Today's GOP Is More Herschel Walker & Lauren Boebert Than Mitch McConnell & Chuck Grassley

Obama lost Georgia both times he ran— with about 47% in 2008 and 46% in 2012. But he’s scheduled fora big get-out-the-vote rally in Atlanta on Friday, October 28. Obama didn’t just win the Atlanta metro—he crushed Romney and McCain there. In 2012 he rocked the area:

• Clayton Co.- 84.7%

• Dekalb Co.- 77.6%

• Fulton Co.- 64.1%

• Rockdale Co.- 57.7%

Those are the people he wants to reach and remind how important their votes are for Raphael Warnock and for a Democratic Senate. Those people plus the Atlanta suburbs that have gotten much bluer with the advent of Trump, particularly Gwinnett, Cobb, Henry, Newton and Douglas counties where Biden very significantly out-performed Obama. These are the counties that will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate— and determine whether or not the least qualified person to ever be nominated for a Senate seat is elected.

Laugh all you want at Herschel Walker but he’s still a contender. The most recent polling shows Warnock ahead, but under 50%.

Warnock has raised about 3 times more than Walker but various Republican outfits— from the Koch network ($5,968,138), the NRA and other gun groups (around $7 million) and shady Trumpist PACs ($1,008,543) to the NRSC ($6,371,934) and McConnell’s SuperPAC ($24,293,934)— have helped close the gap.

Writing the the NY Times this morning, Frank Bruni claimed that “Walker did himself significant good in Friday night’s debate in Georgia,” while admitting that “that may be hard to recognize and even harder to accept, given his occasional struggles to get his words out, his passing acquaintance with policy details, his glancing relationship with the truth. But his performance serves as an important reminder to Democrats who’ve taken such heart from— and found such hope in— the blemishes and blunders of Republican candidates in crucial races: Being flawed and being doomed are very different things. The mess around Walker over the past two weeks and the mess of him over the entirety of his campaign have made it easy to focus on those flaws and forget the advantages that he, like all Republicans running in the midterm elections, possesses. But Walker spent Friday night remembering. He knew what he had to do to stay competitive in, and possibly win, the neck-and-neck Senate race against Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat— which could decide which party controls the chamber.”

Bruni, presumably like 100% of regular DWT readers, thinks Walker “has no business in the Senate [and] is unfit for political office,” but warned that “he won’t necessarily come up short in a Republican-friendly year in a Republican-friendly state.”

I could argue that the most meaningful moment in the Walker-Warnock debate wasn’t when Walker loopily held up some sort of law enforcement badge— and was scolded by one of the moderators for breaking a no-props rule— or when Warnock made cutting reference to Walker as an absentee father but when the moderators put a simple bar graph on the screen.

It shows the results of a recent poll in which voters in Georgia were asked to name their top concern. The most common answer, given by about 40 percent of them, was the economy. The second most common answer, given by 18.6 percent, was threats to democracy. Access to abortion came in a distant third. Only 11.7 percent of respondents said that.

Walker’s task on Friday night wan’t to make voters excited about him. It was to make them less apprehensive. It was to affirm or reaffirm for them that, whatever his lack of charisma and no matter his deficit of coherence, he’s a reliable vessel for their concerns and a viable expression of their qualms.

Were they angry about Biden’s use of an executive order to forgive billions of dollars in student loans? Walker let them know— succinctly and clearly— that he was, too. Did they feel that too many progressives demonstrated too much contempt for the police? He registered his own upset about that.

It was as if he was going methodically through a checklist of the reasons Republicans were or should be on board with him, and he did so with a discipline that made prior characterizations of him as a hapless buffoon seem selective. Was he eloquent? Please. Was he articulate? Sporadically— and that was all that was necessary to exceed the expectations for him.

…[W]hen he was asked whether Biden should run again in 2024, Warnock conspicuously dodged the question. “I think that part of the problem with our politics right now is that it’s become too much about the politicians,” he said. “You’re asking me who’s going to run in ’24? The people of Georgia get to decide who’s going to be their senator in three days— Monday.”

That’s when early voting begins, and if you thought Walker’s candidacy had already ended, the debate challenged that assessment. It’s not because he dazzled but because he showed up, wearing his team’s colors and making his team’s case and not getting any fresh muck on the uniform. In an era this partisan, amid this much economic anxiety, with a Democratic president whose approval rating remains stubbornly low, that may be more than enough.

So… if you want to contribute to Warnock’s Get-Out-the-Vote efforts, you can do that by clicking here and contributing whatever you feel comfortable giving. Keep in mind what ex-Republican Peter Wehner wrote for Atlantic readers this morning: “There have been plenty of awful candidates in American political history; what sets Herschel Walker apart is that he’s a wreck in so many different ways… [T]he most important and instructive thing about the Walker candidacy is what it tells us about the Republican Party, starting with how thoroughly Trumpified it is.

Walker, a former Heisman Trophy winner, had no business running for political office at any level, let alone the United States Senate. The only reason he won the nomination is that he was Donald Trump’s hand-picked candidate. (Walker began his professional football career with the USFL’s New Jersey Generals, which Donald Trump owned. He later referred to Trump as a mentor and someone after whom he modeled himself.) This alone assured Walker of an easy primary victory. He is an archetypal MAGA candidate in a MAGA party.

Like so many who now represent the GOP, Walker displays not just a lack of interest in serious ideas, but contempt for them. Benightedness is chic.

…For those of us of a certain generation, who came of age in the Reagan era, this philistinism is jarring. Conservatism has a proud intellectual tradition, and for many years its (imperfect) home was the Republican Party.

…Donald Trump could not have changed the world without a party with which to do it. The GOP has turned on virtually every noble principle it once claimed to stand for. It has become a freak show, embodied in people like Trump and Walker, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, Ron Johnson and Josh Hawley, Blake Masters and Doug Mastriano, Adam Laxalt and J. D. Vance, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Mike Lindell, Tucker Carlson and Sebastian Gorka, Eric Metaxas and Paula White. They shape its sensibilities, providing the script for everyone else to follow.

To make matters worse, those who surely know better— people like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, and especially Kevin McCarthy— turned out to be hollow men, “shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

For them and for so many people in their party and the MAGA movement, with exceptions so rare that you can almost count them on a single hand, politics have been stripped of any honor. Politics, for them, is about power in the pursuit of yet more power. Politics is purely performative, nasty and brutish, a way to stoke anger and grievances, a means to exact vengeance. That the most impressive person in the Republican Party, Liz Cheney, is the most despised, says everything.

Whatever you thought about the GOP pre-Trump— and it may be that the ugliness was much closer to the surface than I wanted to acknowledge at the time— the Republican Party is today much more conspiracy minded, anti-democratic, and anti-truth. This worries me, because I love my country. And it disheartens me, because I once admired my party. Today, however, because of its diseased state, the most urgent political task is to defeat it in the hopes of eventually rebuilding it.