Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker says he needs campaign money to push back against allegations that he urged and paid for a past girlfriend to have an abortion.
In an email apparently modeled after Martin Niemöller’s post-World War II poem on Nazi purging, Walker says, “First, MSNBC attacked me. Then, it was The New York Times. CNN followed suit, and smaller news outlets like The Nation and Mother Jones piled on, too.”
He continues, “The coastal elites who run these publications and TV stations have launched dozens of attacks against me because I’m not part of the Washington Establishment. They make fun of the way I talk, and they despise that I stand for conservative values and limited government.”
The final nail for Walker it seems was a sketch on Saturday Night Live.
“The cast of the NBC show devoted several minutes of their show this past weekend to tearing me down and dragging me through the mud,” the email says, going on to invoke past satirical sketches targeting Sarah Palin, Donald Trump and George W. Bush.
“Now we’ve discovered that four current and former members of the SNL cast have donated to my opponent’s campaign,” he writes.
Walker then asks his supporters to counteract the donations from four actors in New York so that he can overcome what he claims to be undue adversity.
“Fellow American, we’ve been put through the ringer from Day #1, but now the far-Left is getting desperate because their attacks aren’t working and the race is a toss-up,” the email says.
Walker warns that the attacks could begin to work without more cash, writing, “SNL will continue to attack me through Election Day. MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The View will too. If undecided voters don’t hear from me, they could begin to believe some of the lies from the far-Left.”
Walker is running to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock in an election cycle where abortion rights are in the spotlight due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this year overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey — the two prior court decisions that have served as the framework for abortion rights in the United States for decades.
Most polls show Warnock leading the race, though the end result is expected to be close. A poll from Fox News released last week shows Warnock up 46%-41%, which falls within the measure’s 3.5-percentage-point margin of error.
Georgia has been purpling of late, electing two Democratic U.S. Senators and delivering its electoral votes to Joe Biden in the 2020 cycle. Warnock won election with 51% of the vote two years ago.
