The Press Box - Covering Herschel Walker's Senate Campaign With Greg Bluestein

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Bryan is joined by journalist and author Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to discuss covering Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign. They begin by addressing recent accusations claiming he paid for a woman’s abortion back in 2009, touch on his response to the claims as well as his son’s response on Twitter, and break down how this might affect the Senate race in the coming weeks. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Greg Bluestein Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The time has come to get ready for the 2022 World Cup. And what better way to prepare than by revisiting the World Cup's most amazing goals? I'm Brian Phillips. I'm making a podcast about the history of the men's World Cup, told through the stories of 22 iconic goals. The show's called 22 Goals. It's out now on the Ringer Podcast Network, and we're having so much fun. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Final Edition, Brian Curtis of the Ringer here,

along with producer Erica Servantes. There is a political term called the October Surprise, where a candidate faces a story about their past weeks before election day. We may need a new cliche to describe the last week of the U.S. Senate campaign of Herschel Walker, who has faced a report that he paid for a woman he conceived a child with to have an abortion.

A reporter covering this story is Greg Blustein of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and the author aflipped how Georgia turned purple and broke the monopoly on Republican power. He's going to tell us what October surprises are like for campaign reporters. Greg, welcome to the press box. Hey, thanks for having me. All right, let's start here. On Monday, there was a Daily Beast story by Roger Salenberger reporting that Herschel Walker, who wants a total ban on abortion, paid a woman to have an abortion.

What was the reaction like in Georgia to that story? Who was a bombshell? We should say first that Hershey Walker calls these claims, this report a flat-out lie. We at the AJC haven't independently verified it yet, but we have reached out to the woman who declined to comment. But I was with Senator Raphael Warnock, his Democratic opponent, the incumbent, over at an event, not far from my house, actually. It was a Roche-Shana for the Jewish holiday, Rojasana meeting with some Jewish women and maybe of 150 people, 150 people, people or so were there at this event listening to Senator Warnock speak. We're around seven o'clock. Solenberger and the Daily Beast dropped this report. I'm kind of skimming it. I'm looking back and

forth. I'm getting texts about it. And Senator Warnock is on stage. Obviously, he's no idea that the story has just broke, but he did speak about his opposition to these abortion restrictions. He got a standing ovation from the crowd. And then right afterwards, I ask Senator Warnock, hey, I know you haven't read the story yet, but XYZ, and he was kind of a little bit flabbergasted. He had, and I don't think, was quite aware of the details of the report. But instantly, it became one of the biggest stories of this campaign and how Herschel Walker's responded to it has been fascinating. Because at first, he kind of retrenched to comfortable audiences. He had a few interviews with Fox News and some friendly commentators.

but on Thursday he finally had his first major public event. And he picked a sawmill way out, three hours from Atlanta in the middle of nowhere to deliver his response. Can you give us some campaign trail color about that event? Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, you know, we, of course, have been bugging him in his campaign for, hey, we want a chance to question him, right? We don't want to just hear him on Sean Hannity's program where he's getting friendly softballs about this and then quickly moving on to, you know, Joe Biden attacks. We want to see him out there live with voters. And this was the strangest political event I think I've ever covered, or at least up there, because this is not a campaign trail stop.

This was literally like a working sawmill in the middle of East Georgia, in the middle of kind of nowhere. Three hours from Atlanta, this was a company called Battle Lumber. It's a great company. It supplies lots of jobs to the area. So this is not a disparagement to the company at all, to the firm at all. It's a working somewhere where there's forklifts full of lumber warehouses, sawdust in the air. And, you know, we're kind of at this dusty patch of land near a warehouse on the edge of the property. And they put up a little stage with a giant American flag hanging from a cherry picker from a crane. And, you know, there's a few hundred, maybe 150, 200 people there. But the vast majority of them were shift workers who very clearly did not want to be there.

They had work to do. And it was a hot day and they're all kind of standing there and Hersher Walker gets off the bus. And usually at campaign events, there's huge applause, bursts of ovations, right? Because people have driven to see Hershal Walker from wherever. These were a bunch of workers. Some of them didn't even speak English who didn't, who made it very clear they didn't want to be there and kind of gave them polite applause. Hershey Walker stands up on stage. Doesn't talk about these accusations.

Doesn't hardly talks about a Senate campaign. at all. And one of the workers kind of muttered to a friend, why are we even here? When is this over? You know, we need to get back. They still had to get the work done whether or not Hershal Walker was, you know, was giving them a little break. So very strange event. Afterwards, he got in a very tense exchange with reporters near his campaign bus who were actually asking him about the underlying accusations. The reason why everyone had driven so far to see him. I was going to ask you about this, because how many exchanges have you had as reporters like that with Walker on the campaign trail? where you just have a chance to ask him whatever you want. Yeah, this always happens closer to November for us, local reporters, because there's plenty of events I've been to where I'm the only reporter there.

I mean, more than I can count. Not even that long ago, just a few weeks ago, there was events where it would just be me or just be one of my colleagues who cover these campaigns. And now, especially now with the national attention, events like this get overrun with national reporters who are all on going to go online. Femn TV, and that's cool, that's their job. But it is an interesting part of these campaigns, especially when scandals erupt. And, you know, one of my gigs is also an analyst for MSNBC.

And, you know, I've bought on TV, I don't know, probably close to 100, easily close to 100 times, if not more, over the last six or seven months talking about Georgia politics. But the vast majority of the questions I've been getting have been about the special grand jury trial involving Donald. Trump, that could quite literally be the trial of the century if it goes forward next year. So I get why I'm getting lots of questions about that and less so about the campaign trail. Well, that is completely flipped now that polls show a closer race and that this contest could, you know, again, determine control of the U.S. Senate. Walker's response when you finally get to question him was what? This is a lie.

This is a distraction by Democrats. They're desperate. But, you know, you can hear that in his audio, but the visual is really telling. because Herzegh Walker has stumbled on the campaign trail over and over again. Even his biggest supporters can't deny that. He's had a real tough time communicating a message. He's had all sorts of gaffs and stumbles and blunders on the campaign trail. And so his campaign didn't want him, don't want to risk another gaffe.

So they gave him a piece of paper, a sheaf of paper. And he gets in front of the media, and he's quite literally looking down at the piece of paper on camera, before a live audience. I think it was streamed on live on MSNBC. And he's reading from a prepared statement. They did not even trying to memorize it, just reading directly. And you can hear him pause as he flips the paper and continues to speak. So a very telling campaign event that he didn't bring it up at all on the stage,

that the audience could care, really many of them could care less about what he was saying. And then, you know, when he finally does address it, he reads from a scripted paper. and then when reporters have a chance to ask him questions, he's very combative. But that's kind of normal for him. He likes the back and forth. I ask him a question. He'll say, Greg, you know, you know that's not right. You know you're just making that up. You know you're going to vote for me. He kind of says stuff like that, kind of, you know, make it awkward for the reporters to press them with questions. Betting that combat with reporters will help him with the kind of people he wants to turn out in November.

And I think he's just a competitive guy. Well, I know he's a competitive guy, right? I always tell folks he's not just some great athlete. He's a legendary athlete. That's why he stands apart in Georgia. I mean, he's one of the most recognized figures in Georgia, and the competitive juices get him going. That's why I always kind of thought, I was always skeptical debate would happen,

but I always kind of thought he himself wanted to do a debate because there is no, that is the best form of competition in politics, is standing on stage. It's the closest thing you've got to, like, you know, a championship football game is standing on. stage side by side with your opponent, able to address him directly. So he won the Heisman trophy at the University of Georgia in 1982. He had a long career in the NFL.

What was his reputation like in the state before he got involved in politics? It's a that. It's a legendary athlete. I mean, there's, I have lifelong, I have Democrats. I have friends who are lifelong Democrats whose dogs are named Herschel or whose security codes to their garages are 3434. Brian Robinson, a really well-known Republican strategist here in Georgia, said he's basically the Pope here in Georgia. I mean, that's how high his name recognition is.

He's one of the most recognizable figures in the state. And I'd probably put him up there in terms of living people up there with Jimmy Carter. I know it sounds silly. But that is that sort of reputation he has in Georgia. And, you know, I grew up. I was born after he stopped playing football. in Georgia, right? He had already left the University of Georgia when I was born. My parents, they don't care about college football at all. And yet I still grew up hearing tales of Herschel

Walker. My friends had posters of him in their rooms, right? So that's sort of his renown, but he moved to Texas. He didn't come back to UGA all that often, you know, for big formal events. There was always rumors that he had, you know, a testier relationship with the school. But he wasn't a fixture at UGA football games or anything. like that. But he went to Texas, started a business, ended up competing in the Olympics. It's a bobsledder. It mixed martial art fighting. It was always kind of out there. We always would hear of his travails and his adventures, but it wasn't, but that's just what was definitely not a political fixture in Georgia. And he endorsed Kelly left with the U.S. Senator, which was a big kind of

moment on the campaign trail, but he was not out there, you know, front and center in Georgia politics by any means. Although when his name started surfacing for U.S. Senate, folks paid attention. So he's the football pope in Georgia. How would you describe his politics? Well, that's the danger of any sort of legendary athlete to get into politics. And he was warned, right? He was warned that if you get in, there's going to be a significant number of people who used to idolize you who will no longer. And that's even before any of these athletes. allegations came out. It's just because of policy stances. And he was always a Trump ally. I mean, he goes back, you know, 40 years of Donald Trump, back into the early 1980s when Trump's

USFL team, you know, picked and recruited Herschel Walker. So they have a long friendship. He might be one of the only politicians who can tell Donald Trump no, right, who goes so far back with him that he can, he can defy the former president and speak the truth to the, and speak the truth to them. But at the same time, you know, Donald Trump's endorsement really helped the other field for Hershawaker. Folks here think, and probably so do I, that Hershal Walker would have won the nomination even without Donald Trump support because of that sky high name recognition, but it certainly didn't hurt, and neither did Mitch McConnell's endorsement. But Herschel's stance on a number of issues goes against the majority of where Georgia voters feel, right? A majority of Georgia voters support

Roe v. Wade, Hershawker wants an outright ban on abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. Hershawaker supports expanding gun rights, a majority of Georgia voters say that recently passed permissive gun policies are against their views. And that alone, you know, take away all the violent and erratic behavior in his past and all the other stories that have come out. That alone would have put him out at odds with a significant number of Georgians. One of Walker's sons, Christian, has become a big figure on conservative social media. What has he been doing during his father's campaign? Well, you know, we've been watching him closely for a very long time now to see if he'd ever kind of erupt

because he's known for going on social media rants and about celebrities and about his own past and all sorts of other things. And he had been kind of quiet about Herschel. You know, he hadn't been at public campaign events with Herschel Walker. he hadn't been front and centered by any means in the campaign. After these stories broke, this is what made the Daily Beast stories bigger because you have this allegation for the Daily Beast

that Herschel Walker paid for an abortion in 2009 with his then-girlfriend. You have a flat-out denial from Herschel Walker. So it's a story, but it was Christian Walker going public on his Twitter account saying that basically his dad's a liar. His dad has made a mockery of his family that his own family had urged Hershawaker not to run

because things like episodes like this and other incidents in their past could come out. And finally, after a second report came out that Hershawaker later had a child with this woman, Hershawker's son, Christian, who's an adult son, by the way, is 23. He says, basically, wear a condom, damn. Damn it.

Like, go use birth control. It's jaw dropping, right? And also really hard in a sense because you're seeing this really emotional, personal family drama play out in public. And in a journalistic sense, as you said earlier, the AJC has not independently confirmed this story. But we can all point at Christian Walker's Twitter feed and say, but this is a story because look at the way he's criticizing his dad, essentially. Exactly. I mean, Christian Walker coming out within an hour or two of this Daily Beast report being published, changed the entire story, right? I mean, I don't think we're alone in terms of we would have, we would have been, we'd have played the story a little differently, right? As a, because it's hard, you know, it's not because anyone doubts the Daily Beast report, you know, that the Daily Beast has been right on other stories as well.

But it's a delicate situation, but I was, you know, communicating with my, with my bosses and my colleagues. And when Christian Walker came out, it gave the story a different sort of context. It was his own adult son now openly criticizing his father following this report. The polls between Walker and Senator Raphael Warnock have been very close. Given all that you know about Georgia's political makeup, how specifically could these stories damage the Walker campaign? It's a great question. It's a great unknown. My hunch is that it's still going to be very close. I really think there's this almost misperception, long before this story from folks outside of Georgia. or that, oh, they hear Hersher Walker's bizarre statements.

They read about his lies, exaggerations. They, you know, they've heard about, you know, his violent behavior towards women, including his ex-wife, Cindy Grossman. And Georgians are certainly hearing about that, too. But the polls have remained close. He's been able to survive a lot of that, those negative stories and still remain within striking distance of Rafi and Warnock. Most of the polls show, you know, a three, four-point gap within the margin of error,

which shows that this space is super. close. Right now what we're seeing is unique. We're seeing Republicans fall in basically, this is generalizing, but basically three buckets. The Republicans who don't believe the reports at all and are going to vote for Hershawaker, they say this is all fake news and not to trust it. The Republicans who say they believe the reports, but they want to support a Republican Senate. So basically the ends justify the means that they're willing to hold their nose and vote for someone like Hershaw Walker if it means that he'll vote reliably with the GOP. And if it means there's a chance that Mitch McConnell could end up becoming the Republican Senate leader,

then Republicans flip control of an evenly divided chamber. And then there's that smaller, but I think most influential group, which is the voters who even before this, Republicans, who are saying, hey, I'm going to vote GOP down the ticket, but I can't vote for Herschel Walker. And that's the group that will decide this election. There have been a few stories that the polls have moved slightly in Warnock's direction over the last couple of days. How much stock do you put in those? So those polls were taking it before the Daily Beast story or doing the fallout of that. So it's hard to, it's going to be a week or two before we really know if any polls have shown a real significant shift.

It's close, right? Early voting in Georgia starts in about a week and a half. It starts October 17. The debate with Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock is set for October 14th. So a lot of major moments are happening on the campaign trail. frankly also offering Herschel Walker a chance to, if not reset, at least try to stabilize this campaign, change the subject, shift the conversation away from this, something he has failed to do.

He completely failed to do that on Thursday when he gets up there and talks about his football career, but that's not shifting the conversation, right? So, you know, I think we'll see some more polls coming out, but some of the polls we'll see still will capture a time before these stories. So we won't really know. But they're going to show, I think, a lot of the polls, we saw one poll that showed Warnock with a 12-point lead. No one, including Warnock's campaign, believe that.

We saw another poll that showed a three or four-point cap. That was believable. That's something that both campaigns said reflected their internal data. Walker has threatened to sue the Daily Beast. What is the status of that threatened lawsuit? Well, as of this taping on a Friday morning, it has still not been filed. And he threatened to, he said, he pledged, frankly, to file that defamation suit the morning after this report.

So the report came Monday night. We pledged to file that Tuesday morning. We haven't seen that yet. Frankly, it's not surprising that he didn't file the suit, but threatened to because it aligns with a lot of what Hersh Walker's campaign has done, which is, you know, that they're, Hershal Walker has said a lot of falsehoods, he's promoted conspiracy theories,

and he has a lot of exaggerations. And that's his problem right now, is that if this claim had come out against another Republican in Georgia, a lot of voters would be easier to dismiss it because they trust the candidate. But even his supporters acknowledge, many of his supporters acknowledge this history of lies, this pattern of falsehoods. And that credibility problem might be Hershal Walker's biggest going into the final stretch of this race. How do you think reporters should handle a story when a candidate threatens to sue a publication, which we hear quite a bit?

Yeah, I mean, we write it with, you know, a grain of salt, right? That obviously the lawsuit would not be heard. No significant action would be taken until after the election, right, when it can easily be dismissed by Herschel Walker. So we write about that, right? I think I'm one of my stories. I can't keep track of all the stories have written in the last couple of days, but one of them I quoted a lawyer who's also a prominent Democrat here

who said exactly that. This is just a smokescreen. You know, Hershal Walker will file it and then withdraw it once the election's over. And because he doesn't want to submit himself to all the discovery and all the legal proceedings that would be at stake, right? He'd have to go and speak about his history and other things could come out that he would never want out. And we all know that because we've covered plenty of cases where a secondary story comes out that might be even bigger than the claim he was trying to fight. Speaking of pumping out stories, what's this week been like for you as a reporter? Well, super busy. And, you know, these days reporters aren't just reporters. We have lots of different, we wear lots of different hats. And certainly there's an insatiable appetite for political stories in Georgia. And so my job has changed even the last couple years. I mean, certainly a lot since the 2018 campaign. Nowadays, you know, we have multiple newsletters in the mornings. We have a podcast called Politically Georgia that I host with my colleague, Patricia Murphy. And that comes out at least twice a week, sometimes more.

multiple times. You know, TV and radio are an increasingly important part of our job, communicating what's happening in Georgia to a national audience and to a local audience because we do a lot of local radio and TV shows as well. And then you add to that, the traditional print and digital blog and all the other fun stuff that we do. So it's been very busy. I mean, just on Thursday in between driving six hours back and forth to Hersher Walker's event, I had radio hits at a cafe. I had a TV hit in my car. I had another appearance at a gas station on the way home. I think I stopped two or three different times and then got home just in time to go on MSNBC's primetime air. So very, very busy. But of course, our main job is still our main job,

which is writing for the AJC's digital and print editions. And the growth of your job comes out of the 2020 election where you have this really close presidential race in these two Senate races that go to a runoff? Yeah, although I'd say it really started in 2018. I mean, in 2016 and in, well, 2014, I'd be at campaign events and there would be no one else. I mean, till the very end. And that was, you know, Republicans were always expected to win, but it wasn't because of lack of democratic, you know, effort.

Jimmy Carter's grandson, Jason Carter was the Democratic nominee for governor. Former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn's daughter, Michelle Nunn was the Democratic candidate. candidate for Senate race. So very good candidates, but Republicans kind of easily won eight points over both of those campaigns started change a little bit in 2016 when, you know, I was more in Iowa and New Hampshire and Ohio in South Carolina than I was in Georgia for stretches of time because the races, you know, the interesting, you know, campaign events were there rather than here. But when Donald Trump won, as expected in Georgia, he won by five. points, not by eight, and he lost the suburbs. So that was the really first start of the shift.

It was Ossoff, John Ossoff, his 2017 U.S. House run for a special election to replace a retiring or a congressman who had joined Donald Trump's cabinet. That was the big change for me. That was when suddenly, you know, all the attention was in our backyard and it just hadn't been before. And I live in that district that he was running in. So I went from having a hop on planes to go to, you know, Iowa to being able to literally walk to campaign events. A candidate for that race owns a jewelry shop across the street from my house. There was debates at my local high school. It was that was when, you know, that was kind of my wake up call to Georgia becoming really the premier battleground state. I always joke about this with sports writers. You have to have a certain

amount of fortune that your team that you're covering wins a championship or is really good in the playoffs. This is the political equivalent of that. The blue state or the purple state came to you, other than you going to the Burple State. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it was always super high interest in Georgia, right? There was always intense, intense interest in Georgia. We were having, we were, had no shortage of stories to cover here to the last decade, well before Georgia became this premier battleground state.

But nationally, you know, every so often there'd be a story on some, you know, provocative or controversial legislation or development in Georgia. And then the attention would shift away. But it was in 2017, the attention really pivoted here and it hasn't really left. All right. Last question for you, Greg. A bunch of us non-Georgians learned during that 2020 race that in Georgia, you can't just win an election, you have to win a majority of the vote or you go to a runoff.

Is that the Walker campaign strategy now, get it to a runoff, get more distance from these daily beast stories? I mean, before these stories and maybe even, you know, it will, We'll see, but maybe despite these stories, runoff was looking like the likeliest outcome, a runoff that will be in early December. And Warnock's campaign was kind of girding for it as well. And we just, the fascinating thing about a runoff in Georgia is we just have no idea what the elector will look like. I mean, Republicans had thrived in every statewide runoff in Georgia until last year,

until Democrats took advantage of Donald Trump's lies about widespread election fraud and his obsession with himself over his Republican allies, Kelly Lathler and David Perdue. And, of course, really strong campaigns from Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff certainly helps their cases and flip these seats and won one runoff for the first time, you know, Democrats and generation. They tend to be older, wider electorates. but we also don't know what if if senate control is on the line if senate control is on the line all over again you've got you know another 500 million dollars being pumped into georgia or something like that

and in this case there's not a nine-week runoff like there was in 2021 georgia lawmakers thankfully changed the law to make it a four-week runoff so that means instead of our new years and Christmases and honica's being ruined by campaigns only our thanksgiving will be ruined by these campaigns. Greg blusty thanks for coming on the press box Hey, thanks for having me.