Republican Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker has launched a new attack implying his Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock, is a liar – drawing criticism for the litany of untruths he himself has told in the course of his fraught campaign.
Mr Walker, a former NFL running back who won the nomination for the must-win seat with Donald Trump’s backing, has been called out over a video riffing on a series of ads Mr Warnock himself released during his run for the seat in the last special election for the seat.
The videos in question showed Mr Warnock hanging out with a beagle as he playfully warned Georgians to ignore a deluge of negative ads coming from his opponent, incumbent Kelly Loeffler. The dog, Alvin, was credited with helping boost the candidate’s appeal (in particular to suburban white voters, as academic Hakeem Jefferson pointed out).
However, a minor-as-can-be scandal emerged after the campaign was over when it transpired Mr Warnock did not actually own Alvin. The fact that he had at no point claimed to did not deter a handful of critics from dwelling on the supposed dishonesty – and now Mr Walker is resurfacing the story with a pastiche missing pet ad appealing for information on the whereabouts of Alvin, who “disappeared on Tuesday, January 5th, 2021”.
Mr Walker’s official account captioned the video with a pithy question: “If @ReverendWarnock is willing to lie about having a dog, what else is he hiding?”
This framing has one problem: throughout the campaign, Mr Walker himself has repeatedly lied about various aspects of his past and hidden assorted details of his personal life.
Most infamous is his repeated obfuscation about the number of children he has fathered, a fact that he reportedly kept even from his own staff. Also on the list are untruths about his educational performance, his business record, his fictional career as a law enforcement officer and FBI agent, and more.
The reaction to his tweet indicates something about how these falsehoods have tainted Mr Walker’s image.
Mr Walker’s record of lying is not the only problem facing him as he tries to unseat Mr Warnock. His record of domestic violence has become a serious political liability, with one ad from an outside group simply playing his ex-wife’s description of an incident in which he threatened to kill her.
He also routinely makes statements that go beyond simply false into the realm of the surreal, whether about air pollution (“Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air, so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move”), evolution (“If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it”) or Covid-19 (“I have something that can bring you into a building that would clean you from Covid as you walk through this dry mist”).
The latest polling shows Mr Walker slightly behind Mr Warnock.
