Herschel Walker's Abortion Scandal Unlikely to Destroy His Senate Chances

The scandals facing Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, like defensive linemen trying to stop a fourth-and-goal rushing attempt, just keep piling on.

On Monday, The Daily Beast reported that Walker—the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner and former pro football star—paid a woman he had gotten pregnant $700 to get an abortion, contradicting his campaign trail opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest. After Walker denied paying for an abortion, his son, Christian, called him a liar and a hypocrite in a series of widely trafficked posts on social media in which he alleged that his father left the family behind to have sex with women and threatened them with violence.

"I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us," he tweeted late Monday night after the story broke. "You're not a 'family man' when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence."

The fallout from the story was so great that even some of Walker's most strident supporters in the media—like Atlanta talk radio host Eric Erickson—declared his run to be essentially finished, calling the abortion story and his son's response a death knell for the GOP's hopes to reclaim control of the Senate in one of the most competitive races in the nation.

"Georgia GOP'ers are praying for Dr. Oz to win," Erickson wrote on Twitter. "Walker hasn't mounted a good response to any attack, and this is brutal, probably a KO."

For all the talk, however, the latest scandal might not even be the worst his campaign has faced this cycle.

In June, it was revealed that Walker—who once railed against the issue of absentee fathers in Black households—failed to disclose a number of children he'd had by several women.

Prior to that, Walker had been caught in a number of lies about his life and career, including a demonstrable falsehood about graduating from the University of Georgia (and the ensuing false claim that he'd never said such a thing) as well as a dubious claim that he'd once worked as an agent with the FBI.

Before he'd even declared his intention to run for the seat, an Associated Press review of his life and career revealed a turbulent and troubled past that included various threats against his ex-wife, domestic violence allegations, a reflexive urge to play games of Russian roulette, and a litany of shady business dealings that included unpaid loans and significant overstatements of his income.

None of the revelations have slowed him down. Despite the baggage he carried, the Donald Trump-endorsed Walker cleaned up in Georgia's Republican primary, amassing nearly 70 percent of the vote. And no matter the scandal, Walker's polling has remained consistent throughout the race, leaving him in a virtual tie in most polling against Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock entering the final month of the campaign.

In the modern political world, scandal has all but become obsolete, said Mark Corallo, a top GOP strategist who has served as a spokesman to Trump, Karl Rove and Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, among others.

"Since Bill Clinton, bad personal behavior has become less relevant than it was in the pre-Clinton era," Corallo told Newsweek. "For better or worse [and in my opinion it's for the worse], we no longer seem to weigh a candidate's character or lack thereof as qualifications for office. With inflation on the rise, gas prices on the rise, the stock market losing trillions in value and economy teetering on the edge of recession—all caused by Biden and the Democrats pushing through extremely radical left-wing policies—it's unlikely that these allegations against Walker will be a deal breaker for voters.

"This is very similar to Trump and the NBC tape," he added, referring to a leaked audio tape during the 2016 presidential campaign in which Trump spoke about grabbing women by their privates. "Walker can survive and still win if economic conditions continue to deteriorate."

The timing of the scandal can matter, too. Villanova University professor Derek Arnold, an expert on political scandal, told Newsweek that conveniently timed revelations about someone's past—particularly around an election—can actually arouse suspicion from the public, and potentially backfire to the benefit of the controversial candidate.

"The idea of weaponizing information in a way to make it so that you can cause damage to, in this case, Herschel Walker...that's something that I think the public now is more aware of," he said. "I think [the] public is just a little bit smarter than the handlers think."

In a hyper-nationalized political environment, he said, the issues both sides represent, rather than the candidates themselves, tend to rule the day. But there have been exceptions.

After allegations of sexual misconduct against scandal-prone Republican candidate Roy Moore emerged in the lead-up to the 2017 special election to fill one of Alabama's U.S. Senate seats, Moore eventually regained the polling lead against his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, within a few weeks of the allegations becoming public. But a week after Moore took the lead, Jones won by less than two points.