[ Scandals once sank campaigns. Now, for many voters, winning
isn’t everything—it’s the only thing.]
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HERSCHEL WALKER IS DEMONSTRATING THE NEW LAW OF POLITICS  
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David A. Graham
October 4, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ Scandals once sank campaigns. Now, for many voters, winning isn’t
everything—it’s the only thing. _

, Todd Kirkland / Getty; The Atlantic

 

Southern Democrats, Rockefeller Republicans, campaign-ending
disasters: Some things that used to be staples of American politics
don’t really exist anymore. That’s the result of an era in which
nothing means as much as the letter next to a candidate’s name. With
voters viewing the other party as an existential threat to their lives
or the republic, they seem willing to overlook nearly any personal
failing in the name of partisanship.

A good test of this new rule is coming up in Georgia’s race for U.S.
Senate. Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee, is facing yet another
uproar after a _Daily Beast_ report
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night alleging that Walker encouraged a girlfriend to have an
abortion, and paid for it, in 2009. Walker denies the report and
threatened to sue, but the woman provided the _Beast _with a copy of
a check from Walker, a receipt from the abortion clinic, and a
get-well card signed by Walker. Speaking to Sean Hannity last night,
Walker offered vague excuses. “I send money to a lot of
people,” he said
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“I believe in being generous.”

After the story broke, Walker’s son Christian, a young MAGA
influencer in his own right, unloaded on his father on social media
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“Family values, people? He has four kids, four different women,
wasn’t in the house raising one of them,” he said in a video.
“He was out having sex with other women. Do you care about family
values?”

The elder Walker’s personal life is not merely lurid but relevant to
the race because he has positioned himself as a champion of total
prohibition of abortions, including in cases of rape, incest, and the
life of the mother.

The yawning hypocrisy between Walker’s policy ideas and his own
behavior is one symptom of a Republican Party in flux on social
issues, and particularly on abortion. In the 1980s and 1990s, the
evangelical Christian movement placed conservative social issues,
especially abortion, at the heart of the Republican agenda. Not every
politician who espoused these views lived them—witness the many GOP
participants who condemned
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Clinton’s philandering despite their own—but their hypocrisy was a
political liability.

Republicans now find themselves in a more confusing moment. For one
thing, conservatives are struggling to choose a path forward from
their long-awaited victory in overturning _Roe v. Wade _at the
Supreme Court. Do they leave abortion policy to the states? Pursue a
national ban? De-emphasize the issue amid voter backlash?

More broadly, however, the party faces the quandary of Donald Trump, a
man who delivered the conservative Court that overturned _Roe_ after
years of failed promises by Republican politicians to do so, and yet
who is a chronically dishonest, thrice-married, philandering sexual
harasser who backed abortion rights in recent memory and is not
religious. Walker followed Trump in combining the censoriousness of
the Moral Majority with a total lack of personal moral code.

These kinds of tensions are emblematic of an era when both parties
view the other as a grave danger to their way of life and even life
itself. If you are convinced that the most important thing is simply
keeping the other party out of power, instead of staying home, voting
for the other party, or holding your nose about unsavory candidates,
you may be more likely to vigorously defend and advocate for them.

Not so long ago, things were different. In 2012, two prominent cases
occurred in Senate races that Republicans were expected to win. Both
involved exceptions for rape in abortion bans. In Indiana, Richard
Mourdock defeated incumbent Senator Richard Lugar in the GOP primary
and was poised to go to the Senate when he was asked in a debate about
whether abortion laws should have exceptions in the case of rape.
Mourdock said no: “In that horrible situation of rape, that it is
something that God intended to happen.” In Missouri, Representative
Todd Akin seemed on course to defeat Democratic Senator Claire
McCaskill when he commented that pregnancy was rare in the case of
rape: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try
to shut that whole thing down.”

Though a number of Republicans now openly support bans without
exceptions, these views were considered extreme at the time, and the
specific sentiments toxic. Both men saw their support collapse. In the
end, Mourdock lost to the Democrat Joe Donnelly by almost six points,
and Akin to McCaskill by more than 15. Neither state has come close to
electing a Democrat to the Senate since.

_David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.  He won the
Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting in 2021 for
his coverage of the 2020 presidential election. Before joining The
Atlantic in 2011, he reported for Newsweek, the Daily Beast, The
Wall Street Journal, and The National. At The Atlantic, he covers
politics and national affairs, and he previously edited the politics
section._

* Herschel Walker
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* scandals
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* political power
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