Walker aims to pivot focus back to Dems in tight race

ALTO, GEORGIA » Republican U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker commiserated as north Georgia farmers bemoaned environmental regulations and rising costs of doing business. Minutes before, the former football star and political newcomer volleyed with journalists on issues ranging from gas prices to abortion.

In both audiences, Walker tried every way he could to steer the conversation back to Sen. Raphael Warnock and a Democratic administration whose popularity lags in this battleground state that President Joe Biden won by the narrowest of margins.

“We need to be talking about what people are concerned about, that my opponent seems to be voting with Joe Biden rather than the people of Georgia,” Walker said at a north Georgia produce market. “That’s what we need to be putting headlines about what Herschel Walker is saying ... because the people of Georgia are hurting.”

With generationally high inflation and Biden’s low popularity, Republican candidates across the U.S. are spending this election year similarly trying to keep the focus on Democrats. But for Walker, the sweeping partisan jabs on display at multiple campaign stops last week offered a chance to steady an otherwise haphazard campaign.

Some Republicans quietly acknowledge that such deflection may be the only way Walker can win this midterm contest that will help determine control of a Senate now split 50-50 between the two major parties.

“Look, it’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up,” said state Sen. Butch Miller as he campaigned with Walker in north Georgia.

Walker, 60, cruised to the GOP nomination in May, mostly on his celebrity status as the star running back on the University of Georgia’s national championship football team in 1980 and his personal friendship with former President Donald Trump.

But along the way, Walker has faced new disclosures on past violent threats against his first wife. He’s exaggerated his academic and business records, and alternately denied ever making such statements. He acknowledged fathering multiple children he hadn’t publicly mentioned previously despite spending decades blasting absent fathers. And Walker recently was captured on video at a closed campaign event offering a nonsensical explanation of the climate crisis as China sending its “bad air” to the U.S. while stealing “our good air.”

Warnock’s campaign and allied Democratic campaign arms reacted with an advertising onslaught casting Walker as unqualified.

“Every one of Walker’s lies, scandals and bizarre statements proves that he isn’t ready to represent to represent the people of Georgia and can’t be trusted to serve in the U.S. Senate,” said Dan Gottlieb, a spokesman for the Georgia Democratic Party.