Herschel Walker was a bad candidate.
This statement about the Republican Party’s candidate for U.S. Senate in Georgia, who lost Tuesday’s runoff election to Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, is obviously true. The catalog of Walker’s disqualifying conduct is thick, unseemly and violent. But to say that Walker was a bad candidate ultimately obscures more than it reveals.
Democrats also produce bad candidates. They nominated one, State Representative Krystle Matthews, to run against Republican Senator Tim Scott in South Carolina this year. It wasn’t a crucial race; Scott’s victory was a foregone conclusion and Democrats aren’t generally competitive in statewide races in South Carolina. But state Democrats called for the scandal-plagued Matthews to quit the field anyway.
A more typical bad Democratic candidate was Mandela Barnes, who lost a winnable U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin, or Katie Hobbs, who won the governorship of Arizona. Barnes seemed strategically out of step. Hobbs was a lackluster campaigner who ran a low-visibility race. But neither Democratic candidate lived out of state or made millions hawking magic pills to gullible television audiences. Neither lied about a dodgy military record or promoted the QAnon cult’s obsession with teachers “grooming” children for sex. Nor did they try to demagogue their way to office — as Hobbs’ defeated opponent, Kari Lake, is still trying to do.
Democratic “bad candidates” are simply a different order of bad than Republican “bad candidates.” And they are far less common — especially in highly contested states where the margin of victory or defeat is likely to be small.
This is not a product of happenstance. Nor is it exclusively a result of Donald Trump, who is currently being blamed for his characteristically goonish endorsements, including his promotion of Walker. The Republican affection for unfit candidates both preceded Trump (look at the Tea-Party-era GOP class of 2010) and made Trump’s errant presidency possible. Indeed, the wildly dishonest television personality and corrupt real-estate heir is the very embodiment of his party’s perverse appetites.
It takes a certain amount of contempt for self-government for a party to repeatedly embrace unfit candidates. Republican voters had better choices than Walker in Georgia, just as they had superior choices to Trump for the presidency. At this point, it’s hard to dispute that Republican voters in many states prefer bad candidates, who offer the promise of owning the libs while rejected GOP candidates might merely govern the republic.
Had Walker won, his victory would have showed that the GOP is “not racist,” according to one of his handlers, Senator Lindsey Graham. A Walker win surely would have provided Graham and others with a tool to use in their political battles. But it also would have landed another small grenade in the heart of the republic.
The Senate, which used to claim to be the world’s greatest deliberative body, is an institution that functions on speech and debate. Walker has trouble stringing coherent sentences together. If Walker is qualified to be a senator, the Senate is a joke. If the Senate is a joke, what part of America’s constitutional republic is not?
Many voters seem to have grasped the connection between bad GOP candidates and assaults on democratic capacity. The difference between the vote totals last month in Georgia for Republican Governor Brian Kemp and Walker, for example, was about 200,000. You might call it the contempt gap. It represents the rough number of conservative voters who supported a qualified conservative politician but also refused to vote for a buffoon whose very presence in office would show contempt for democratic government.
Republican elites are now trying to understand how they ended up with such a poor outcome in the midterms. In a Twitter thread, Josh Holmes, an establishment stalwart and former aide to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, weighs the balance between rural and suburban outreach. The solution, he concludes, is that the GOP either needs to “fix rural midterm turnout or mix the appeal.” On Fox News, meanwhile, host Laura Ingraham blamed the GOP establishment for failing to support the party’s Georgia Frankenstein more vigorously.
Neither of these is a perceptive diagnosis of the Republican condition. Both presage more election misfires. For now, the commitment of Democratic voters — and the contempt gap produced by a small but vital bloc of conservative voters — is keeping the U.S. out of the Trumpist ditch.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was an editor for the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
