Georgia Senate To Go To Runoff Between Warnock & Walker

The race for Georgia’s Senate seat had been one of the most competitive and expensive in the country this midterm cycle. With the chamber evenly split, Republicans were eager to take back the seat Warnock had won alongside fellow Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in the 2020 cycle, when the state turned blue for the first time in decades.

Walker, who had a habit of delivering unintelligible answers on everything from gun violence to the economy to healthcare, had also found himself mired in scandal for months. Past accusations of domestic violence by Walker’s ex-wife, including him choking her and putting a gun to her head, were featured heavily in advertisements against him.

Then in June, the Daily Beast reported that Walker, who had modeled himself as a dedicated parent and a critic of fatherless Black homes, had a second son whom he had not publicly acknowledged and whose mother had sued the candidate for child support. Walker was subsequently forced to admit that in addition to his son Christian Walker, a conservative social media influencer, he had a total of three other children.

Months later, the Walker campaign was again rattled by reporting from the Daily Beast in which a woman said he impregnated her in 2009 and then paid for her abortion. The candidate initially denied knowing the woman and called the piece “flat-out lie,” but then the Daily Beast reported she was the mother of one of his other children.

As elsewhere across the nation following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion had been a major topic of debate in Georgia, which has a ban on the procedure after six weeks. Walker had campaigned as an anti-abortion evangelical who wanted a total ban on the procedure with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the pregnant person.

The abortion accusation was all too much for Christian. In a sensational turn of events, the son used his large social media following to turn on his father, calling him a deadbeat and a liar.