Walker senate loss in Georgia proof Trump is 'toxic' - analyst

Record ID: 1701206

  • Title: Walker senate loss in Georgia proof Trump is 'toxic' - analyst
  • Date: 7th December 2022
  • Summary: PALM BEACH, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES (FILE – NOVEMBER 15, 2022)(REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE)(English) FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, DONALD TRUMP, MAKING ANNOUNCEMENT THAT HE WILL RUN IN 2024, SAYING: “America’s comeback starts right now.”
  • Embargoed: 21st December 2022 22:44
  • Keywords: Allan Lichtman Georgia Herschel Walker Raphael Warnock Trump runoff senate race
  • Location: VARIOUS, UNITED STATES
  • City: VARIOUS, UNITED STATES
  • Country: US
  • Topics: North America,Government/Politics,Elections/Voting
  • Reuters ID: LVA004518507122022RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text:The defeat of Republican Herschel Walker in Georgia’s Senate runoff race is further evidence that former U.S. president Donald Trump is “toxic” to a significant portion of the electorate, an analyst told Reuters on Wednesday (December 07).
    Walker, a former football star backed by Trump, lost in a hard-fought race to Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock on Tuesday (December 06).
    “There's no question that Donald Trump is toxic with a pretty substantial proportion of the general election electorate, particularly suburban women,” said historian Allan Lichtman. “The GOP can't win without winning over the suburban vote.”
    Walker's defeat is a setback for Donald Trump as he seeks the Republican nomination to run for the White House again in 2024.
    The former president endorsed Walker and dozens of other high-profile Republicans in this year's midterm elections, but he ends with a mixed record in his most competitive contests.
    “Donald Trump has always cast himself as the great kingmaker within the Republican Party,” said Lichtman, a Distinguished Professor of History at American University, “but the utter failure in swing states… of his candidates to win general elections, have kind of toppled him from the throne.”
    Lichtman said that while Trump’s endorsement of Walker hurt him, he was also a deeply flawed candidate from the outset.
    “What went wrong for Herschel Walker was Herschel Walker,” Lichtman said. “Herschel Walker was arguably one of the worst Senate candidates in the history of the country. He could not articulate clearly policy positions… He was plagued by multiple scandals, including allegations of this supposedly, fervently anti-abortion candidate paying and pressuring women to have abortions.”
    Democrats now are on track for a 51-seat majority in the 100-seat Senate, which will make it slightly easier to advance Biden's nominees for judicial and administrative posts.
    The result cements Georgia as a battleground state certain to play a prominent role in the 2024 presidential election.
    Democrats have now won three Senate races in the past two years in the former Republican stronghold, and Democratic President Joe Biden carried the state in 2020.
    “Georgia is no longer a reliably red state. It has now become a competitive swing state, if you will. It's neither red nor blue, but purple,” Lichtman said. “And it's now a state that Republicans can no longer take for granted in presidential elections.”
    One reason for this, Lichtman said, is the prominence of the Black vote.
    “This election in Georgia proved the power of the Black vote,” he said. “The Black vote has become the indispensable base of the Democratic Party, which helps explain why President Biden wants to now to substitute South Carolina as the first in the nation primary or caucus contest for the Democratic Party nomination.”
    Senior Democratic party officials on December 02 conditionally approved making South Carolina, where a majority of Democrats are Black, the first state to hold presidential primary contests, on Feb. 3, 2024.
    The White House-approved plan could mark the end of Iowa's long tenure as the Democrats' first nominating contest.
    It represents an effort to elevate the diverse, blue-collar constituencies that powered Biden's primary victory in 2020 after embarrassing defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire.
    Raphael Warnock, who like Walker is Black, is pastor of the historic Atlanta church where assassinated civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. preached.
    It is his second runoff victory in two years, after he won the seat in January 2021.
    (Production: Ashraf Fahim)
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