David Shafer to Newsmax: Big Names Will Back Herschel Walker in Runoff (Newsmax/"National Report")
By Brian Pfail | Thursday, 10 November 2022 01:36 PM EST
Georgia GOP Chair David Shafer said support will “swing behind” Herschel Walker, R-Ga., in the runoff against incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga.
On Newsmax’s “National Report” with Shaun Kraisman, Shafer expressed confidence in the freshman Republican saying the real difficulty is that “Warnock was the only Democrat incumbent on the ballot” and that “he was elected just two years ago” in a “way that left him relatively untouched during most of the 2020 Senate campaign.”
“A lot of the reasons for the runoff is the fact that Warnock was the strongest of the Democrats that we were running against,” said Shafer.
He argued Republican candidates were too busy attacking themselves, allowing Warnock to build up enough strength to lead to the runoff elections. Neither candidate met the 50% threshold required for victory, with Democrats pumping an estimated $7 million into the campaign.
Shafer said this was the fifth U.S. Senate race to be forced into a runoff in Georgia. The first was in 1992 when Republican Paul Coverdell forced Democrat Wyche Fowler into a runoff election, in which Coverdell was victorious.
As to big-name Republican support, Shafer says, “I think that they’ll swing behind Herschel Walker. I think you’ll see that we will assemble the resources that we needed. Herschel was outspent in the general election and still performed very strongly.”
Shafer commented on Democrat money, too.
“There are more Democratic billionaires than there are Republican billionaires, and there’s all kinds of dark money that pours into these races,” he said. “But Herschel overcame that. Brian Kemp overcame that, and we finished very strongly, and I think that that momentum will continue through the runoff.”
Kraisman asked whether he thought former President Trump’s appearance would help.
“We definitely want his help, and we need the support of his supporters,” Shafer said. “There are hundreds of thousands of people here in Georgia and millions all over the country that seem to only vote in elections in which he is on the ballot.”
“We need his help getting those voters out for Herschel Walker,” he said. “What form that helped takes is something I defer to the campaign.”
According to The New York Times, Warnock holds 49.42% of the votes, while Walker has 48.52 with 95% of the votes accounted for. The gap between the two is less than 50,000 votes.