According to a report from Politico, Republicans in Georgia are frantic that former football star Hershel Walker will be their candidate in November for the U.S. Senate seat currently occupied by Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock believing that he has no chance of winning.
With that in mind, conservative candidates and opponents of Walker -- who has received Donald Trump's endorsement -- are preparing to launch a multi-million dollar ad blitz against him in the hope that he won't get the needed 50 percent of the primary vote which would force him into a run-off.
As Politico's Natalie Allison wrote, "In the eight weeks running up to the May 24 primary, two super PACs supporting Walker's GOP rivals plan to drop millions of dollars in ads attacking Walker, according to people familiar with their spending plans — ad buys that stand to alter the shape of a race that could decide control of the Senate," adding that they are concerned about his general election electability because of his history of domestic violence.
Adding that Democrats would likely focus on his history of threatening and abusing women with attack ads leading up to the November midterms, Republicans in the state want to derail his campaign and replace him with someone without his spotty history.
According to Politico, "At a meeting of the Putnam County Republican Party on Monday night, Walker's leading challenger, state Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, closed his stump speech with an impassioned appeal for the crowd to do their research on Walker."
"Folks, he can't win in November," Black told the crowd. "The baggage is too heavy. It'll never happen. Let the Democrats pour $140 million on top of domestic violence and threatening shootouts with police. Let that happen. That discussion is going to be had right now. I'm pretty passionate about that."
According to Tyler Foote, a Republican consultant who is supporting one of Walker's rivals, the former football star has been spared attack ads from rivals so far and that is why his poll numbers are so high.
"Everybody seems to feel like Herschel is kind of inevitable," Foote explained. "None of the surveys, at least that I've seen so far, are actually testing the negative hits against Herschel. They're just doing the horse race."
Foote claimed his internal polling shows that Walker is beatable in November.
The report continues, "... a memo sent March 18 to Black's donors, obtained by POLITICO, says Black's campaign hired Meeting Street Insights to conduct internal polling in late February and found Walker's support dropped to 38 percent after Republican primary voters were informed about past allegations and his support for granting a pathway to citizenship to some immigrants living in the country illegally. The pollster interviewed 500 primary voters on landlines and cellphones with a margin of error of 4.4 percent."
"Polling last summer and in January showed Warnock beating Black by at least 5 percentage points in a general election, though more surveys have tested a match-up between Warnock and Walker, showing an even tighter race," Politco's Allison added.
