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      Will Asian American Voters Continue to Rally Behind Democrats?

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      The party confronts a mood of frustration among the rising electoral force that helped vault it to power. The campaign in Georgia will test that bond.JOHNS CREEK, Ga. — At a brightly lit restaurant in suburban Atlanta, nestled in a tidy neighborhood of office buildings and private drives, State Senator Michelle Au brought up the mass shooting that lingers as a singular trauma in the local Asian American community.Addressing a predominantly Chinese American group of about 40 people, Dr. Au, a practicing anesthesiologist, delicately alluded to “the shootings that took place in metro Atlanta on March 16 of 2021” as she launched into a plea for new gun-control laws that Georgia Republicans oppose. She did not need to remind her audience of the details of the deadly attack carried out last year by a white gunman against several massage parlors in the Atlanta area, killing eight people including six women of Asian descent.“Republicans, while they talk a big game about public safety, they don’t seem to be as interested in actually proposing concrete solutions to deal with it,” Dr. Au told the crowd.The issue of gun safety is one of several that Democrats like Dr. Au are putting at the center of their argument to Asian American voters ahead of the November elections, as they work to win over the array of communities that make up America’s fastest-growing demographic group.Dr. Au’s district — a well-paved tangle of shopping centers and office complexes where law firms list their names in Korean and Indian grocers compete for space with bubble tea chains — is a case study in the social and political complexity of an electoral force rising in swing states: the diverse collection of communities jammed into the census label “Asian American.”The attack last year by a white gunman against several massage parlors in the Atlanta area killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIn 2020, Georgia voters turned out in force to eject Donald J. Trump from office and then elect two Democratic senators in a runoff that decided control of the Senate. It was a breakthrough in Asian American mobilization, with turnout surging nationally by about 40 percent over the 2016 election — the largest spike of any demographic group. It amounted to an emphatic repudiation of a president who trafficked in race baiting amid a wave of hate crimes against Asian Americans.Yet just two years later, Democratic candidates in states like Georgia are confronting a mood of frustration and fear among Asian American voters that threatens to weaken the political coalition that turned Georgia blue for the first time this century.The anxious mood, voters and local leaders say, comes from persistent alarm about public safety and a feeling of being overlooked by national political leaders despite growing electoral clout.They warn that too many Democrats are still treating Asian Americans as a constituency of secondary importance, while Republicans continue pushing an agenda that is broadly unfriendly to Asian American communities even as the G.O.P. makes sporadic overtures on issues like education and crime.The ongoing scourge of racist harassment and violence, stirred during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic and stoked by Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, has kept the electorate on edge and heightened concerns about lax gun laws and crime. At Dr. Au’s event in Johns Creek, one speaker brought up attacks against Asian Americans on the New York City subway as part of a national atmosphere of menace.Narender G. Reddy, Dr. Au’s opponent in her state legislative election this year, is an Indian American real estate agent and longtime Republican donor.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesSeveral state elections in Georgia will represent a revealing test of Democrats’ bond with the Asian American electorate. The party has nominated a number of Asian Americans for important races, including Bee Nguyen, a Vietnamese American state legislator running for secretary of state against the Republican incumbent, Brad Raffensperger, and Nabilah Islam, a Bangladeshi American seeking a State Senate seat in the Atlanta suburbs.Republicans have put forward a handful of Asian American candidates, too: Dr. Au’s opponent in her state legislative election this year, Narender G. Reddy, is an Indian American real estate agent and longtime Republican donor who has pressed Gov. Brian Kemp and other Republicans to do more to woo South Asian voters. There are signs this year that Mr. Kemp is making a meaningful effort.Gun Violence and Gun Control in America2022 Mass Shootings: Gun violence is a persistent American problem. A partial list of mass shootings this year offers a glimpse at the scope.Ending a Stalemate: A bipartisan bill, the most significant gun measure to clear Congress in decades, was forged by an unlikely coalition of senators.California’s New Law: Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that provides a minimum $10,000 award to residents who successfully sue makers of illegal guns. The measure is modeled after a Texas anti-abortion law.Armed and Ready to Teach: Lawmakers in Ohio have made it easier for teachers and other school employees to carry guns. The move is part of a wider strategy by Republicans and gun rights advocates, who say that allowing teachers, principals and superintendents to be trained and armed gives schools a fighting chance in case of attack.Democrats are counting on voters in communities like Johns Creek, an affluent enclave some 25 miles from downtown Atlanta, to help Stacey Abrams defeat Mr. Kemp and re-elect Senator Raphael Warnock. About a quarter of residents in the area identify as Asian American.In an interview, Dr. Au, 44, said Democrats needed to connect with Asian American voters on policy issues like gun safety and abortion rights rather than assuming Asian Americans would continue to vote Democratic chiefly out of distaste for Republicans. Economic frustrations over inflation and gas prices were part of the Asian American experience, too, she said.The community, Dr. Au said, wants “to have a voice and have power and be listened to.”“It’s not a safe thing to say that all voters of color, uniformly, will vote for Democrats because they have a more inclusive platform,” she said. “And I think it’s not safe to say that all Asian voters will vote for Democrats, because of that same reason.”Johns Creek, an affluent enclave some 25 miles from downtown Atlanta, could be a pivotal community for the Democratic Party in November. About a quarter of the residents in the area identify as ethnically Asian.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesAsian American voters have steadily shifted in the direction of Democrats since the turn of the century, as a younger and more liberal generation has come of age politically, while conservative-leaning older voters have turned away from the Republican Party’s increasingly hard-line views on race and national identity.Tracy Xu, a voter at Dr. Au’s event, said she planned to vote for Democrats in November because she was upset about gun crime and the rollback of abortion rights. The law enacted by Georgia Republicans to ban most abortions, Ms. Xu said, reminded her of the repressive reproductive policies in China, where she lived for the first half of her life.But Ms. Xu, 51, who works in the financial industry, said she still considered herself a political independent and did not see either party as having a dominant advantage with voters like her.“Just like the country’s split, our community is very split,” Ms. Xu said.Tracy Xu, a voter at Dr. Au’s event, said she planned to vote for Democrats this year because she was upset about gun crime and the rollback of abortion rights.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesA Fragile AllianceThe relationship between Democrats and the Asian American community was tested almost immediately after the 2020 election, in tense exchanges between Mr. Biden and Asian American lawmakers who questioned whether the incoming president understood the role their community had played in his victory.Asian American voters made up about 4 percent of the national electorate in 2020, with studies showing they voted for Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump by a margin of roughly two to one. That was enough to secure victory for Democrats in a narrowly split state like Georgia.Still, Republicans maintained support in more right-leaning parts of the community, particularly among older and more religious voters; in Southern California, Vietnamese American voters helped elect to Congress two Korean American Republican women who branded the Democratic Party as a vehicle for socialism.Mr. Biden struggled at the outset to forge a tighter bond with Asian American political leaders, clashing with lawmakers over the near-absence of Asian Americans from early appointments to his administration. Private frustrations exploded into a damaging public spectacle when Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a Democrat of Thai ancestry, threatened a blockade of Mr. Biden’s nominees until the administration pledged to put more Asian Americans in important positions.Representative Judy Chu of California, the head of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said lawmakers had been “severely disappointed” during the transition but that the president had given convincing assurances he recognized the influence of the Asian American vote.After the spa shooting, Mr. Biden traveled to Georgia to meet with Asian American leaders. He was joined by Vice President Kamala Harris, herself the daughter of an Indian American immigrant. Weeks later, Mr. Biden returned for a rally marking his 100th day in office.Asian businesses along Buford Highway in Doraville, Ga.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesIntroducing him on that April day was Long Tran, a cafe owner in Dunwoody who said he spoke backstage with Mr. Biden about the shooting and the impact of “anti-Chinese rhetoric.” The president, Mr. Tran said, stressed that he and Ms. Harris “haven’t forgotten that Asian hate is still rising in the country and it’s something that needs to be addressed.”Yet in the 2021 off-year elections, Republicans recovered some ground with Asian American voters in New York City and Virginia, offering a hard-edged message about crime and opposition to liberal education policies that would have reformed or abolished certain kinds of selective public-school programs that are popular with Asian families but that many Democrats regard as exclusionary of Black and Hispanic students.Asian American voters motivated by similar concerns helped upend local politics in San Francisco, ejecting members of a left-wing school board and a progressive district attorney in recall elections that showed powerful currents of discontent within the overwhelmingly Democratic city.This summer, focus groups conducted by national Democratic pollsters found Asian American voters expressing dismay that Democrats often prioritize other constituencies defined by race or sexual orientation above Asian Americans, according to two people briefed on the studies.Long Tran, a Democratic candidate for the state legislature in a district with a large community of Asian American voters, said many people he met were uneasy about left-wing ideas on police reform and concerned about support on the right for lax firearm laws.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesStill, the Asian American Voter Survey, a large-scale poll conducted annually, found in July that Asian Americans leaned toward supporting Democratic congressional candidates by a margin of 54 percent to 27 percent. Those voters trusted Democrats more than Republicans on issues including guns, the environment and race — but split evenly on which party they preferred to handle the economy.Mr. Trump remained intensely unpopular with Asian American voters.EunSook Lee, the head of the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund, a progressive nonprofit, said Democrats still had a window to solidify their political relationship with the Asian American electorate.Of Asian American voters, she said, “They care about reproductive rights. They care about gun control. And on all those issues, the Republican Party isn’t budging.”Divide and ConquerIn a real estate office in Duluth, Ga., minutes away from Johns Creek, Mr. Reddy — Dr. Au’s Republican opponent — gave a blunt assessment of his party’s efforts to court Asian Americans: “Still not there.”Mr. Reddy’s office is all but wallpapered with photos of himself with Republican politicians like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, an expression of his personal devotion to the G.O.P. But Mr. Reddy, 71, said most of his Indian American friends saw the Republican Party as “all white.”“That’s the only popular perception,” he said. “And there is truth to it, actually.”The party, he said, had been harmed by episodes like a rally at the end of the Georgia Senate runoffs when Senator David Perdue, a Republican incumbent, had mocked the pronunciation of Ms. Harris’s first name. National Democratic organizations, including the advocacy group Indian American Impact, mounted a fierce campaign targeting Asian American voters with information about Mr. Perdue’s insulting conduct.The G.O.P.’s business-friendly economic agenda could resonate in the community, Mr. Reddy argued, but Republicans were still seen as “anti-immigrant” and overly tied to Mr. Trump. A supporter of Mr. Trump for years, Mr. Reddy said it had grown difficult to justify his behavior.Republicans in Georgia have taken something of a divide-and-conquer approach to the Asian American vote. The governor appointed the first Asian American justice to Georgia’s Supreme Court and Republicans have recruited a few Asian American candidates to run in state legislative seats.At the same time, the Republican-dominated legislature has used gerrymandering to break up ethnically Asian communities and mute their influence at the polls. Dr. Au became a victim of that strategy last year when Republicans demolished her State Senate district, prompting her to run for a Democratic-leaning seat in the lower chamber instead.Mr. Tran, the businessman who introduced Mr. Biden last year in Atlanta, is now a Democratic candidate for the state legislature in a district with a large community of Asian American voters. Mr. Tran, 46, said he often found voters expressing unease about left-wing ideas on police reform.He said he had encountered pervasive concern about gun violence and Republican support for lax firearm laws. “Everyone is scared to death about guns,” Mr. Tran said. “I was eating dim sum and the waiters were saying, ‘We can’t stop looking at the door and wondering if the next person who comes in will have a gun.’” More

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      Herschel Walker Is Target of Ad on Domestic Abuse Accusations

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      ATLANTA — In his campaign for the Senate, Herschel Walker has not hidden his past struggles with mental illness and violence in past relationships, aspects of his background that he outlined in a 2009 memoir and that his campaign sought to address in its earliest days.Now, a group of anti-Trump Republicans is hammering him over one of those episodes.In a new advertisement running on major networks in the Atlanta media market, footage of Mr. Walker scoring a touchdown for the University of Georgia is juxtaposed with close-up video of his ex-wife, Cindy Grossman, describing how he once held a gun to her temple and threatened to pull the trigger.“Do you think you know Herschel Walker?” a narrator asks. “Well, think again.”Mr. Walker has not denied Ms. Grossman’s accusations, saying his violence against her was a consequence of his struggles with mental health. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.The ads were purchased by a subsidiary of the Republican Accountability PAC, a group that grew out of Republican Voters Against Trump, which was established in 2020 by “never-Trump” Republicans including the strategist Sarah Longwell and the writer William Kristol. It says it has allocated $10 million in negative advertising and voter mobilization efforts over the next three months to stop Mr. Walker and other candidates it views as unfit for office or a danger to democracy. They include two candidates for governor, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Kari Lake in Nevada.The initial ad buy against Mr. Walker in the Atlanta media market is just $100,000. It would take far more to make serious inroads with Georgia’s vast Republican base, for whom Mr. Walker still retains near-godlike status from his career as a college running back. But the anti-Trump group is hoping at least to turn the heads of some swing voters.Specifically, Ms. Longwell, the group’s executive director, said it hoped to exploit what she called an emerging gap in support for candidates atop Georgia’s Republican ticket. While Mr. Walker was running roughly even in the polls with Senator Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Democrat, she said, Gov. Brian Kemp was outpacing his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, by a slightly larger margin.“We think that there’s a lot of these voters in Georgia who will split their ticket, and who will vote for Kemp, who will vote for Brad Raffensperger, but cannot vote for Herschel Walker,” she said, also naming the Georgia secretary of state. “For a lot of these voters, it’s about understanding the difference between the football player and the person running for Senate.”One such voter she pointed to was Brenda James, a Republican from Columbus, Ga., who in an interview said she voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 but President Biden in 2020, according to the Republican Accountability PAC. She condemned Republicans for “attempting to manipulate and use” Mr. Walker.“Bless poor Herschel’s heart,” Ms. James said. “The man needs help. He doesn’t need to be thrust into political limelight in the way that they are doing. Frankly, I think it’s disgusting and despicable.” More

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      John Eastman Proposed Challenging Georgia Senate Elections in Search of Fraud

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      On the day of President Biden’s inauguration, John Eastman suggested looking for voting irregularities in Georgia — and asked for help in getting paid the $270,000 he had billed the Trump campaign.John Eastman, the conservative lawyer whose plan to block congressional certification of the 2020 election failed in spectacular fashion on Jan. 6, 2021, sent an email two weeks later arguing that pro-Trump forces should sue to keep searching for the supposed election fraud he acknowledged they had failed to find.On Jan. 20, 2021, hours after President Biden’s inauguration, Mr. Eastman emailed Rudolph W. Giuliani, former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, proposing that they challenge the outcome of the runoff elections in Georgia for two Senate seats that had been won on Jan. 5 by Democrats.“A lot of us have now staked our reputations on the claims of election fraud, and this would be a way to gather proof,” Mr. Eastman wrote in the previously undisclosed email, which also went to others, including a top Trump campaign adviser. “If we get proof of fraud on Jan. 5, it will likely also demonstrate the fraud on Nov. 3, thereby vindicating President Trump’s claims and serving as a strong bulwark against Senate impeachment trial.”The email, which was reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who worked on the Trump campaign at the time, is the latest evidence that even some of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters knew they had not proven their baseless claims of widespread voting fraud — but wanted to continue their efforts to delegitimize the outcome even after Mr. Biden had taken office.Mr. Eastman’s message also underscored that he had not taken on the work of keeping Mr. Trump in office just out of conviction: He asked for Mr. Giuliani’s help in collecting on a $270,000 invoice he had sent the Trump campaign the previous day for his legal services.The charges included $10,000 a day for eight days of work in January 2021, including the two days before Jan. 6 when Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump, during meetings in the Oval Office, sought unsuccessfully to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to go along with the plan to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6. (Mr. Eastman appears never to have been paid.)A lawyer for Mr. Eastman did not respond to a request for comment.Disclosure of the email comes at a time when the Justice Department is intensifying its criminal investigation of the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Patrick F. Philbin, who was a deputy White House counsel under Mr. Trump, has received a grand jury subpoena in the case, a person familiar with the situation said.Mr. Philbin is the latest high-ranking former White House official known to be called to testify before the grand jury. Others include his former boss, Pat A. Cipollone, who as White House counsel argued, along with other White House lawyers, against some of the more extreme steps proposed by Mr. Trump and his advisers as they sought to hold onto power.Earlier subpoenas to a number of people had sought information about outside lawyers, including Mr. Eastman and Mr. Giuliani, who were advising Mr. Trump and promoting his efforts to overturn the results.In June, federal agents armed with a search warrant seized Mr. Eastman’s phone, stopping him as he was leaving a restaurant in New Mexico.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. 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’

      by

      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