for the GOP’s hopes to reclaim control of the Senate in one of the most competitive races in the nation.
