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      Can Democrats Avoid a Midterm Wipeout?

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      This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Wednesdays.It is one of the most enduring trends in American politics that the president’s party tends to fare poorly during midterm elections. And in 2022, that trend was supposed to reassert itself with a vengeance: As inflation climbs at its fastest pace in four decades, Joe Biden’s approval rating has plunged to the lowest of any elected president at this point in his presidency since the end of World War II, according to FiveThirtyEight.But despite those grim conditions, the midterms could be surprisingly competitive: In a July poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, 41 percent of registered voters said they preferred Democrats to control Congress, compared with 40 percent who preferred Republicans.Here’s what people are saying about the state of the races, whether Democrats stand a chance of keeping one or both of their majorities in Congress, and what could change the forecast between now and November.Why the races look closer than expectedIf the Times/Siena polling made one thing clear, it’s that voters are not pleased with the way the country is being run. Even as the unemployment rate hovers around a 50-year low, Americans are deeply anxious about the economy: Just 10 percent of registered voters rated it as “good” or “excellent.” More broadly, political malaise seems the order of the day: A majority of respondents said the nation was too divided to solve its challenges, and just 13 percent said the country was heading in the right direction.But there are a few factors insulating Democrats from all this negative sentiment.As The Times’s chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, explains, recent news is actually helping Democrats in some ways: This summer, the Supreme Court has handed the right significant victories on abortion, climate policy, religious rights and gun laws, galvanizing voters who lean Democratic on those issues and shifting the national political discourse away from the Republican Party’s preferred turf of immigration, crime and school curriculums. Recent mass shootings have also played a role in this shift.In the past several years, the Republican Party has made inroads with less affluent, less educated voters while shedding support among higher-income, higher-educated voters. As a result, the electoral playing field has become less tilted toward Republicans, according to Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who focuses on redistricting and demographic trends. While “the conventional wisdom has it that Democrats are disadvantaged in redistricting because of their inefficient over-concentration in cities,” he told Thomas B. Edsall, a contributing writer for Times Opinion, “the Trump era seems to have changed the country’s political geography in ways that are beneficial to Democrats.”Republicans are also reconfiguring their relationship with Donald Trump, whose grip on the party isn’t as strong as it once was, particularly as the fallout from the House Jan. 6 investigation compounds. According to the Times/Siena College poll, nearly half of Republican primary voters would prefer someone other than Trump for president in 2024. As Jake Lahut reports for Insider, that fault line has created potential pitfalls for Trump-backed Senate candidates, like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia, who have won their primaries but have struggled to break away in general election matchups against their Democratic opponents.The odds: According to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, Republicans have roughly the same chance of reclaiming a Senate majority as Democrats do of retaining theirs. In the House, though, Republicans are still heavily favored. Why? House candidates are both more numerous and more anonymous than Senate candidates, Silver explains, so voters’ feelings about the national political environment tend to be determinative.As The Times’s David Leonhardt wrote this month, “If Democrats keep the Senate without the House, they still would not be able to pass legislation without Republican support.” But, he added: “Senate control nonetheless matters. It would allow President Biden to appoint judges, Cabinet secretaries and other top officials without any Republican support, because only the Senate needs to confirm nominees.”The abortion factorBecause the Supreme Court returned the power to regulate abortions to the states last month, abortion will be a live issue this midterm season in a way it hasn’t been for many decades. Five states will have ballot measures asking voters whether to amend their constitutions to either enshrine or proscribe the right to abortion. And in other states, the issue has raised the stakes in competitive races for the legislature and the governor’s mansion.There are two ways abortion’s centrality could help Democrats in November, Ed Kilgore argues in New York magazine. “The first and most obvious is that it could keep in the Democratic ranks a significant number of suburban swing voters who voted for the Donkey Party in 2018 and 2020 but who might swing back to the G.O.P. without Trump totally dominating the landscape and with economic issues in the forefront,” he writes. “The second possible effect is to boost the turnout rates of certain pro-Democratic groups of voters who often skip non-presidential elections.”Mainstream Democrats have historically treated abortion as a divisive issue best left on the periphery of their campaign strategy. (Biden himself did not utter the word “abortion” until more than a year into his presidency.) But this election season, some Democrats are actively campaigning on the issue, wagering that the Supreme Court’s abrogation of the constitutional right to abortion could prompt a backlash from voters. In Georgia, for example, Stacey Abrams, the state’s Democratic nominee for governor, has started making direct appeals to swing voters and portraying her opponent, the incumbent governor, Brian Kemp, as the mind behind one of the nation’s most extreme abortion laws, which bans abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy.Similarly, Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat who is up for re-election in “notoriously swingy” New Hampshire, has leaned into the issue. “I will fight and never back down,” she said in a June television ad raising the possibility of a national abortion ban. “Protecting our personal freedoms isn’t just what’s right for New Hampshire. It’s what makes us New Hampshire.”Whether this strategy will end up redounding to the Democrats’ benefit remains an open question. Since the court overruled Roe v. Wade, most polls have shown approximately a three-point shift in the Democrats’ direction on the generic ballot, which asks whether voters would prefer Democrats or Republicans to control Congress, compared with surveys by the same pollsters before the decision came down.But some are skeptical that the shift will endure through November or prove significant enough to turn the electoral tide. “Does it have an effect? Absolutely,” Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist, told The Times. “Does it fundamentally change the landscape? No. Not in an off-year election, when your president’s approval rating is below 40 percent and gas is $5 a gallon.”What to watchInflation: According to the Times/Siena College poll, 78 percent of voters say inflation will be “extremely important” when they head to the polls. “It’s a very negative thing politically for the Democrats,” said Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University and a former economic adviser for the Obama administration. “My guess is that the negative views about inflation are so deeply baked in that nothing can change in the next few months to change them.”Unless, of course, they get worse: Republicans are seizing on fears of rising prices in campaign ads, which economists warn could push prices even higher by entrenching inflationary expectations.A surprise announcement from Trump: “Should former President Trump decide, against the advice of nearly every Republican strategist alive, to announce his candidacy before the midterm elections in November, he might energize Democratic voters enough to minimize their losses at the margins,” Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report writes. “I am not sure it would save one or both majorities, but it certainly has the potential to have a greater impact than abortion, guns, and Jan. 6 combined.”Another polling failure: As this newsletter has explored, the polling profession has been in something of a state of crisis since the 2016 election. Pollsters are having a harder and harder time reaching working-class voters, who have been trending Republican, and so polls have routinely overestimated Democratic support. As Cohn writes, “It’s hard not to wonder whether the good news for Democrats might simply be a harbinger of yet another high-profile misfire.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.READ MORE“This election could answer the biggest midterm question: Abortion or the economy?” [Politico]“Where the Midterms Could Most Affect Abortion Access” [FiveThirtyEight]“Could the Midterms Be Tighter Than Expected?” [The New York Times]“Democrats’ Risky Bet: Aid G.O.P. Extremists in Spring, Hoping to Beat Them in Fall” [The New York Times]“Sorry, Democrats. Don’t get your hopes up for the midterms.” [The Washington Post] More

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      Senator Raphael Warnock uses a new ad to pressure Herschel Walker to commit to a debate.

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      ATLANTA — A new advertisement from Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s incumbent Democratic senator, pushes the state’s Republican Senate nominee, Herschel Walker, to debate Mr. Warnock.“Stop dodging. Commit to debates,” reads an onscreen message in the 30-second television spot, which began airing in Georgia’s top four media markets on Tuesday, juxtaposed against Mr. Walker’s recent comments about his openness to debating Mr. Warnock.The ad is part of a weekslong saga between the two candidates: While Mr. Walker has repeatedly pledged to debate Mr. Warnock, his campaign has not accepted invitations to any of the three matchups scheduled for this fall. Mr. Warnock has committed to attending an Oct. 16 debate hosted by the Atlanta Press Club, in addition to two others in Macon and Savannah later that month; those dates have not yet been finalized.During a news conference in Athens, Ga., last Wednesday, Mr. Walker told reporters that he would be “ready to go” for the Oct. 16 debate if the two campaigns “negotiate and we get everything right.”His spokeswoman, Mallory Blount, later issued a statement saying that Mr. Walker’s campaign “doesn’t care about the old way of doing things” and that any debate it ultimately agreed to “must have a fair and equitable format and unbiased moderator.”Mr. Warnock’s campaign has used Mr. Walker’s hesitance to underscore its argument that he is not prepared to serve in the Senate.“I don’t know if Herschel Walker is scared for voters to hear what he has to say, or scared for voters to hear that he’s unprepared to speak on the issues that matter most to the people of Georgia,” Quentin Fulks, Mr. Warnock’s campaign manager, said in a statement. “There’s a clear choice in the race for Senate, and we hope Herschel Walker will be true to his word and commit to joining us at three debates.” More

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      When Republicans Backed Herschel Walker, They Embraced a Double Standard

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      As I wrote in this newsletter in March, the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” coined by George W. Bush when he was a presidential candidate, pithily captures a wisdom that’s difficult to discount, regardless of one’s political stripe. But its emergence as a critique of the educational establishment has meant that it’s generally thought of as a charge from the right.There are times, though, when the right might consider attending to the proverbial log in its own eye, few more obvious and disturbing than the elevation of the ex-football star Herschel Walker, a Black man, as the Republican Party’s candidate in this year’s Georgia Senate race.To start, Walker is fact-challenged: His campaign removed a false claim from its website that he graduated from college. He has falsely claimed to have worked in law enforcement. The lucrative chicken processing business he has reportedly claimed to own is apparently neither especially lucrative nor owned by him. In a local TV interview this year, he said, implausibly, “I’ve never heard President Trump ever say” that the 2020 election was stolen.As Maya King reported this week for The Times, “After repeatedly criticizing absent fathers in Black households,” Walker “publicly acknowledged having fathered two sons and a daughter with whom he is not regularly in contact.”It is hardly uncommon, however, for people running for office to have messy pasts. And in theory, someone could be an effective senator while, like Walker, questioning the theory of evolution: “At one time, science said man came from apes, did it not?” he asked in March. “If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.” Or even while, as he did two years ago, offering the take that there existed a “dry mist” that “will kill any Covid on your body” that “they don’t want to talk about.”The problem with Walker is how glaringly unfit he is for public office apart from all that.Asked whether he would have voted for President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, Walker objected that it was “totally unfair” to expect him to answer the question because he hadn’t yet seen “all the facts,” apparently unaware that one would expect him to have formed an opinion via, well, following the news. Asked, on the day of the Uvalde massacre, about his position on new gun laws, Walker seemed unclear that candidates are expected to at least fake a basic familiarity with the issues, responding, “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.”Days later on Fox News, he went into a bit more detail in a verbal bouillabaisse that almost rose to the level of performance art, saying:You know, Cain killed Abel. You know, and that’s a problem that we have. And I said, what we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation, what about getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women, that’s looking at their social media? What about doing that, looking into things like that, and we can stop that that way?This isn’t a mere matter of verbal dexterity. He’s not just a political neophyte getting his sea legs as a public speaker — in recent months, we’ve watched Eric Adams, the New York City mayor, going through that. Walker isn’t just gaffe-prone, as Biden has been throughout his career. He isn’t someone underqualified and swivel-tongued, like the former governor and current congressional candidate Sarah Palin, who still gives the impression of someone who could have learned on the job. Walker doesn’t appear to have the slightest clue about, or interest in, matters of state, and gives precious little indication that this would change.Here’s where I’m supposed to write something like, “Walker makes Donald Trump look like Benjamin Disraeli by comparison.” But it’s more that Trump, who has endorsed Walker, is pretty much as clueless. Trump’s speeches are riveting — at least to his devotees — and certainly more practiced, but given how recently we’ve seen what happens when someone who would lose an argument with a cloud is placed in a position of grave responsibility, it’s rather grievous to see Republicans now do this with Walker.So why are they doing it?You could say that the issue here is less racism than strategy. The incumbent Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock, is Black, and Georgia Republicans presumably hope that a useful number of Black voters who might otherwise default to supporting him will be swayed by another Black candidate with a famous name, regardless of his lack of credentials. Banking on public naïveté isn’t necessarily a racist act, but the optics here are repulsive: It’s hard to imagine Republicans backing a white candidate so profoundly and shamelessly unsuited for the role. It presents a double standard that manifests as a brutal lack of respect for all voters, Black voters in particular.Serious figures have served in Congress’s upper house, from Henry Clay to Lyndon B. Johnson, Margaret Chase Smith to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to Tim Scott. And now, potentially, Herschel see-it-and-everything-and-stuff Walker? This amounts to the same kind of insult that comes from the left when elite schools lower admissions criteria in order to attract more Black students — a kind of pragmatism forged in condescension. Some call that bigotry. I would quibble about the definition, but only that, and not loudly. Walker as a candidate for the United States Senate is water from the same well.Have feedback? Send me a note at McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” More

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      Despite Repeated Fumbles, Georgia Republicans Say They’re Sticking With Walker

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      Republicans are standing behind Herschel Walker, the former football star, despite an array of revelations, missteps and questions about his qualifications for a Senate seat. ATLANTA — Georgia Republicans knew for months before Herschel Walker launched his Senate campaign that he would be a huge risk in one of the party’s most pivotal races. Just how much of a risk has become clear to many of them in recent weeks.Mr. Walker has blundered through an array of missteps and has endured negative media coverage, raising questions about his past and fitness for the office.He made exaggerated and untrue claims about his business background and his ties to law enforcement. After repeatedly criticizing absent fathers in Black households, he publicly acknowledged having fathered two sons and a daughter with whom he is not regularly in contact. And he initially failed, according to reporting by The Daily Beast, to share information about those three children with senior campaign aides.“Herschel Walker, the wannabe U.S. senator, is avoiding contact — with opponents, with the media, with good sense — like the way Georgia Bulldog fans sidestep wedding invites that fall on a gameday,” Adam Van Brimmer, opinion editor of the Savannah Morning News, wrote in a recent column. “Walker isn’t so much running for U.S. Senate as he is running from it.”Yet these developments have mattered little to Republican officials and strategists, several of whom said in interviews that their support for Mr. Walker has not wavered. They said he continues to have the backing of top Republican leaders in the state at a time when Democrats are bracing for bruising losses in the November midterms. Even those in the G.O.P. who are quietly wary of Mr. Walker’s tumultuous past and his lack of political experience say they are looking past all that and focusing instead on flipping a Democratic seat in the Senate.The Republican Party has stood by numerous elected officials and candidates plagued by scandals, often choosing to break with them only when their chances of winning a race are jeopardized. For Mr. Walker — who comes with hefty investments from top conservative groups, Donald J. Trump’s blessing and a base enamored by his football stardom at the University of Georgia in the 1980s — that break has yet to materialize. A display in honor of Herschel Walker at the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in Macon.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“I think Georgia Democrats have gotten a lot more excited than the Republicans have gotten worried,” said Randy Evans, a former leader of the Republican National Committee in Georgia and an ambassador to Luxembourg under Mr. Trump. Some Republicans, however, said they believe Mr. Walker will continue to be weakened in the months leading up to the November election. Janelle King, an Atlanta-area Republican political consultant whose husband, Kelvin King, ran against Mr. Walker in the G.O.P. primary, said that Mr. King and other unsuccessful Senate candidates argued that the party had been too blinded by Mr. Walker’s football stardom to see that his past would be a liability. Now, she said, she wishes they had worked harder to highlight those concerns. In addition to a slow drip of negative press, Mr. Walker failed to attend any of the Republican Senate debates during the primary — something Ms. King said she regrets not making a bigger focal point of her husband’s campaign. “We should have demanded to see more from him,” she said. “Because at least we could have worked out some of these things. So now we’re in the general and everything is just coming out.”Others in the party who are concerned about Mr. Walker’s past fear it will hurt his standing with the slice of independent and moderate Republican voters who will ultimately decide the race. Some Republicans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about the campaign, said that Mr. Walker’s staff should have taken advantage of his lead during the primary to prepare for a much tougher general election by sharpening his public speaking skills for the debates against the Democratic incumbent, Senator Raphael Warnock. Mr. Warnock has already committed to attending three debates later this fall. Mr. Walker has also agreed to debate but has not named the debates he would attend. In the last week Mr. Walker’s campaign has limited his media exposure almost completely, barring reporters from attending at least two of his events, including one with the Buckhead Atlanta chapter of the Young Republicans and an Independence Day picnic that was billed as “open to everyone” with Representative Andrew Clyde. “Georgia voters will have a clear choice this fall between Reverend Warnock’s extensive record of fighting for all Georgians to lower costs for hardworking Georgia families and Herschel Walker’s pattern of lies, exaggerations, and completely bizarre claims, all of which show he is not ready to represent Georgians in the U.S. Senate,” Meredith Brasher, Mr. Warnock’s communications director, said in a statement.Recent polling shows a tight race between Mr. Walker and Mr. Warnock. A poll from the Democratic group Data for Progress shows Mr. Walker with a two-point lead over Mr. Warnock. In late June, a Quinnipiac poll found that Mr. Warnock had a ten-point lead over Mr. Walker — Mr. Walker’s campaign claimed the margin is much closer. Mallory Blount, a spokeswoman for Mr. Walker, said the recent string of headlines had little effect. “Attacks on our campaign aren’t new and I’m sure we will see more,” Ms. Blount said in a statement. “What else can Sen. Warnock talk about? Gas prices? Inflation? Crime? Accomplishments? Nope. The fact is Warnock cares more about Joe Biden than he does Georgia — he’s gone Washington and left Georgia behind.” Those who are confident about Mr. Walker’s prospects say that voters are either not paying close attention to the negative stories about him or not caring enough about them to let it change their vote. Last month, at a Juneteenth event hosted by Mr. Walker’s campaign and the Republican National Committee, voters characterized the negative coverage as little more than political distractions. “He is a man. He’s doing right by his family. He’s doing right by the community,” said Ronel Saintvil, a Republican who is Black and who lives in metro Atlanta. “To me, for somebody just to bad mouth him like this, I don’t believe it’s right. They’re not focusing on the issues at hand that affect the people in Georgia. And I think that’s what’s more important.” Others say Democrats’ own woes, both nationally and statewide, are buffering concerns about Mr. Walker.Marci McCarthy, chair of the DeKalb County Republican Party, cited recent stories of Mr. Warnock’s use of campaign funds for personal legal matters, saying voters “are really not looking for the rubbish about either candidate.”Mr. Walker’s campaign, for its part, has started to make a number of changes in preparation for the fall, including hiring a new communications director. Top Republican groups have also made big investments in the race. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican Senate campaign arm that has so far spent $8 million in Georgia this year, bought $1.4 million in pro-Walker television airtime last week, according to the advertising data tracking firm, AdImpact. And in the state, Mr. Walker benefits from support among the party’s most faithful. In Cherokee County, a Georgia Republican stronghold that supported Mr. Trump by nearly 40 points in 2020, G.O.P. leaders are planning to host an event in partnership with the campaign in the coming weeks, according to the county party chair, James Dvorak. Vernon Jones, the Democrat-turned-Trump-Republican who lost his congressional race in Georgia’s deep-red 10th district, has also entered the fray, saying on Friday that he will launch an independent expenditure committee supporting Mr. Walker’s and Gov. Brian Kemp’s campaigns. He plans to spend at least $500,000 in radio and digital advertisements aimed at Black male voters over the next four months. The continuing support shows Mr. Walker’s strength, his proponents say. “You’re going to have bumps in the road in the road, and it’s probably better to get those things out of the way as early as possible,” said Eric J. Tanenblatt, a Georgia Republican strategist who was chief of staff to a former governor, Sonny Perdue. “I think by the time voting starts in the fall, some of these bumps in the road will get worked out. I hope so, for Herschel’s sake.” More

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      ‘The Senate Needs a Soul’

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      Raphael Warnock claims he’s not a politician, though he certainly sounds like one and serves as one. The U.S. senator from Georgia, who has long been the pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s former church, says that his “entry into politics is an extension” of his work on a range of what he sees as moral issues, such as health care, criminal-justice reform and voting rights.Warnock became Georgia’s first Black senator in January 2021, when he narrowly beat the Republican incumbent, Kelly Loeffler, in a special runoff election. And he is set for yet another tough political battle ahead, against Herschel Walker, the former N.F.L. player, who in addition to his celebrity status also has an endorsement from Donald Trump. The stakes are high: “God knows these days, the Senate needs a soul,” Warnock says.[You can listen to this episode of “Sway” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]In this conversation, Kara Swisher talks to Warnock about his path from the pulpit to the Senate and the religious journey he traces in his recent memoir, “A Way Out of No Way.” She presses him on whether he can beat his celebrity opponent and asks what shadow Trump casts on this election. And they discuss the contrast between the jubilation he felt on his history-making victory and the horror that unfolded less than 24 hours later, as a mob attacked his “new office,” the Capitol, on Jan. 6.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Keven LoweryThoughts? Email us at sway@nytimes.com.“Sway” is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Caitlin O’Keefe and Wyatt Orme, and edited by Nayeema Raza; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair; music and sound design by Isaac Jones and Sonia Herrero; mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      A Pro-Herschel Walker Group Gave Out Gas Vouchers, Angering Democrats

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      ATLANTA — A gas-money giveaway in support of Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for Senate in Georgia, drew the ire of Democrats and voting rights groups in the state, who said the move was both hypocritical and possibly illegal.The event, organized by the pro-Walker PAC 34N22, aimed to highlight rising gas prices and tie the issue to Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat who will run for re-election against Mr. Walker in November. The group handed out $25 fuel vouchers and Walker campaign flyers to motorists in line at a gas station in downtown Atlanta on Saturday as volunteers held signs saying, “Warnock isn’t working.”Several Democrats and leaders of voting rights groups criticized the event, pointing to a provision of the state’s voting law that bans volunteers from handing out water or snacks to voters while they are waiting in line. Handing out gas vouchers on behalf of a political candidate to motorists who are in line at the pump, they argued, should be considered just as unlawful.In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, State Representative Bee Nguyen, a Democrat who is running for Secretary of State in Georgia, cited a 2020 incident in which she said a state investigator had demanded that volunteers at a polling place in Metro Atlanta remove all snacks and water.“Giving away gas vouchers and Herschel Walker flyers at the same time isn’t legal,” she said. “Are they going to do something about it?”A memo from Mr. Walker’s lawyers shared after the event denied any wrongdoing, saying the gas vouchers were distributed “without condition” and that no voters who received the vouchers were required to vote, register to vote or support any political candidate.“Warnock’s campaign is upset about 34N22’s community outreach program, not because of any earnest legal concerns, but because they don’t want the public to know Warnock has contributed to record gas prices and the pain Georgians are feeling at the pump,” the memo reads.Mr. Warnock’s campaign did not comment on the event.Mr. Walker’s campaign denied any involvement with Saturday’s voucher giveaway after a video surfaced showing Angela Stanton-King, a Walker campaign volunteer, crediting Mr. Walker for the gas voucher event. Campaign laws bar candidates from directly influencing or cooperating with PACs that support them.“Herschel Walker decided, ‘You know what, we’re going to do this free gas giveaway for the community. I want them to know that I care,’” said Ms. Stanton-King, a former U.S. House candidate who was pardoned in 2020 by former President Donald J. Trump for her role in a car-theft ring, in the video.The Saturday event — and ensuing backlash — provide the latest look at what is likely to be a bitter and expensive fight for the Senate seat.Two days before the event, Mr. Warnock released a television advertisement attacking Mr. Walker for his embrace of an aerosol product he claimed could remove Covid-19 from one’s body upon entry to a building. The last few seconds of the ad, entitled “Snake Oil,” flash the words: “Is Herschel Walker really ready to represent Georgia?” as footage plays of Mr. Walker explaining the treatment in an interview. More

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      At Least Trump Didn’t Get What He Wanted This Week

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      Well, the people have spoken. Sort of.Several major elections this week, and the big story was Georgia. The race Donald Trump certainly seemed to care about most was a Republican primary there involving his enemy Gov. Brian Kemp.Trump, as the world knows, hates hates hates Kemp for insisting on reporting the accurate results of Georgia’s voting in the 2020 presidential race. The rancor runs so deep that Trump’s Save America PAC actually coughed up at least $500,000 toward Kemp’s defeat.Normally, our ex-president sits on his cash like a nesting hen. Must have tugged at his heartstrings to see it being carted away. And to no avail, hehehehehehe. Trump recruited former Senator David Perdue to run against his enemy, and Kemp demolished Perdue by more than three to one.Same story with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, who Trump told to “find 11,780 votes” after the presidential election and give him the win. Didn’t happen! Yet this week, Raffensperger did so well with Georgia Republican voters that he’s not even going to face a primary runoff.If you’ve got an optimistic nature, here’s a spin you can put on the whole story: Tuesday’s results showed regular Republicans aren’t all still steaming about how the 2020 presidential election was stolen from their man. And they’re not all going to the polls to get revenge.They’re ready to — dare I say it? — move on. No better example than Mike Pence. “I was for Brian Kemp before it was cool,” the former vice president told a crowd near Atlanta.Yes, he really said that. It will be remembered as yet another sign of the wrecked relationship between Trump and his former No. 2. It was also perhaps the only moment in American history when Mike Pence was linked with the word “cool.”OK, that’s enough voter happiness. Back down to Planet Earth. The newly reaffirmed Governor Kemp announced on Tuesday that he and his family were “heartbroken” by the “incomprehensible” school shooting in Texas.Now, Kemp recently signed a bill that will allow Georgians to carry handguns in public pretty much whenever they feel like it — no license or background check required. You’d think — at least wish — that he’d consider a possible link between the wide, wide availability of firearms in this country and the tragic line of mass shooting deaths. Anything can make a difference.Compared with the elementary school shooting in Texas, everything else about this week will be a political footnote. But some of the footnotes are certainly interesting. If we want to pick a theme for Tuesday’s elections, it might be that Donald Trump’s influence isn’t nearly as strong as he thinks it is, and that he may be the only American voter whose chief preoccupation is revisiting the 2020 election on an hourly basis.Getting over it is something Trump can’t abide. Consider the primary in Alabama for a Republican Senate candidate. Perhaps you remember — if you’re very, very, very into elections — that Trump began by backing Representative Mo Brooks, then changed his mind and unendorsed him? Cynics believed Trump had just decided Brooks was a loser, but it’s also possible the congressman had offended our former president by urging voters to “look forward.”That’s the wrong direction to mention when you’re hanging out with the Trump camp.“Mo Brooks of Alabama made a horrible mistake recently when he went ‘woke’ and stated, referring to the 2020 presidential election scam, ‘Put that behind you, put that behind you,’” Trump said as he retracted his endorsement.The outcome of all this drama was that Brooks got less than a third of the vote, behind Katie Britt, the former chief of staff of retiring Senator Richard Shelby. Since Britt failed to get 50 percent, there will be a runoff. Winner will face Democratic nominee Will Boyd this fall.One addendum — which you should really skip over if you’re feeling even modestly depressed: Both Britt and Brooks are in the gun camp as deep as humanly possible. Britt has ads in which she’s aiming a rifle and promising to “shoot straight.” The N.R.A., which endorsed Brooks, praised his efforts to protect “interstate transportation of firearms.” Those of us in states that are desperately trying to keep gun proliferation under control would appreciate it if he focused his energies on something else.Trump’s biggest election night triumph may have been Herschel Walker, the former football player he backed for a Georgia Senate nomination. But Walker’s competition wasn’t exactly top-notch, and now he’ll be running against Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, who will probably take note of a few items on Walker’s résumé that Trump overlooked. Including allegations of domestic violence, refusal to take part in debates, and the day on the campaign trail when Walker expressed doubt about the theory of evolution. (If it were true, Walker mused, “Why are there still apes? Think about it.”)On the plus side, there was Walker’s eagerness to spend $200,000 entertaining people at Mar-a-Lago. Nothing, it appears, raises the former president’s enthusiasm for a candidate like a willingness to make Donald Trump wealthier.All told, reporters found that seven of the Republicans Trump endorsed this year spent a total of more than $400,000 in campaign money at the resort. So yeah, our ex-president lost a lot politically this election season. But he gained a chunk of cash.Maybe he’ll use some of it for tips when he speaks on Friday at the N.R.A.’s three-day convention in Houston.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. 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