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      Herschel Walker Paid for an Abortion for Ex-Girlfriend, Report Says

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      ATLANTA — Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia and an avowed abortion opponent, paid for his then-girlfriend to have an abortion in 2009, according to a report published Monday in The Daily Beast. Mr. Walker called the claim “a flat-out lie.”The woman, who The Daily Beast said asked to remain anonymous out of privacy concerns, said that she and Mr. Walker had conceived the child while the two were dating, and mutually agreed not to go ahead with the pregnancy. She said Mr. Walker, who was not married at the time, reimbursed her for the cost of the procedure, the outlet reported.As evidence, the woman provided a copy of a $700 check from Mr. Walker, a receipt from the abortion clinic and a “get well” card from Mr. Walker, The Daily Beast reported. The outlet published a photo of the card with what it said was Mr. Walker’s signature.Mr. Walker quickly posted a statement on Twitter and threatened to file a defamation lawsuit against The Daily Beast on Tuesday morning. “I deny this in the strongest possible terms,” he said. “It’s disgusting, gutter politics.”The development is the latest in a series of potentially damaging reports about Mr. Walker’s personal life since he began his campaign for Senate in 2021. In June, The Daily Beast reported that Mr. Walker, who has criticized absentee fathers in Black households, had fathered a child out of wedlock. Later that week, the outlet reported on two more children he had not previously mentioned publicly or to his campaign aides.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Trouble for Nevada Democrats: The state has long been vital to the party’s hold on the West. Now, Democrats are facing potential losses up and down the ballot.Democrats’ House Chances: Democrats are not favored to win the House, but the notion of retaining the chamber is not as far-fetched as it once was, ​​writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Latino Voters: A recent Times/Siena poll found Democrats faring far worse than they have in the past with Hispanic voters. “The Daily” looks at what the poll reveals about this key voting bloc.Michigan Governor’s Race: Tudor Dixon, the G.O.P. nominee who has ground to make up in her contest against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, is pursuing a hazardous strategy in the narrowly divided swing state: embracing former President Donald J. Trump.Christian Walker, Mr. Walker’s son who has not endorsed his father’s campaign or appeared publicly on behalf of his father, weighed in on Monday evening, saying on Twitter that “every member” of Mr. Walker’s family urged him not to run for office.“I don’t care about someone who has a bad past and takes accountability. But how DARE YOU LIE and act as though you’re some ‘moral, Christian, upright man,’” he continued. “You’ve lived a life of DESTROYING other peoples lives.”Mr. Walker responded with a single tweet: “I LOVE my son no matter what.”In an interview on Monday night with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Mr. Walker denied the account laid out in The Daily Beast article, saying he did not know the woman. When asked about the reported $700 payment for the abortion, he said, “I send money to a lot of people.”“I never asked anyone to get an abortion, I never paid for an abortion,” Mr. Walker continued. He said of Democrats, “They want this seat. But right now they’ve energized me even more.”Mr. Walker has also been found to have exaggerated or misrepresented other parts of his life story. He claimed to have worked in law enforcement when he did not. He exaggerated the origins of a chicken business he built. After starting a food distribution company, he claimed to donate a portion of his business earnings to charity but there is little proof that the organizations received the funds.Mr. Walker has made his opposition to abortion a cornerstone of his campaign message, saying repeatedly that he supports bans on the procedure with no exceptions for rape or incest. He has also endorsed legislation recently proposed by Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, that institutes a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Mr. Graham’s bill does include exceptions for rape, incest or pregnancies that threaten the mother’s health.“There’s no exceptions in my mind,” Mr. Walker told reporters in Macon, Ga., in May, days before the state’s G.O.P. Senate primary. “You never know what a child is going to become.”The Georgia Senate race is one of the most closely watched in the country. Most polls show that the race between Mr. Walker and his Democratic opponent, Senator Raphael Warnock, is virtually tied. A spokeswoman for Mr. Warnock’s campaign declined to comment. More

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      Democrats’ Troubles in Nevada Are a Microcosm of Nationwide Headwinds

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      Inflation and a rocky economy are bolstering Republicans in their races against incumbent Democrats, motivating “an electorate that simply wants change,” as one G.O.P. consultant says.LAS VEGAS — The Culinary Workers Union members who are knocking on doors to get out the vote are on the cursed-at front lines of the Democratic Party’s midterm battle.Most voters do not open their doors. And when some do answer, the canvassers might wish they hadn’t.“You think I am going to vote for those Democrats after all they’ve done to ruin the economy?” a voter shouted one evening last week from her entryway in a working-class neighborhood of East Las Vegas.Miguel Gonzalez, a 55-year-old chef who described himself as a conservative Christian who has voted for Republicans for most of his life, was more polite but no more convinced. “I don’t agree with anything Democrats are doing at all,” he said after taking a fistful of fliers from the union canvassers.Those who know Nevada best have always viewed its blue-state status as something befitting a desert: a kind of mirage. Democrats are actually a minority among registered voters, and most of the party’s victories in the last decade were narrowly decided. But the state has long been a symbolic linchpin for the party — vital to its national coalition and its hold on the blue West.Now, Democrats in Nevada are facing potential losses up and down the ballot in November and bracing for a seismic shift that could help Republicans win control of both houses of Congress. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto remains one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the country. Gov. Steve Sisolak is fighting his most formidable challenger yet. And the state’s three House Democrats could all lose their seats.The Democratic juggernaut built by former Senator Harry M. Reid is on its heels, staring down the most significant spate of losses in more than a decade. More

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      The Latino Voters Who Could Decide the Midterms

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      Diana Nguyen and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherLatino voters have never seemed more electorally important than in the coming midterm elections: the first real referendum on the Biden era of government.Latinos make up 20 percent of registered voters in two crucial Senate races — Arizona and Nevada — and as much or more in over a dozen competitive House races.In the past 10 years, the conventional wisdom about Latino voters has been uprooted. We explore a poll, conducted by The Times, to better understand how they view the parties vying for their vote.On today’s episodeJennifer Medina, a national politics reporter for The New York Times.Dani Bernal, born in Bolivia and raised in Miami, described herself as an independent who’s in line with Democrats on social issues but Republicans on the economy.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesBackground readingTwo years after former President Donald Trump made surprising gains with Hispanic voters, Republican dreams of a major realignment have failed to materialize, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Jennifer Medina More

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      It’s Time to Take Democrats’ Chances in the House Seriously

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      No, they are not favored. But the notion of retaining the chamber is not as far-fetched as it once was.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, before the memorial service last month for Queen Elizabeth II in Washington. Republicans are favored to retake the House. Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressThere were more than a few Democrats who were a little miffed about my Friday newsletter on gerrymandering, which argued that Democrats aren’t at a terribly significant structural disadvantage in the race for the House.I understand why Democrats don’t love reading that the obstacles they face — especially unjust ones — aren’t so bad. But underneath what some might read as a dismissal of the seriousness of gerrymandering is a kernel of good news for Democratic readers: Republican control of the House is not a foregone conclusion.No, I’m not saying Democrats are favored. The likeliest scenario is still that Republicans will find the five seats they need to take control. And no one should be surprised if Republicans flip a lot more than that — especially with early signs that the political winds may be starting to shift in ways that might yield some Republican gains in key races (more on this tomorrow).But the idea that Democrats can hold the House is not as ridiculous, implausible or far-fetched as it seemed before the Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade. It is a real possibility — not some abstraction in the sense that anything can happen.In fact, not much would need to happen at all.If the polls are “right” and Election Day were today, the fight for the House would be very close. It would be a district-by-district battle for control, one in which the race might come down to the strengths and weaknesses of individual candidates and campaigns. With a few lucky breaks, Democrats could come out ahead.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Sensing a Shift: As November approaches, there are a few signs that the political winds may have begun to blow in a different direction — one that might help Republicans over the final stretch.Focusing on Crime: Across the country, Republicans are attacking Democrats as soft on crime to rally midterm voters. Pennsylvania’s Senate contest offers an especially pointed example of this strategy.Arizona Senate Race: Blake Masters, a Republican, appears to be struggling to win over independent voters, who make up about a third of the state’s electorate.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed G.O.P. nominee, is being heavily outspent and trails badly in polling. National Republicans are showing little desire to help him.Those are two huge “ifs,” of course. But with five weeks to go until the election, those “ifs” aren’t exactly a good enough reason to justify writing off the race for the House.How could this be? It’s more straightforward than you might think. Democrats hold a narrow lead on the generic congressional ballot, a poll question asking whether voters would prefer Democrats or Republicans for Congress. If Republicans don’t have a robust structural advantage, as I wrote last Friday, then why wouldn’t the Democrats at least be competitive in the race for Congress? On paper, the Democratic disadvantage is fairly comparable to their disadvantage in the Senate — which most everyone agrees Democrats have a decent chance to hold this cycle.Of course, the reason we think Democrats might overcome their obstacles in the Senate is because we have dozens of polls in critical Senate races. Thanks to those polls, we know Democrats lead in Pennsylvania and Arizona, which we might have assumed were tossups otherwise. In contrast, we have no idea whether Democrats are leading in equivalent races for the House: There are almost no nonpartisan House polls at all, and they’re spread out across many more races.But if Democrats can do what they appear to be doing in the Senate, there’s no reason to assume they couldn’t already be doing something similar in the House. If we had as many House polls as we do in the Senate, perhaps Democrats would appear to be ahead in the race for the House as well.On this point, it’s worth pausing on the decision by House Republicans to pull adds in Ohio’s Ninth District. This district voted for former President Donald J. Trump by three percentage points in 2020; it was redrawn to defeat the longtime Democratic incumbent, Marcy Kaptur. But Republicans nominated J.R. Majewski, a stop-the-steal candidate who misrepresented his military service for good measure. The Republicans canceled nearly $1 million in scheduled advertisements.Mr. Majewski may well win in the end, but this is exactly the sort of story we see playing out in the Senate — weak Republican candidates failing to capitalize on their underlying advantages, with well-funded Democratic incumbents positioned to pounce. The district is now characterized as “lean Democratic” by the Cook Political Report.I asked my friend Dave Wasserman, House editor of the Cook Political Report, whether he thought Democrats would appear to lead in the race for the House today if there were robust polling averages in every district, as there are in the Senate. He said they would, with Democrats leading the polls “in maybe 220 to 225 seats,” more than the 218 needed for a majority.The fragmentary nonpartisan House polling we do have is intriguing. These polls don’t say much about any particular district (with the exception of Alaska’s At-Large, another race where the Republicans may be forfeiting what little remains of their structural advantage). But on average, Democrats are running a net 3.9 points behind President Biden — a number that’s essentially consistent with a tied national vote (Mr. Biden won by 4.5 points in 2020) — across the 29 districts where there have been polls since Aug. 1.In the end, most analysts — including me and Mr. Wasserman — still think Republicans are favored to win the House. In this national environment, it would be no surprise if the polls trended toward the Republicans over the next few weeks. If they don’t, we’ll be nervous that the polls are about to be off yet again. That’s not just because the polls have underestimated Republicans in recent cycles, but also because the long history of out-party success in midterm elections weighs heavily on our thinking.But until or unless the polls shift more clearly in the G.O.P.’s favor, there’s no reason to dismiss the prospect of a Democratic House. Not anymore. More

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      The Racial Divide Herschel Walker Couldn’t Outrun

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      WRIGHTSVILLE, Ga. — The race for a critical Senate seat was in full motion by midsummer, but there were just a few Herschel Walker campaign signs sprinkled around his hometown.They were planted in front of big homes with big yards, in a downtown storefront window, near the sidewalk by the Dairy Queen. There were two on the corner by the Johnson County Courthouse, near a Confederate memorial.The support appeared randomly scattered. But people in Wrightsville saw a dot-to-dot drawing of a racial divide that has shaped Wrightsville for generations — and is now shaping a critical political race with national implications.“All those campaign materials were in the white community,” said Curtis Dixon, who is Black and who taught and coached Mr. Walker, a Republican, in the late 1970s when he was a high school football prodigy. “The only other house that has a Herschel Walker poster is his family.”It may not be an exaggeration. In a predominantly Black neighborhood of small homes about a block from where Mr. Walker went to high school, nine people, including a man who said he was Mr. Walker’s cousin, gathered on a steamy Saturday in July to eat and talk in the shade.No one planned to vote for Mr. Walker. Most scoffed at the thought.Around the corner, a retired teacher named Alice Pierce said nice things about Mr. Walker’s mother and family, as most people do.“But I’m not going to vote for him, I’ll be honest with you,” she said.Fearful of repercussions in a small town, and out of respect for members of the Walker family who still live in the area, many Black residents in Wrightsville spoke only under the condition of anonymity.One woman, taking a break from mowing her lawn, said Mr. Walker would be in over his head as mayor of Wrightsville. “He’s famous to some people, because of football,” she said. “But he’s just Herschel Walker to me.”Mr. Walker, who is one of the most famous African Americans in Georgia’s history, a folk hero for legions of football fans, is unpopular with Black voters. And nowhere is the rift more stark than in the rural farm town where he was raised about 140 miles southeast of Atlanta.Mr. Walker’s hometown, Wrightsville, sprinkled with his campaign signs. Few are in the yards of Black residents, a microcosm that shows the racial divide among Mr. Walker’s supporters.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesPolls show that Mr. Walker, despite his fame as a football player, may receive less than 10 percent of the Black vote in the Senate race against incumbent Raphael Warnock. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesSince June, polls have routinely shown Mr. Walker attracting less than 10 percent of Black voters in the race against incumbent Raphael Warnock, the pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. Although Mr. Walker often boasts he is going to win “the Black vote,” surveys have found him poised to win no more Black voters than other Republicans on the ballot.There are easy explanations: Mr. Warnock, who is also Black, is a Democrat who preaches at Martin Luther King Jr.’s former church, and Mr. Walker is running as a Republican tied to Donald J. Trump.But there are complex reasons, too, especially in Wrightsville.“Herschel’s not getting the Black vote because Herschel forgot where he came from,” Mr. Dixon said. “He’s not part of the Black community.”Such feelings toward Mr. Walker have been present for decades. They are flowering ahead of November’s elections.But they took root during one seismic spring stretch in 1980. On Easter Sunday that April, Mr. Walker, the top football recruit in the country, committed to play at the University of Georgia in Athens. The signing made national news.Two nights later, after months of simmering tensions, there was a racial confrontation at the courthouse, a lit fuse that exploded into weeks of violence.The events, two of the biggest in town history, did not seem connected at the time. More than four decades later, their intersection may help decide the balance of power in the U.S. Senate.A confederate memorial near Wrightsville, the Johnson County seat.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times‘You can’t get into shape marching’Several two-lane roads lead to Wrightsville, a crossroads more than a destination, set amid rolling hills of farms and forests. It is the seat of a rural county with fewer than 10,000 residents, about one-third of them Black.A few miles from town, one road is labeled the “Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway.” Another passes by a substantial Confederate memorial. Down a nearby dirt road is the church that Mr. Walker attended as a boy.Another road to Wrightsville passes the spot, five miles from town, where Mr. Walker and six siblings were raised by Willis and Christine Walker in a white clapboard house.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Sensing a Shift: As November approaches, there are a few signs that the political winds may have begun to blow in a different direction — one that might help Republicans over the final stretch.Focusing on Crime: Across the country, Republicans are attacking Democrats as soft on crime to rally midterm voters. Pennsylvania’s Senate contest offers an especially pointed example of this strategy.Arizona Senate Race: Blake Masters, a Republican, appears to be struggling to win over independent voters, who make up about a third of the state’s electorate.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed G.O.P. nominee, is being heavily outspent and trails badly in polling. National Republicans are showing little desire to help him.The family home has been replaced by a stately, ranch-style brick one, where Mr. Walker’s widowed mother lives. Behind it is a second home, a place for Mr. Walker to stay when he visits. About eight storage buildings nearby hold his collection of classic cars.Mr. Walker’s childhood home is gone, replaced by a brick house where his widowed mother lives. A second home behind it is where Mr. Walker stays when he visits.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Walker, now 60, has mostly lived in Texas since the mid-1980s. He often comes to Wrightsville for the Fourth of July, and his cars comprise most of the parade. This year featured a new entry — a Chevy truck wrapped in an advertisement for “Team Herschel,” with Mr. Walker’s photo on the hood.The parade, just a few minutes long, takes place in front of the Johnson County Courthouse, perched on a central square surrounded mostly by empty storefronts. Banners on lampposts call Wrightsville “the friendliest town in Georgia.”But back in 1980, it was “a mean little town,” the Atlanta Journal reporter Ron Taylor wrote at the time, that “hangs at the damaged roots of all that did not grow after the sixties.”It was outside the courthouse in 1979 that the Rev. E.J. Wilson, a Black pastor and civil rights activist new to town, began organizing protests calling out the indignities of being Black in Wrightsville.Schools had been integrated, but plenty else felt separate and unequal. City jobs and services mostly went to white people. The police force was white. There was an all-white country club but no public parks or pools. Black neighborhoods had dirt roads and leaky sewers. There was still an all-white cemetery, Mr. Wilson pointed out.And plenty of residents could recall 1948, when the Ku Klux Klan marched on the courthouse and not one of the 400 registered Black voters voted in a primary election the next day.Mr. Wilson and John Martin, a local leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, saw Wrightsville as a rural echo of Birmingham a generation before, with Sheriff Roland Attaway in the hardened role of Bull Connor.Mr. Walker was the town’s most famous resident, a potentially powerful ally.“There were a few times after the Friday night football games when some of the protest leaders grabbed Walker, still in uniform and pads, and demanded he join them,” The New York Times Magazine wrote in 1981. “Sheriff Attaway offered to let Herschel carry a pistol. Most of the Black athletes quit the track team the same spring Herschel led it to its title.”Protests grew through the spring of 1980. So did opposition. National civil rights leaders arrived. The Klan and J.B. Stoner, the white supremacist politician later convicted of a church bombing, rolled in. There were standoffs and skirmishes.Some civil rights leaders saw Wrightsville as a rural echo of Birmingham a generation before. Peaceful demonstrations like this one in 1980 occasionally turned violent.Kenneth Walker/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via APThe 1980 Johnson County High School yearbook honored the football team, led by Mr. Walker, the nation’s top recruit. While Mr. Walker wore No. 34 in college and the pros, he was No. 43 in high school. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesTwo nights after Easter, the courthouse square filled with about 75 Black protesters and twice as many white ones. The Black protesters were attacked by the white crowd, and sheriff’s deputies joined in, Black leaders told reporters. No one was arrested.Violence continued sporadically for weeks. Schools and factories closed for fear of outbursts. A little girl, a woman and a policeman were hurt by gunfire. A cafe burned.In May, Sheriff Attaway and his deputies, guns drawn and bracing for a riot, rolled down South Valley Street into a Black neighborhood where Mr. Wilson’s red brick church still stands. They went door to door, arresting and jailing about 40 people, some for days, most without charges.Mr. Walker never got involved.“I’d like to think I had something to do with it,” said Gary Jordan, a white man who coached Mr. Walker in track and football, starting when Mr. Walker was in fifth grade. “I said, ‘You can’t get into shape marching. You’ve got to run. And practice is at 3.’”Mr. Walker had several other white mentors in town, including an owner of a service station where Mr. Walker worked and a farmer who had employed his parents. Another was a math teacher, Jeanette Caneega.“As a student in school, his role in society was not to solve the racial problems of the world,” she said this summer.“I don’t want to be divisive,” Gary Phillips, Mr. Walker’s high-school football coach, who is white, said, “but as an 18-year-old Black kid in Wrightsville with a lot of pressure on him, can you see how or why he might have decided that this is not the best thing for me, to start getting into this?”Mr. Walker soon left Wrightsville and rarely spoke about the episode. He declined to be interviewed for this article. In college, when he was asked by a reporter about the friction back home, Mr. Walker said that he was “too young” and “didn’t want to get involved in something I didn’t know much about.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.In a memoir published decades later, Mr. Walker only briefly noted the conflict. But he described a school confrontation between a Black student and the white principal the year before.“I could never really be fully accepted by white students and the African American students either resented me or distrusted me for what they perceived as my failure to stand united with them — regardless of whether they were right or wrong,” he wrote. “That separation would continue throughout my life with only the reasons for it differing from situation to situation.”He added: “I never really liked the idea that I was to represent my people.”Student football players warmed up on Herschel Walker Field.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAn Outsider at HomeToday, the school that Mr. Walker attended is shuttered behind a chain-link fence. A new school was built next to what is now called Herschel Walker Field. The complex sits on Herschel Walker Drive.Teachers, coaches and classmates in Wrightsville remember Mr. Walker’s demeanor. Polite. Humble. Kind. Respectful.People who plan to vote for him in November tend to mention those things, too. They credit Mr. Walker’s parents. Willis worked at a kaolin mine. Christine worked at a textile mill. They stayed mostly to themselves and taught their children to try to get along with everyone. “The good Christian woman that she is,” Mr. Walker wrote of his mother, “she also taught us that color was invisible.”Mr. Walker, in a family of strong athletes, was barely noticed until his junior year of high school. He was, by his telling, a chubby stutterer with so few friends that he paid children to talk to him. He was haunted by nightmares of wolves and was “petrified” of the dark and the Klan, he wrote in his memoir.He painted himself as an outsider, even in his hometown.“No one wanted to associate with me because I was an outcast, a stuttering-stumpy-fat-poor-other-side-of-the-railroad-tracks-living-stupid-country boy,” Mr. Walker wrote.In his early teens, Mr. Walker disappeared into books and devoted himself to fitness. He became a model student, a member of an honor society called the Beta Club. Ms. Caneega, the teacher who led the club, joked that she would have taught for free if she “had a class full of kids like him.”With no weight room in town, Mr. Walker did pull-ups from trees and ran barefoot along the railroad tracks. Mr. Jordan, the coach, wrapped a belt around Mr. Walker, fastened chains to him and had him pull truck tires across the Georgia red dirt.Mr. Walker won state titles in track in both sprints and the shot put and led Johnson County to a football state championship his senior year.The nation’s top college coaches crowded into Wrightsville. Some arrived by helicopter, landing on a field next to school. Mr. Walker delayed a decision for months through the tumultuous spring of 1980.“Part of that might be that he was so nice, he didn’t want to tell other people goodbye and no thanks after he got to know them a bit,” Vince Dooley, Georgia’s coach from 1964 to 1988, said.Mr. Walker flipped a coin. It landed on Georgia on Easter night.A coin? Many details of Mr. Walker’s biography bend toward fable. Until recently, it didn’t really matter. Mr. Walker was just a sports legend, spinning legends.Mr. Walker attracted national attention as a high-school football and track athlete. Residents remember coaches arriving by helicopter to woo him and watch him compete.J.C. Lee/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via APMr. Walker, as a freshman, led Georgia to the 1980 national championship and a Sugar Bowl victory over Notre Dame. He later won the Heisman Trophy, cementing his status in state history and folklore.Focus on Sport/Getty ImagesBut as scrutiny befitting a Senate candidate has grown, Mr. Walker has been found to be a purveyor of fiction and misdirection about basic résumé facts, such as graduating from Georgia (he did not) in the top 1 percent of his class (no); about the size, scope and success of his companies (all exaggerated); about working in law enforcement, including the F.B.I. (he has not); and about his number of children.His candidacy has resurfaced his 2008 memoir, “Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder,” in which Mr. Walker described a dozen “alters,” or alternate personalities. It rekindled stories of Mr. Walker’s struggle with mental health, reminding voters of his admissions of violent tendencies (briefly chasing down a man he said he wanted to kill), suicidal thoughts (Mr. Walker, who nearly killed himself in an idling car in his garage, said he occasionally played Russian roulette with a revolver) and infidelity.His post-football life, especially, has been a stream of erratic behavior, some of it described in the book. Mr. Walker’s entrance into politics has prompted stories with new details surrounding allegations that he abused and made death threats against his former wife of nearly 20 years and his late girlfriend.He has denied the allegations and often deflects questions about his past by saying that he is “fighting to end the stigma of mental illness.”Such matters have not derailed Mr. Walker’s campaign. Stamped deeper into Georgia’s collective psyche is Mr. Walker’s first college touchdown in 1980. (“Oh you Herschel Walker! My god almighty, he ran right through two men!” the radio announcer Larry Munson shouted then.)When Mr. Walker arrived on Georgia’s campus, it had been less than a decade since the football team was integrated — one of the last in the country to do so. He became a near-instant hero among the school’s mostly white fan base when he led the Bulldogs to a national championship, playing in the Sugar Bowl against Notre Dame with a separated shoulder.“Up in a private box in the Superdome,” Dave Anderson of The Times wrote from the game, “the second most important citizen in Georgia peered down yesterday at the most important. President Carter was watching Herschel Walker run with a football.”Mr. Walker left Georgia after winning the Heisman Trophy his junior year, signing with the new United States Football League. State legislators wore armbands with Georgia’s colors, red and black, to mourn Mr. Walker’s departure.It was before his second season with the New Jersey Generals that the team was purchased by Mr. Trump, then a 37-year-old New York real-estate developer.“In a lot of ways, Mr. Trump became a mentor to me,” Mr. Walker wrote in 2008, “and I modeled myself and my business practices after him.”Mr. Walker was nudged into running for Senate by Donald Trump. The two met when Mr. Walker played for Mr. Trump’s United States Football League team in the 1980s.Audra Melton for The New York Times‘Run Herschel, Run’On a sweltering summer weekday at Jaemor Farms, a large produce stand off a rural highway, shoppers fondled ripe peaches and sampled ice cream.Mr. Walker sauntered in, still fit in a T-shirt and casual pants, trailed by a loose huddle of handlers. Heads turned. Mouths opened. An elderly woman rushed to her car to tell her husband.“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Drew Echols, whose family owns Jaemor Farms, a traditional campaign stop for would-be politicians. He shook his head and laughed. “It’s because they all know him. He’s Herschel Walker.”It was Mr. Trump who nudged Mr. Walker back to the bright lights of Georgia. Mr. Walker played 15 seasons of professional football, 12 in the N.F.L. He was wildly famous but never recaptured the success of his college career.“Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the legendary Herschel Walker ran for the United States Senate in Georgia?” Mr. Trump said in a statement released in March 2021, adding: “Run Herschel, run!”And Mr. Walker did. He appeared at Trump rallies, where he stood out for his relative lack of vitriol. Bombast is not in Mr. Walker’s nature, though he does share Trump’s penchant for unscripted, sometimes incoherent, remarks.In July, for example, discussing China and climate change, Mr. Walker said that Georgia’s “good air decides to float over” to China, displacing China’s “bad air,” which returns to Georgia. “We got to clean that back up,” he said. And in May, after the school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, he delivered a soliloquy that began, “Cain killed Abel, and that’s a problem that we have.”His public performances raise questions about why Mr. Walker chose — and was chosen — to run.Mr. Walker is widely viewed as “not being ready for prime time,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor at Emory University in Atlanta who teaches African American politics. “Which for Black voters, who may be skeptical of the Republican strategy of nominating him in the first place, just smacks of what they view as tokenism.”Mr. Walker, with supporters in Oscilla, Ga. He tends to draw a crowd on the campaign trail.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMr. Walker with Black clergy members at an event in Austell, Ga.Audra Melton for The New York TimesMuch of the recent campaign intrigue has been over whether Mr. Walker would debate Mr. Warnock, who makes a living preaching from a pulpit. (The two will face off in a debate later this month.) Mr. Walker is more comfortable with small talk. A lifetime of autograph seekers has made him comfortable with quick interactions and people smiling back at him.At Jaemor Farms, Mr. Walker met in a back room with about a dozen local farmers, all white. He was flanked by two polished white former state politicians, Terry Rogers and Butch Miller, who, like human crutches, kept the discussion moving forward whenever Mr. Walker wobbled into unfamiliar terrain.Mr. Walker half-joked that Democrats wanted to force farmers to use electric combines. He reminded the group that he was from rural Wrightsville. He said his grandfather raised cotton and peas.“I used to help pick,” Mr. Walker said. “I thought it was an upgrade to start baling hay.”The farmers laughed, knowingly. Then Mr. Walker detoured into remarks about China, TikTok and Archie Bunker.Georgia’s population is one-third Black, but Mr. Walker’s campaign staff is almost entirely white, as are the crowds that gather to watch him. “The thing you can’t measure about his support is how many people he’s going to pull in that never voted before, haven’t been involved, but know him from his Georgia football days,” Martha Zoller, a conservative talk-show host and political pundit in Georgia, said.Mr. Rogers, a former Republican state legislator and now a political consultant, noted that the Bulldogs are coming off their first national championship season since 1980.“This election’s being held during football season,” he said. “I think that goes a long way — especially if Georgia keeps winning.”The allusions to Georgia football are telling. Sanford Stadium in Athens, like many major sports venues in this country, remains a place where a mostly white fan base cheers mostly Black athletes. Mr. Walker, his No. 34 jersey long retired, is a link to feel-good nostalgia for a university where Black enrollment is about 8 percent. As a politician, Mr. Walker tries to keep his messages about race in America positive. He says he is pro-police without addressing violence against Black men. He spreads unfounded claims about voter fraud but does not address voter suppression. He says Democrats use race to divide “a great country full of generous people.”At a campaign stop in Wrightsville in August, he told a room full of women, nearly all of them white: “Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re racist.”In Wrightsville’s downtown, a shop promoted Mr. Walker’s candidacy. “We need to do more to promote Herschel here in his hometown,” said the shop’s owner, who is white.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhat’s Left BehindChange moves slowly in Wrightsville. As Mr. Walker said of his hometown last year, “If you got one year to live, you move there. Because that year’s forever. Same old, same old.”Since Mr. Walker left four decades ago, several textile factories in the area have closed, including the one where Mr. Walker’s mother worked. So have a window factory and a meatpacking plant. Downtown storefronts have emptied.The median household income in Johnson County is around $42,000 per year. About one-quarter of residents live in poverty. The race divide has softened, but slowly. As recently as 2003, Wrightsville drew attention for being one of several small Southern towns that still held segregated proms.Across from the courthouse is a floral and collectibles shop called Kreative Kreations. This summer, its display windows were decorated with campaign signs for Mr. Walker. “Run Herschel Run,” read a larger banner over the storefront.The store owner, Kevin Price, who is white and nearly a decade younger than Mr. Walker, grew up in Wrightsville and recalled his family “packing up every Saturday morning and heading for Athens” to watch the Bulldogs play.“We need to do more to promote Herschel here in his hometown,” Mr. Price said.On a shaded bench across the street, a woman named Lisa Graddy wondered just where Mr. Walker had run.“He forgot about his hometown,” Ms. Graddy said.Exactly what she and other Black residents expect from Mr. Walker is murky. It is a combination of investment, representation, empathy and engagement.Mr. Walker still has family in Wrightsville but little support from other Black residents. Tommy Jenkins, a former high school teammate, is among the few of them who plan to vote for Mr. Walker.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhy has he not used his fame, fortune and now his political standing to raise the voices of those he left behind, they ask. It is a question raised in 1980, echoing in 2022.One ex-teammate, Tommy Jenkins, said the answer to the question was once very simple. Mr. Jenkins was among the Black track athletes who boycotted the team and participated in the protests.“A lot of people criticized him for not standing up, but I understood why Herschel didn’t do it,” said Mr. Jenkins, a Black Wrightsville resident who intends to vote for Mr. Walker. “It would’ve ruined his career.”Christian Boone contributed reporting from Georgia. Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More

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      ‘From the Hood to the Holler’ Review: A Race to Galvanize the Poor

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      A new documentary revisits the former Kentucky state representative Charles Booker’s 2020 campaign to unseat Mitch McConnell in the Senate.At a hearing in 2019 for a vote on a bill that would restrict abortion access in Kentucky, Charles Booker, a state representative at the time, gave an impassioned speech about abortion rights, criticizing politicians who had compared the medical procedure to lynching. When the speaker of the Assembly tried to silence him, Booker yelled, “My life matters, too, speaker,” as an older white man screamed at him to “sit down.”“I can only imagine that in this white person’s mind, he thought he had the right to tell this Black person to sit down,” Attica Scott, another state representative from Kentucky, says later.The exchange plays out in the new documentary “From the Hood to the Holler,” directed by Pat McGee. It follows Booker’s subsequent run for Senate in 2020, including a campaign defined by his willingness to walk across that racial divide, traveling to “hollers,” or poor, mostly white communities in Appalachia, to unite impoverished voters. Booker lost narrowly in a Democratic primary against Amy McGrath; some weeks before the election, the documentary notes, he had raised around $300,000 compared to her $29.8 million. (In May, Booker won the primary by a landslide, and he’ll face off against the Republican senator Rand Paul in November.)The documentary succeeds at presenting Booker as a candidate who can unite voters, and its best scenes show him meeting the moment. In one scene, he mediates between the police and protesters after the death of Breonna Taylor, whom he knew, convincing the officers to drop their batons in a show of solidarity. In another, he strategizes with his team about safety procedures for traveling through places that may have once been considered sundown towns, showing how racism persists in modern-day Kentucky and the nation.But though Booker’s story and success are inspiring, the documentary falls flat, feeling more like a political tool than a commentary on the state of politics in Kentucky. It would have benefited from less focus on Booker and more on the many Kentuckians he spoke to who are ready for a change.From the Hood to the HollerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      The Fetterman-Oz Race Is No Piece of Cake

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      OK, people. Time for some real political drama. Pennsylvania! Pennsylvania! Pennsylvania!Surprised you, didn’t I? But really, the Senate race there has it all. Swing state that could very well decide who holds the majority in the Senate and whether the rest of President Biden’s agenda has any real chance of getting passed.And the main candidates — the Republican, Mehmet Oz, and the Democrat, John Fetterman — are a stupendous diversion. You have the big, heavy issues, naturally, but they’ve also been fighting about stuff like where Oz actually lives and the right word to use for vegetables in the supermarket.Remember that last one? In an ongoing attempt to prove he’s just a regular guy and not a superrich TV personality with multiple expensive homes, Oz released a video of himself shopping for groceries and blaming Biden for the high cost of “crudité.”Imagine the euphoria in the Fetterman camp after that one. “In PA, we call this a veggie tray,” the candidate tweeted happily.Fetterman also released a video of three women wearing broccoli costumes. I know this doesn’t tell you a whole lot about what the candidates would do with, say, military spending. But you have to admit it’s a conversation maker.Oz is an accomplished heart surgeon and a TV personality who became famous for giving out health tips on Oprah Winfrey’s show. Most of his advice is perfectly reasonable. Really, that time he warned women that carrying a cellphone in their bras might cause breast cancer was long, long ago.Fetterman is Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, running as a regular guy who’ll wear a sweatshirt and shorts for pretty much anything from a picnic to a news conference to guiding the president on a tour of a bridge collapse. One of the duties of his job is to head the state Pardons Board, and you will not be surprised to hear that Oz is constantly reminding voters that he recommended pardons for people who were, um, convicts.One of the big talking points in the Senate race is residency. It’s certainly an issue that works for Fetterman, who has a tattoo on his arm advertising the ZIP code of the town where he once served as mayor. Oz made his home in a pretty fabulous New Jersey mansion during his precampaign days. Now, of course, he’s acquired a place in Pennsylvania. But Fetterman cannot remind the state too often that this is a rather recent development. (Democrats have a highway billboard near the state border telling motorists they’re “now leaving” New Jersey for Pennsylvania, “JUST LIKE DR. OZ.”)Issue-wise, Oz and Fetterman certainly diverge, although there has been a bit of squirming around. Particularly on the part of Oz, who used to be for gun control but became a Second Amendment fiend during the Republican Senate primary campaign. His abortion position is evolving. He emerged from that primary as “strongly pro-life” but now reminds voters he isn’t keen to punish anybody involved in terminating a pregnancy.Lately, Fetterman’s health has loomed large. He suffered a stroke in May, and while he’s certainly been getting better, there’s no question he still suffers from the effects, including what he calls “auditory processing” issues.Oz, in one of his very least charming tweets, sent out a picture of Fetterman in what looks like boxer shorts, his rather expansive stomach bare, calling him “Basement Bum.” Oz’s communications adviser claimed that if Fetterman had “ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke.”Given what a very, very big deal the outcome of the Pennsylvania race might be, it’s natural that things would go a little crazy. We can actually cheer the fact that it isn’t truly worse — that there’s been little focus on the fact that Oz, who describes himself as a “secular Muslim,” has maintained dual citizenship with Turkey.(Well, there’s been little focus from the Fetterman folk. In the primary, some of the other Republican candidates did try to make it a big deal.)Since Fetterman’s stroke restricted his campaigning, the race has focused more and more on the candidate debate. It looks as though there’s going to be only one, on Oct. 25.People, does this seem worrisome to you? Fetterman has been pulling farther and farther ahead in the polls, and there’s a definite feeling around that the debate is all that’s standing between him and the Senate seat.In normal circumstances, that’s unnerving; political history is full of stories about candidates who lost their lead when they blurted out one stupid thing. And let me admit that when Gov. Rick Perry forgot the name of one of the federal agencies he would eliminate if elected president, I reminded you of his “oops” moment constantly until his candidacy went down the drain.But that was Rick Perry, a terrible candidate running to be leader of the free world. Sort of a different situation. And Fetterman should be fine, right? Right?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Which Midterm Polls Should We Be Taking With a Grain of Salt?

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      Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report and Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster, to discuss the state of polling and of Democratic anxiety about polls ahead of the midterms.Frank Bruni: Amy, Patrick, as if the people over at Politico knew that the three of us would be huddling to discuss polling, it just published a long article about the midterms with the gloomy, spooky headline “Pollsters Fear They’re Blowing It Again in 2022.”Do you two fear that pollsters are blowing it again in 2022?Patrick Ruffini: It’s certainly possible that they could. The best evidence we have so far that something might be afoot comes from The Times’s own Nate Cohn, who finds that some of the Democratic overperformances seem to be coming in states that saw large polling errors in 2016 and 2020.Amy Walter: I do worry that we are asking more from polling than it is able to provide. Many competitive Senate races are in states — like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that Joe Biden won by supernarrow margins in 2020. The reality is that they are going to be very close again. And so an error of just three to four points is the difference between Democratic and Republican control of the Senate.Ruffini: This also doesn’t mean we can predict that polls will miss in any given direction. But it does suggest taking polls in states like Ohio, which Donald Trump won comfortably but where the Republican J.D. Vance is tied or slightly behind, with a grain of salt.Bruni: So what would you say specifically to Democrats? Are they getting their hopes up — again — in a reckless fashion?Walter: Democrats are definitely suffering from political PTSD. After 2016 and 2020, I don’t think Democrats are getting their hopes up. In fact, the ones I talk with are hoping for the best but not expecting such.Ruffini: In any election, you have the polls themselves, and then you have the polls as filtered through the partisan media environment. Those aren’t necessarily the same thing. On Twitter, there’s a huge incentive to hype individual polling results that are good for your side while ignoring the average. I don’t expect this to let up, because maintaining this hype is important for low-dollar fund-raising. But I do think this has led to a perhaps exaggerated sense of Democratic optimism.Bruni: Great point, Patrick — in these fractured and hyperpartisan times of information curation, polls aren’t so much sets of numbers as they are Rorschachs.But I want to pick up on something else that you said — “polls will miss in any given direction” — to ask why the worry seems only to be about overstatement of Democratic support and prospects. Is it possible that the error could be in the other direction and we are understating Republican problems and worries?Ruffini: In politics, we always tend to fight the last war. Historically, polling misses have been pretty random, happening about equally on both sides. But the last big example of them missing in a pro-Republican direction was 2012. The more recent examples stick in our minds, 2020 specifically, which was actually worse in percentage terms than 2016.Walter: Patrick’s point about the last war is so important. This is especially true when we are living in a time when we have little overlap with people from different political tribes. The two sides have very little appreciation for what motivates, interests or worries the other side, so the two sides over- or underestimate each other a lot.As our politics continue to break along educational attainment — those who have a college degree are increasingly more Democratic-leaning, those with less education increasingly more Republican-leaning — polls are likely to overstate the Democratic advantage, since we know that there’s a really clear connection between civic voting behavior and education levels.Ruffini: And we may be missing a certain kind of Trump voter, who may not be answering polls out of a distrust for the media, polling and institutions generally.Bruni: Regarding 2016 and 2020, Trump was on the ballot both of those years. He’s not — um, technically — this time around. So is there a greater possibility of accuracy, of a repeat of 2018, when polling came closer to the mark?Ruffini: The frustrating thing about all of this is that we just don’t have a very good sample size to answer this. In polls, that’s called an n size, like n = 1,000 registered voters. There have been n = 2 elections where Trump has been on the ballot and n = 1 midterm election in the Trump era. That’s not a lot.Bruni: We’ve mentioned 2016 and 2020 versus 2018. Are there reasons to believe that none of those points of reference are all that illuminating — that 2022 is entirely its own cat, with its own inimitable wrinkles? There are cats that have wrinkles, right? I’m a dog guy, but I feel certain that I’ve seen shar-pei-style cats in pictures.Walter: First, let’s be clear. Dogs are the best. So let’s change this to “Is this an entirely different breed?”I’m a big believer in the aphorism that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.Ruffini: Right. Every election is different, and seeing each new election through the lens of the previous election is usually a bad analytical strategy.Walter: But there are important fundamentals that can’t be dismissed. Midterms are about the party in charge. It is hard to make a midterm election about the out-party — the party not in charge — especially when Democrats control not just the White House but the House and Senate as well.However, the combination of overturning Roe v. Wade plus the ubiquitous presence of Trump has indeed made the out-party — the G.O.P. — a key element of this election. To me, the question is whether that focus on the stuff the Republicans are doing and have done is enough to counter frustration with the Democrats.Ruffini: 2022 is unique in that it’s a midterm cycle where both sides have reasons to be energized — Republicans by running against an unpopular president in a time of high economic uncertainty and Democrats by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe. It’s really unique in the sweep of midterm elections historically. To the extent there is still an energized Republican base, polls could miss if they aren’t capturing this new kind of non-college, low-turnout voter that Trump brought into the process.Bruni: Patrick, this one’s for you, as you’re the one among us who’s actually in the polling business. In the context of Amy’s terrific observation about education levels and the Democratic Party and who’s more readily responsive to pollsters, what are you and what is your firm doing to make sure you reach and sample enough Republican and Trump-inclined voters?Ruffini: That’s a great question. Nearly all of our polls are off the voter file, which means we have a much larger set of variables — like voting history and partisan primary participation — to weight on than you might typically see in a media poll (with the exception of the Times/Siena polls, which do a great job in this regard). We’ve developed targets for the right number of college or non-college voters among likely voters in each congressional district. We’re also making sure that our samples have the right proportions of people who have registered with either party or have participated in a specific party’s primary before.But none of this is a silver bullet. After 2016, pollsters figured out we needed to weight on education. In 2020 we weighted on education — and we got a worse polling error. All the correct weighting decisions won’t matter if the non-college or low-turnout voter you’re getting to take surveys isn’t representative of those people who will actually show up to vote.Bruni: Does the taking of polls and the reporting on polls and the consciousness of polls inevitably queer what would have happened in their absence? I will go to my grave believing that if so many voters hadn’t thought that Hillary Clinton had victory in the bag, she would have won. Some 77,000 votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — the margin of her Electoral College loss — are easily accounted for by overconfident, complacent Clinton supporters.Walter: In 2016, there were two key groups of people that determined the election. Those who never liked Clinton and those who disliked Trump and Clinton equally. At the end, those who disliked both equally broke overwhelmingly for Trump. And, those Democratic-leaning voters who didn’t like her at all were never fully convinced that she was a worthy candidate.Ruffini: I don’t worry about this too much since the people most likely to be paying attention to the daily movement of the polls are people who are 100 percent sure to vote. It can also work in the other direction. If the polls are showing a race in a red or blue state is close, that can motivate a majority of the party’s voters to get out and vote, and that might be why close races in those states usually resolve to the state fundamentals.Bruni: Evaluate the news media in all of this, and be brutal if you like. For as long as I’ve been a reporter, I’ve listened to news leaders say our political coverage should be less attentive to polls. It remains plenty attentive to polls. Should we reform? Is there any hope of that? Does it matter?Ruffini: I don’t think there’s any hope of this getting better, and that’s not the media’s fault. It’s the fault of readers (sorry, readers!) who have an insatiable appetite for staring at the scoreboard.Walter: We do pay too much attention to polls, but polls are the tool we have to capture the opinions of an incredibly diverse society. A reporter could go knock on 3,000 doors and miss a lot because they weren’t able to get the kind of cross-section of voters a poll does.Ruffini: Where I do hope the media gets better is in conducting more polls the way campaigns conduct them, which are not mostly about who is winning but showing a candidate how to win.In those polls, we test the impact of messages on the electorate and show how their standing moved as a result. It’s possible to do this in a balanced way, and it would be illuminating for readers to see, starting with “Here’s where the race stands today, but here’s the impact of this Democratic attack or this Republican response,” etc.Bruni: Let’s finish with a lightning round. Please answer these quickly and in a sentence or less, starting with this: Which issue will ultimately have greater effect, even if just by a bit, in the outcome of the midterms — abortion or gas prices?Walter: Abortion. Only because gas prices are linked to overall economic worries.Ruffini: Gas prices, because they’re a microcosm about concerns about inflation. When we asked voters a head-to-head about what’s more important to their vote, reducing inflation comes out ahead of protecting abortion rights by 67 to 29 percent.Bruni: Which of the competitive Senate races will have an outcome that’s most tightly tethered to — and thus most indicative of — the country’s mood and leanings right now?Walter: Arizona and Georgia were the two closest races for Senate and president in 2020. They should both be indicative. But Georgia is much closer because the G.O.P. candidate, Herschel Walker, while he’s still got some problems, has much less baggage and much better name recognition than the G.O.P. candidate in Arizona, Blake Masters.Ruffini: If Republicans are going to flip the Senate, Georgia is most likely to be the tipping-point state.Bruni: If there’s a Senate upset, which race is it? Who’s the unpredicted victor?Walter: For Republicans, it would be Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. They’ve argued that the incumbent, Senator Maggie Hassan, has low approval ratings and is very weak. It would be an upset because Bolduc is a flawed candidate with very little money or history of strong fund-raising.Ruffini: I’d agree about New Hampshire. The polling has shown a single-digit race. Republicans are also hoping they can execute a bit of a sneak attack in Colorado with Joe O’Dea, though the state fundamentals look more challenging.Bruni: You (hypothetically) have to place a bet with serious money on the line. Is the Republican presidential nominee in 2024 Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis or “other”?Walter: It’s always a safer bet to pick “other.” One of the most difficult things to do in politics is what DeSantis is trying to do: not just to upend someone like Trump but to remain a front-runner for another year-plus.Ruffini: I’d place some money on DeSantis and some on “other.” DeSantis is in a strong position right now, relative to the other non-Trumps, but he hasn’t taken many punches. And Trump’s position is soft for a former president who’s supposedly loved by the base and who has remained in the fray. Time has not been his friend. About as many Republicans in the ABC/Washington Post poll this weekend said they didn’t want him to run as did.Bruni: Same deal with the Democratic presidential nominee — but don’t be safe. Live large. To the daredevil go the spoils. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or “other”?Walter: History tells us that Biden will run. If he doesn’t, history tells us that it will be Harris. But I feel very uncomfortable with either answer right now.Ruffini: “Other.” Our own polling shows Biden in a weaker position for renomination than Trump and Democrats less sure about who the alternative would be if he doesn’t run. I also think we’re underestimating the possibility that he doesn’t run at the age of 81.Bruni: OK, final question. Name a politician, on either side of the aisle, who has not yet been mentioned in our conversation but whose future is much brighter than most people realize.Walter: If you talk to Republicans, Representative Patrick McHenry is someone they see as perhaps the next leader for the party. There’s a lot of focus on Kevin McCarthy now, but many people see McHenry as a speaker in waiting.Ruffini: He’s stayed out of the presidential conversation (probably wisely until Trump has passed from the scene), but I think Dan Crenshaw remains an enormously compelling future leader for the G.O.P. Also in Texas, should we see Republicans capitalize on their gains with Hispanic voters and take at least one seat in the Rio Grande Valley, one of those candidates — Mayra Flores, Monica De La Cruz or Cassy Garcia — will easily be in the conversation for statewide office.Bruni: Thank you, both. I just took a poll, and 90 percent of respondents said they’d want to read your thoughts at twice this length. Then again, the margin of error was plus or minus 50 percent, and I’m not sure I sampled enough rural voters in the West.Frank Bruni (@FrankBruni) is a professor of public policy and journalism at Duke, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter and can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) is a co-founder of the Republican research firm Echelon Insights. Amy Walter (@amyewalter) is the publisher and editor in chief of The Cook Political Report.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More