• Ryan Mills recaps the latest scandal involving Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, in which the pro-life Republican is accused of paying a former girlfriend to abort a child they'd conceived:
During an interview with National Review in September, he took aim at his opponent Senator Raphael Warnock's pro-choice position, noting that Warnock is a pastor and should abide by the Ten Commandments. "He's thinking it's okay for a woman to kill a baby. Thou shall not kill. Does that not violate [the Ten Commandments]?" Walker said.
• John McCormack writes that if the allegation is true, then honesty and contrition was the right response — both morally and politically:
One of Walker's own sons does not believe his denial. "It's literally his handwriting on the card. They say they have receipts, whatever," Christian Walker said in a video posted on social media. "We were told at the beginning of this [campaign] he was going to get ahead of his past, hold himself accountable — all of these different things — and that would have been fine. He didn't do any of that. Everything's been a lie."
"Don't lie," he added. "I wouldn't have spoken out if there weren't all these lies." That response from Christian Walker is one reason why (in the likely event the central allegation that Walker paid for the abortion is true) the best political response from Herschel Walker would have been honesty and contrition. The pro-life movement has always welcomed and even celebrated converts. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who performed abortions and helped found NARAL, was a pro-life convert and a hero of the pro-life movement. The Christian religion is also pretty big on repentance and forgiveness, too.
• Jim Geraghty says that the alleged scandal is the "kind of risk a party accepts when it chooses to nominate an unvetted first-time candidate to run for a key U.S. Senate seat."
• Several pro-life organizations and GOP leaders have stood by Walker amid the reports. Caroline Downey has more:
Senate Leadership Fund, the Super PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, suggested that the Walker bombshell is a sideshow and that the GOP imperative is still to get Republicans elected and flip the chamber from Democratic control.
"We are full speed ahead in Georgia. This election is about the future of the country — Herschel Walker will make things better, Raphael Warnock is making it worse. Anything else is a distraction," SLF President Steven Law told CBS News.
• Isaac Schorr points to recent evidence that the abortion issue's impact on the midterms may not be as strong as previously expected, as the number of weekly Google searches in the U.S. on abortion has returned to pre-Dobbs levels and the number of searches about the economy are on the rise.
Moreover, polling shows that abortion is not an especially important issue to voters. A Monmouth University survey released on Monday shows that voters place more importance on inflation, crime, elections and voting, jobs, immigration, and infrastructure than they do on abortion. A majority of voters did not not express approval of President Biden's handling of any of those topics, including abortion.
• Republicans have gained ground with Catholic voters, according to a new EWTN News and RealClear Opinion Research. As I reported:
Republicans now have a slight advantage among likely Catholic voters heading into the midterms, with 48.7 percent of Catholic voters saying they would support a Republican candidate if the 2022 elections for Congress were held today and 44.7 percent saying they would support a Democrat.
• Madeleine Kearns argues that, for Republican candidates, resisting gender ideology is not only the right thing to do but a winning strategy:
For evidence that the wedge issue has potential, look no further than the latest data from the Pew Research Center. First, sports: Roughly six-in-ten (58 percent) adults favor requiring athletes to compete on teams that match their biological sex, while only 17 percent oppose this idea. Second, on medicalized gender transition for minors: 46 percent favor outlawing the practice compared to 31 percent who oppose doing so. Third, on keeping gender-identity ideology out of elementary schools: 41 percent are in favor, while 38 percent are opposed.
• Progressives have miscalculated when it comes to Hispanic voters, Rich Lowry writes:
One of the most significant events in American politics is that Hispanics are, in effect, deciding that they are working-class voters rather than ethnic-grievance voters. This is so momentous because it means that Democrats can't rely on the monolithic Hispanic voting bloc they imagined would guarantee them an enduring electoral majority, and that the shift to the Republicans may be just beginning (the migration of working-class whites to the GOP has been happening over the course of a couple of generations).
• NR editors on Stacey Abrams's very bad day in court:
There's losing a lawsuit, and then there's what happened to Stacey Abrams in federal court last week.
Abrams, of course, has become a progressive rock star thanks to her insistence that Georgia's election system is a sink of racially motivated voter suppression. She denied the legitimacy of her 2018 defeat in her first run for governor based on these claims, and she's been hailed in the press as a savior of American democracy because she is so committed to fighting the state's supposedly malign practices.
Now, federal district judge Steve Jones, an Obama appointee, has shredded key contentions in her long-running argument against Georgia. In the case, a group founded by Abrams, Fair Fight Action, alleged all manner of violations of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. In a comprehensive, careful, and rhetorically unadorned 288-page decision, Jones would have none of it. He ruled against Fair Fight Action and the other plaintiffs on all counts.
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