A running back with more than a decade’s experience in the NFL, Herschel Walker isn’t exactly the typical Republican candidate for the US Senate.
But celebrity of any kind is a strength in Donald Trump’s Republican Party, which makes Mr Walker the obvious choice for the former president in the race to nominate a champion in Georgia who can retake one of the state’s two Senate seats from Democrats this year. Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win the state since 1992 in 2020, followed by Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock winning runoff elections in January 2021.
Mr Walker, breaking the mold of other former athletes, is fairly active in state politics dating back almost 10 years. He first appeared in a commercial paid for by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce in support of a GOP primary candidate in 2014; four years later, he endorsed Brian Kemp as the now-governor battled Stacey Abrams in a close election marred by accusations of interference and voter suppression by the state’s government.
The main factor which determined his knighting by Donald Trump as his pick in the Senate primary, however, is his vocal support for Mr Trump’s conspiracies about the 2020 election. Mr Walker has claimed that Mr Biden actually got tens of millions fewer votes than he really did, and blamed “country-wide election fraud” for Mr Trump’s defeat. His successful football career certainly didn’t hurt, though: before going pro, Mr Walker led the...
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