Heisman Trophy winner and U.S. Senate Republican nominee Herschel Walker speaks with supporters of former U.S. President Donald Trump during a demonstration on the Banks County Dragway on March 26, 2022 in Commerce, Georgia .
Megan Varner | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Herschel Walker, a former professional football player and businessman backed by former President Donald Trump, will win Georgia’s Republican primary race in the Senate, NBC News reported Tuesday.
Walker will face current Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in the November general election, according to NBC. Warnock took office last year after winning a special election.
The outcome of the race could tip the scales of power in Washington, where Democrats have a very thin majority in the Senate. The House is divided 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris has the tiebreaker vote.
Early polls of the hypothetical Walker-Warnock showdown show that the candidates are virtually tied, according to RealClearPolitics.
Primary races in Georgia, an oscillating state that voted for President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, also mark the biggest test to date of Trump’s enduring influence over the Republican Party.
Trump has promoted the fact that most of the candidates he endorsed in the 2022 election cycle have won their primaries, even though many of those races were not competitive. Fifteen months after his only term in the White House, the former president has maintained his status as the de facto GOP leader.
Many Republican primary candidates have tried to appeal to the party base by talking about their pro-Trump credentials, even if the former president did not endorse them. GOP aspirants in many cases have sought Trump’s favor by embracing the falsity of the election robbery, raising the possibility that a wave of candidates running election conspiracies could run for federal and state office next year.
The primary election will set the table for the mid-November legislatures, when Republicans hope to gain majority control of the House and Senate. Democrats are fighting uphill: the president’s party tends to perform poorly in the midterm elections, and the run-up to the primaries has been marked in part by high inflation and low Biden approval.
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