Herschel Walker and the Real Face of Abortion

F ollowing his final defeat in the runoff for a Senate seat in Georgia, Herschel Walker has now lost the same election twice in a month. Both races were close, with Walker trailing incumbent Raphael Warnock by less than a point on Election Day, and by about two and a half points in the runoff.

While Warnock had the advantage of incumbency, there is little doubt from these results that this was a winnable race in the hands of a better Republican candidate. Republicans remained the majority party in Georgia in 2022. A mediocre Republican candidate won the lieutenant governor’s race by five points, and another Republican won the attorney general’s race by five; these were the smallest margins of Republican victories in statewide office in 2022. Governor Brian Kemp won his reelection by seven and a half points. Republicans won nine of the state’s 14 House races, with a cumulative statewide margin almost identical to Kemp’s. Republicans lost a few seats in the state legislature but maintained a 33-23 majority in the state senate and a 101-79 majority in the state house.

In short: Herschel Walker lost because he simply did not get the votes of a lot of people who voted Republican for a lot of other offices. Why did that happen?

As always, the answer is not just one thing. Kemp was a popular incumbent, as were a number of other Republican winners; Walker was challenging an incumbent. Warnock was not as badly flawed an opponent as Stacey Abrams was. Walker had advantages as a candidate, chiefly an inspiring life backstory and his status as probably the greatest living legend in the state’s most popular sport, but his deficiencies as a candidate included questions of both his competence and his mental stability.

In Election Day exit polls, Walker lost 57-41 among voters who said they were casting a ballot in favor of their candidate rather than to stop his opponent — a sign that anger at the Democrats kept Walker close, but he simply didn’t inspire enough people to cast a positive vote for him. Sixty-three percent of voters said that Walker showed poor judgment, and he lost those voters by 50 points. He won 76-27 among voters who cited the candidate’s values, but lost 60-38 among voters who cited the candidate’s integrity. That adds up to a picture of an electorate that liked what Walker stood for but faulted him for not living up to his own values.

When you compare Walker and Kemp in the Election Day exit polls, Walker ran two to five points behind Kemp in most voter groups. But the gaps were clearest in a few of them:

• Kemp won independent men 51-46; Walker lost them 43-52, a net swing of seven points.
• Kemp won independent voters as a whole 49-48; Walker lost them 42-53, a net swing of six points.
• Kemp won college-educated white women 60-39; Walker won them 54-44, a net swing of five points.
• Kemp lost moderate voters 61-37; Walker lost them 66-32, a net swing of five points.
• Kemp lost voters who want abortion legal in most but not all cases 59-40; Walker lost them 64-35, a net swing of five points.
• Kemp lost voters who were dissatisfied but not angry with Dobbs 59-39; Walker lost them 63-33, a net swing of five points.
• Kemp lost voters who want abortion legal in most or all cases 71-28; Walker lost them 75-23, a net swing of five points.
• Kemp won college graduates as a whole 50-49; Walker lost them 52-45, a net swing of four points.
• Kemp won men as a whole 58-40; Walker won them 54-44, a net swing of four points.
• Kemp lost unmarried men 54-45; Walker lost them 58-39, a net swing of four points.
• Kemp lost independent women 52-46; Walker lost them 55-41, a net swing of four points.

When you pull together these strands, what do you see? Walker’s biggest problem, at least on Election Day, wasn’t turnout, or it would not have been such a good day for the rest of the Georgia Republican ticket. He didn’t fall that far behind Kemp among core Republican constituencies such as conservatives, pro-lifers, or rural voters; he lost some ground with those voters, but they weren’t splitting tickets in numbers as large as the groups listed above. Nor was his problem the core Democratic constituencies, which mostly supported Abrams just a few points less than Warnock. The biggest gaps were among the overlapping groups of (1) independent and unmarried men, (2) educated women, and (3) moderately pro-abortion voters.

In part, of course, this illustrates the value of having a record to run on: While Walker was pilloried for taking a no-exceptions abortion stance, Kemp had actually signed a pro-life law that was not a complete ban on abortion. But I think it also reflects another reality: A fair number of voters who say they support abortion in the abstract do not want to look too carefully at it, and don’t like what they see when they do. There, too, lies a cultural and political lesson for pro-lifers.

The biggest story of the Walker–Warnock race was two women accusing Walker of paying them to abort children he fathered with them out of wedlock. As I argued at the time, while the stories were probably true, it was morally defensible for pro-life voters to support Walker, given the nature of the office he was seeking and the fact that Warnock wants the federal government to fund abortions and uses his pulpit as a preacher to defend abortion. Of course, the fact that a vote is morally defensible does not mean that people will do it enthusiastically. Most strongly pro-life voters in Georgia held their noses and voted for Walker, but some simply couldn’t, and in a close race, that did him no favors.

But the voters who were likelier to turn on Walker even while voting for other, strongly pro-life Republicans were not disgusted pro-lifers or married churchgoers; they were people who sometimes vote for pro-abortion Democrats, people who tell pollsters that they generally favor legal abortion with some exceptions, college-educated women who may like abortion in theory but would never have one, and single men who could perhaps picture themselves being in the situation of unintentionally getting a woman pregnant outside of marriage.

When these voters looked at what abortion really is, they did not like what they saw. They saw a wealthy, famous man paying to make his affairs go away, and women feeling pressured to do so and keep quiet. They saw, in short, something deeply immoral and irresponsible. And they couldn’t vote for a man who would kill his own children for his own convenience, because it is an evil thing to do.

For the pro-life cause, there is no sugar-coating the fact that the reelection of Raphael Warnock to the Senate is a bad thing that will have bad consequences. Warnock will exercise his power to ensure that more children die. He not only lacks the language in which to identify evil, he embraces it as a virtue.

But there is, nonetheless, a positive lesson here. As past reform movements have come to understand, the best way to discredit an evil is to lay it bare in concrete terms, unclouded by euphemism and slogan. The actual, living reality of abortion is a ghastly and cruel thing, and when American voters encounter someone who would actually go through with it, they recoil.