After moving from Texas to Georgia last year to run for the Senate, Herschel Walker has struggled mightily as a candidate. Republican voters didn’t seem to care: In yesterday’s primary, with just about all of the votes counted, the former football player defeated his next closest GOP rival by nearly 55 points.
Soon after, the Republican nominee for the Senate in the great state of Georgia was asked for his thoughts about yesterday’s deadly mass shooting at a Texas elementary school. As Newsweek noted, it didn’t go especially well.
CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju shared a video to Twitter late on Tuesday showing him asking Walker about the shooting that left at least 19 children and two adults dead. “Do you support any new gun laws in the wake of this Texas shooting?” Raju asked Walker.... “What I like to — what I like to do is see it and everything and stuff,” Walker replied.
As a rule, when politicians are asked questions about their positions on issues, their answers are either good or bad. “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff” isn’t really an answer at all.
It was, however, a reminder that Walker hasn’t yet reached the point that he’s even pretending to be a capable Senate candidate.
The Republican’s odd response to an important issue came on the heels of an interview in which Walker said he didn’t know if Donald Trump had ever claimed that the 2020 election was stolen — suggesting the candidate doesn’t keep up with current events at even the most basic level.
Walker also said “everyone knows” that “something happened” in the 2020 race, which dovetailed with his other recent rhetoric questioning the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Addressing his party’s conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s defeat, Walker said last week, “I think right now they’re having trials and having all these, these hearings, but it seems like nothing is ever getting done. And that’s what’s so amazing.”
I’d love to tell you what that meant, but it’s a tough quote to decipher.
Similarly, he also recently tried to talk about energy policy, but offered little more than a garbled word salad.
All of this is part of an apparent rollout of the Republican’s ideas on substantive issues, which includes Walker’s support for an abortion ban with “no exceptions.”
It also comes against a backdrop in which Walker has made demonstrably untrue claims about his business background, his educational background, and a controversial veterans charity he claimed to have created — despite the fact that it wasn’t a charity and he didn’t create it.
What’s more, as we’ve discussed, Walker appears to know effectively nothing about public affairs, and voters have also recently learned about allegations of domestic violence and other dangerous personal behavior from his past.
Making matters just a little worse, the Senate candidate also has a weird history of promoting unproven medical treatments that don’t make any sense.
For a typical candidate, all of this would derail a campaign. But Georgia Republicans remember Walker as a fine football player, and as yesterday’s primary results show, that apparently was enough.