While campaigning for today’s important Senate runoff election in Georgia, Republican nominee Herschel Walker has made a lot of interesting choices, like flashing a fake police badge in a debate, ranting about the relative strengths of werewolves and vampires in a stump speech, and saying he doesn’t know what the heck a pronoun is. Then on Monday night, Walker—a man who held a gun to his ex-wife’s head—closed his campaign with a rally at a gun range.
The Walker campaign set up a stage inside the Governors Gun Club in Kennesaw, Georgia, north of Atlanta, in an attempt to target the party’s base: suburban voters.
Three of Walker’s former partners have accused him of domestic abuse, including his first wife, Cindy DeAngelis Grossman, who alleged that Walker held a gun to her head and said “he was gonna blow [her] brains out.” (Grossman and Walker have a son together, the conservative influencer Christian Walker, who has that the former NFL running back threatened to kill him and Grossman.)
Walker was flanked at the rally by women Republican operatives—including Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley—though it was unclear if that was purposeful given the domestic violence allegations or merely a coincidence.
The candidate’s current wife, Julie Blanchard, said at Monday’s rally that Walker getting “attacked” was worth it so the U.S. doesn’t turn into Venezuela. “Everyone says: Gosh, why did Herschel get in this? What has this been like for me? And you know what? Our country’s worth it,” Blanchard said, according to NBC News. “It doesn’t matter what it’s like. It doesn’t matter if you get attacked.”
“He loves this country. He loves God. And he wants to fight for our country,” she said. “We don’t want to wake up like Venezuela.”
By contrast, Politico noted that incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) “was spending the campaign’s final day in Atlanta, meeting with local union members, college students and Atlanta-based rap artist Killer Mike and ending with a final campaign rally at a local brewery.”
In early voting, Democrats had a 13-point edge, compared to an 8-point lead in November. Walker is expected to win much of the Election Day vote, but we’ll see how well he can do when even Republican elected officials—including the state’s lieutenant governor, have said they can’t vote for him.
Over the weekend, Walker suggested he believes he’s running for the House of Representatives, not the Senate.
Uhhhh, good luck to Georgia voters today.