Senate Rs, stuck with Walker, flock to Georgia to salvage Senate hopes

Herschel Walker, the embattled GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia, on Tuesday reminded Republicans that they’re stuck with him by reciting a parable involving cows and a bull.

“I’ve been telling this story about the bull and six cows. Now, three of them are pregnant — so you know he’s got something going on,” said Walker, who was speaking to supporters alongside Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rick Scott of Florida in Carrollton, Ga.

In Walker’s telling, the bull, unsatisfied, becomes increasingly infatuated with the other three cows, jumps over a fence and meets the objects of his affection — only to find out “they were bulls too.”

“So what I’m telling you [is] don’t think something is better somewhere else,” Walker, who has spent the last week denying reports that he paid for a former girlfriend’s abortion and largely abandoned their son, said to laughter.

The visit from Scott, who runs the GOP’s Senate campaign operation, and Cotton was intended to show that national Republicans are still behind Walker. And unlike Walker’s allegorical bull, they don’t have the option of jumping the fence and searching for something better. Voting is already underway in Georgia. The deadline for removing a candidate from the ballot is long past.

But more than that, Walker may well survive the scandal. An Emerson College poll released Tuesday showed him just 2 points behind his opponent, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. “I can firmly say that, based on the polls I’ve seen, this has not changed anything about this race,” said one Republican close to Scott.

Control of the Senate could easily hinge on the race in Georgia. Democrats currently control the chamber only by virtue of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote, and Georgia had been seen as a top Republican pickup opportunity.

So with less than a month to go until Election Day and the Senate still up for grabs, Republicans say they have little choice but to support Walker, who is set to debate Warnock on Friday for the first and only time.

“He’s our candidate, we’ve got to make the best of it,” said Scott Reed, a longtime Republican operative who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign.

“Even in Georgia, where this debate on Friday is going to be the equivalent of the ‘Thrilla in Manila,’ we can still win the race because it’s still about Biden.”