Herschel Walker's Campaign Just Blew Up

On A Terrible Man

In my computer, there’s a book – wholly written, mostly edited, and (to make this relevant to this article), partially set in Forsyth County, Georgia – called The Best Kind Of Chaos. It’s a story about homosexuality (shocker, I know) and family and a lot about golf, actually, but the Forsyth looms large in it, because it’s a story rooted in the very basic tug of war of the outer Atlanta metro, and what happens when two people both considered themselves Republicans at the start of a marriage and one doesn’t anymore?

Forsyth County, the Romney +63, Trump 2020 +33 county north of Atlanta, is the definitive place where Atlanta’s massive shift can best be explained, because what happened in 2012 was that socially conservative, homophobic, pro-life voters and socially liberal, pro-gay right, pro-choice voters could co-exist, and the differences over why they voted Republican didn’t matter as much as the fact they did vote Republican.

In 2016, and moreso in 2020, those voters split, as the economic conservatives who moved to Forsyth because they had money for a McMansion voted their social conscious for Hillary and Joe (or Gary Johnson and Joe) and the social conservatives who wanted 3 SoCons on the Court gleefully voted for Trump again. It’s a fascinating county also because of its history – often referred to as “whites only until the 90s Forsyth” in these pages and other places, Forsyth used to the refuge of the racist, the line of demarcation whereby whites could be “safe” from “those people”.

Now? Forsyth has diversified a bit racially, but not nearly enough to create a 30% swing left in 2 Presidential cycles. What has created it is simple – the lives of those residents of Forsyth, and of educated, socially liberal whites across Atlanta, America, and the English speaking world (and, apparently also partially Brazil, but I’m not an expert) is that social liberals cannot countenance voting for the party of Amy Coney Barrett and a socially conservative agenda that already got rid of Roe and is coming for gay marriage next.

We know that one of the biggest indicators that led to an increase in support for gay marriage was knowing a gay person, and in the same way, the integration of gay people and Black people into the lives of many who had walled themselves off into bubbles of their straight white money has caused this cascade of swing in the Atlanta suburbs and exurbs, for one reason – you can’t really vote for the party of racists and homophobes when your weekly golf game includes the Black guy two doors down and you play bridge with the gay couple two streets over.

So, why am I doing a soliloquy on Forsyth right now? Because Herschel Walker had a woman abort a baby in 2009 and Christian Walker has decided to yeet his father’s Senatorial campaign off the roof they seemingly rarely lived under together, and there are still people trying to pretend this won’t matter.

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This story, as genuinely sad in some ways as it is, will not push Herschel Walker below, say, 45% of the vote in Georgia, because polarization is a hell of a drug and that’s just not how Georgia elections work. Georgia elections are rarely blowouts, because there enough rural white votes to keep the GOP above 45% in most cases and enough Black voters to get Democrats there. It’s a state with few swing voters, in a sense – but that’s not the same as saying this won’t matter.

This will matter, because the GOP need one of two things to happen to win Georgia – Black turnout to take a dive, or a metric fuckton of suburban reversion. And I mean a fuckton more than the Biden – Perdue reversion, for anyone about to quote me that north Fulton swung right in the runoffs. Of course it did – north Fulton is, functionally, a separate county from the rest of the county, and the rich whites there who voted for Biden weren’t full in on the Democratic project. Spoiler alert: these are the people who will re-elect Brian Kemp this year, because we are talking about some of the richest people in the state.

These are the exact kinds of people that represent the past GOP coalition, and the coalition of voters who care about things like not having 4 kids with 4 different women, or not lying about thinking abortion is murder while getting one for your mistress, or not generally being a scumbag. The domestic abuse stuff has been hurting Walker this whole time – there’s a reason that Walker routinely underruns Trump with educated whites in these polls, and this will merely light a fire under those concerns.

More bluntly, I don’t see a path forward for Walker anymore (not that I ever saw much of one for him), because of the very nature of Georgia. Yes, he has no path to 44% of the vote, but he also doesn’t really have a path to 50%. Black turnout looks to be decent with Abrams and Warnock – currently, around 35% of mail vote applications are Black, which is only relevant in that it’s not an alarming catastrophe, and the fundamentals suggest a good Black turnout – so then it comes down to getting Kemp 2018 levels in the suburbs. Shockingly, it ain’t happening.

Right now, I don’t see a path where Herschel outperforms Trump in Forsyth. I don’t see a universe where the GOP get a whiter electorate than 2020. And I don’t see a world where the white rurals are worth as much a share of the vote than 2020.

If you have a 2020-style electorate and no suburban reversion, then you get a runoff, which we know are worse for Republicans. If you have a 2021-style electorate (whites are more educated, more of the electorate’s Black), then you need the suburbs to revert. The suburbs weren’t reverting anyways (as the “Global” part of the Global Fucking Realignment makes clear), but this has just dropped a rhetorical bomb on any real, meaningful prospect of Herschel maintaining Trump’s margins in the white suburbs and exurbs. And with that, the game’s up.

Given the only thing Herschel Walker understands is football, let’s make this very clear – he was down 3 with 5 minutes left and he didn’t have the ball. Now he’s down 10. Can teams come back from that? Yes. Do they often? No.

I can’t find the votes for Herschel to win. I could barely find them before this, and I can’t now. Herschel was always a disastrous candidate, and now the USS Walker is about to put a large chunk of the GOP’s Senate hopes in the sea.