The NPR Politics Podcast - These Candidates Face Allegations Of Abuse—Will They Win Their Elections Anyway?

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Prominent candidates in two Republican Senate primaries, Missouri's Eric Greitens and Georgia's Herschel Walker, face domestic violence allegations. On today's podcast, how the candidates — and the Republican party — have responded.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, demographics and culture correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, and congressional correspondent Susan Davis.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello, my name is Cesar calling from Iowa. I'm currently trying to finish a 15-page paper from our policy analysis class, but procrastinating by recording this timestamp. This podcast was recorded at... I just went to buy Red Bull when I was procrastinating. This feels like more ambitious than that. It's 2.02 Eastern on Thursday, April 21st. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will

possibly still be procrastinating this paper or maybe finishing it. Who knows? Enjoy the show. As a procrastinator myself, I deeply feel him. As an Iowan procrastinator myself, I deeply feel him too. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture. And I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And Danielle, today we are going to talk a lot about a report that you just finished up, looking at the fact that a number of Republican candidates running for Congress have been accused of domestic violence and other forms of abuse.

Big picture context, Republicans, of course, are heavily favored to win back control of the House and probably the Senate this year. But among many other things to talk about, some of these allegations could make it harder for some of these candidates to win these key races. Danielle, let's start with probably, you know, maybe one of the most high-profile Senate races in the country. That's Georgia. One of the candidates with a lot of these allegations is Herschel Walker, the favored

Republican candidate in that race. Right. Yes. So Herschel Walker, plenty of our listeners may have heard his name before. That's because he is a very famous ex-football player, especially for Georgians. He's a downright hero down there. He played for the University of Georgia, then he played in the NFL, and he is now running in the Republican primary to unseat Raphael Warnock, the Democrat who currently holds that Senate seat. Now, Herschel Walker is accused of some pretty ugly, to put it mildly, behavior. He's accused by his ex-wife, a woman cindy grossman they were married for nearly two decades of being quite violent with her on numerous occasions including holding a gun to her head multiple times threatening her with knives she says she once passed out during an altercation she thought he had choked her and that's how it happened not to get too deep into this but there

are a lot of really ugly allegations there. Plus allegations from two other women. One, a woman in 2002 said Walker had threatened her and was following her or had her followed. Another one in 2012 was an ex-girlfriend who said and they are being raised up in the Republican primary as opponents including Gary Black, one of the other men running, who has made an ad that is really, really taking aim at Herschel Walker because he is the favorite in this race despite all of these allegations. How has Herschel Walker responded to all of this? Herschel Walker responded to all of this? Herschel Walker is a complicated case. Those two allegations I mentioned that were not his wife, he flat out denies. As far as the allegations about him abusing his ex-wife, he does not deny them. In recent interviews, one with Axios, for example, he said he doesn't deny them, but he does not say

he committed that abuse. What he has said in some interviews is that he suffers from a mental condition called dissociative identity disorder, which is formerly known as multiple personality disorder, and that he had periods having that disorder that he cannot remember now. So that has been part of his explanation of those things. How are Republican leaders responding to this, people like Mitch McConnell? Walker does have emphatic support of a lot of top Republicans. He is endorsed by Donald Trump. He is also endorsed by Mitch McConnell. In fact, Axios' Jonathan Swan asked McConnell how he came to back Walker in spite of the allegations. The way I always do a variety of different

considerations. Every candidate has flaws and assets. This candidate has a lot of assets and is very competitive and has a great chance of winning. And this is a thing that I really want to drive home as we talk about all of these candidates that are accused of these sorts of things is that to me, and I know Sue can add a lot of context here, the GOP is in a process, it has been for many years, especially because of some of the allegations against Donald Trump, of figuring out what is and what isn't acceptable morally in its politicians. And one thing that Mitch McConnell likes about Walker is that he can flat out win. And essentially saying that that kind of counterbalances things. And relatedly, I spoke to a Georgia Republican strategist who said that Walker's allegations are outweighed for a lot of voters by the fact that he's a football hero. I mean, there are a

lot of things at work in any of these allegations, I should say. But there is also a lot at work that can counterbalance them. One of the things that I find interesting about this is that, you know, it's not new in politics to have candidates that come forward that have ugly pasts or accusations against them. This is true for Democratic candidates and Republican candidates. A lot of times the powers that be in the party would have stiffer elbows to sort of get those kind of candidates out of races, withdraw endorsements or push them out. Or oftentimes the revelations of certain things against a candidate would Walker, that these kind of accusations aren't immediately disqualifying. And party leaders like Mitch McConnell, who used to play a very, very heavy handed role in trying to decide who the candidates should be in primary races, are taking much more of a hands off approach, essentially saying like, the party's not going to try to decide this anymore. We're just going to leave it up to the voters.

I mean, it seems like the culture that Donald Trump didn't quite create, but certainly exacerbated, plays a role in all of this. This culture where so many Republicans, especially base voters, just either don't believe reports in the media about these candidates or think that there's some sort of plot against Republicans and these candidates. And Eric Greitens in Missouri is a really good example of that. Yes, he's a great example of this. Now, our listeners might remember Eric Greitens because he is the former governor of Missouri, and he was forced out amid allegations that he had blackmailed a woman he was having an affair with. Now he is also accused of abusing his ex-wife, Sheena Greitens, and one of their children. He has fully denied it. And not only that, he made a video where he denied these allegations.

And he took on, he sort of tried to spin this into a sort of Trumpian-sounding defiance of a a message saying, nope, these accusations are a part of a conspiracy by elite Republicans. Everybody wants to take me down, but I'm an outsider. We are no longer going to allow you not just to attack me and attack my kids, but to destroy this country. And that's what you're doing. You're making life hard for millions of families around this country by cooperating with the left, by stabbing President Trump in the back, by stabbing the people of America in the back, and we're not going to stand for it anymore. And I mean, there's a lot going on there. There's him saying that this is an elite conspiracy, and there's him saying that, like, raising the specter of the scary, terrifying left as being the people that they're ultimately trying to defeat. And

a lot of what we're talking about today is a microcosm of greater negative partisanship in our country. But isn't Gretens a little bit different in that, you know, in a case like Georgia, Walker is the establishment candidate, right? Like Mitch McConnell's backing his candidacy, the former president's backing his candidacy, Gretens is causing a lot higher level of discomfort within the Republican Party. And part of the reason why I say that is he's already held statewide office and the voters of that state kind of really know who he is. This isn't new revelations for them. And whether he can overcome that and if he were to win that primary and be in a good position to win in November, which, you know, frankly, is not an impossibility,

I think would speak to that dynamic that like polarization and partisanship matter above all else, even really dark and frankly, ugly character accusations against a lot of these candidates. Right. And to Sue's point, Mitch McConnell has really sort of stepped back from Eric Greitens in that same Axios interview with Jonathan Swan. Swan asked him about Greitens and and McConnell said, I'm paraphrasing here, that we're really just going to leave that up to the voters of Missouri. They will take that all into account. So he does not have Mitch McConnell support the way Walker does. And other high profile Republicans, like the other senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, have called for Greitens to back out of the race. And of course, he is not.

All right. So those are just two of the most high profile examples of this. We're going to talk more about it. We're going to talk about how Democrats are assessing all of this after a quick break. We are back. And Danielle, are Democrats facing similar allegations? You know, there is no clearinghouse for the allegations that we're talking about here. But the highest profile Democratic example that I have found is Raphael Warnock, who I have mentioned. He's the senator that Herschel Walker will be running against. He has been accused of running over his wife's foot with a car during an argument they had as he was trying to leave.

Now police were called to the scene and first responders did not find evidence that that had happened. But it's also true, while we're here talking about different parties, is that the parties treat different types of misconduct very differently, or at least they definitely have in the recent past. Consider Al Franken, the Minnesota Democratic senator, he was accused of groping women. There was Katie Hill, the California congressmember who was pushed out after having an inappropriate relationship with a staffer. So Sue brought up earlier, party power having waned. It certainly seems to me that the power to push someone out is a bit stronger on the Democratic side. Does that seem right, Sue? Well, I think there was sort of a

counter reaction, especially during the Trump era, because of the accusations against the former president that the Democratic Party was always trying to seek sort of the higher ground on these issues. And also, frankly, a party that has promoted itself as more a party of women that supports women, that elevates women. Now, of course, men can also be subjected to domestic violence, but it is much more disproportionately going to happen to women. So the party politically, the internal politics of the party, I think has made it much more complicated for Democrats to allow for any kind of candidates that seem like they might be sort of guilty of any kind of sexual violence. And that was particularly heightened during the Me Too movement. I think Al Franken is a great example of that. There are even a lot

of Democrats to this day that think that they might have gone even a little too far in pushing Al Franken out of the Senate. But I think that the party itself has tried to be seen as the party with the higher ground, although they have certainly had candidates that have also been accused of sexual violence or domestic violence. I think they have more effectively been able to push those candidates out of office or out of races when they chose to. All right. So Danielle, you've looked at a lot of races. We really just focused on two earlier. But big picture, what are the other names we need to know about? And what are the other political dynamics we need to know about

when it comes to where these races are and how that factors into how voters and political leaders are responding to this? I mean, Sue sort of nudged at this earlier. It's that these sorts of allegations, while they might have been considered an absolute 100 percent this will sink your campaign sort of factor in the past, they won't necessarily sink a campaign now. Now, that said, they still can. Republican Sean Parnell, who was running for the Republican Senate seat in Pennsylvania, he was accused of abuse in custody hearings of abusing his wife and kids. He dropped out. Eric Greitens has fallen in polling but is not out. He is still competitive according to recent polling in his primary. Herschel Walker,

according to recent polling, would be quite competitive against Raphael Warnock. And there are still others to mention here. For example, a former Trump aide named Max Miller, he's running in an Ohio House race. He is accused of abusing another former Trump aide, Stephanie Grisham, while they dated. He denies this. And there is not great polling in every House race, as I know you know. But according to one Ohio analyst I spoke to, he has a very good chance of winning. So those are a couple of other examples there. I mean, again, what we're learning, what might have sunk a candidate before doesn't necessarily sink them now. There's a guy I spoke to at the University of Akron. His name

is David B. Cohen. He is a professor of political science and just a really good analyst on this stuff. And I asked him about this. Well, I kind of think of it as the pre-Access Hollywood world and the post-Access Hollywood world. Anybody with a pulse that was following politics in 2016 thought that the Access Hollywood tape would sink Donald Trump's candidacy. Trump proved that you could win even with legitimate, serious questions about a candidate's moral character and with legitimate accusations of sexual assault. To me, there's two real takeaways from that sentiment. One is that, you know, in Trump's case, the Access Hollywood tape, if you'll recall, he spun it to almost be an asset, saying it was locker room talk.

I mean, this brings in a lot of the reporting I've done on masculinity that he sort of used gender to say, no, I'm one of the guys. And one other point here is that there's just a lot here about negative partisanship. If you paint the other party as bad enough, it stands to reason that you're going to accept more and more in your own party. That's a dynamic that can work on both sides. And I think it is plausible to say that that is a big part of what's going on here. All right. We will leave it there for today. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture.

And I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. We will talk to you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.