Herschel Walker Was Never Going to Get Many Black Votes in the First Place
Whether or not Herschel Walker survives the latest allegation about his problematic sexual past — funding a former girlfriend’s abortion more than a decade ago — complicates judging his relationship to the black community. Before this October surprise, the New York Times gave us a glimpse of Walker’s Georgia hometown. “All [Walker] campaign materials were in the white community,” said Curtis Dixon, who is Black and who taught and coached Mr. Walker, when he was a high school football prodigy. “The only … house that has a Herschel Walker poster is his family.”
The media has strongly suggested that Walker’s lack of black support reflects his deep deficiencies. John McWhorter concluded,
The incumbent Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock, is Black, and Georgia Republicans presumably hope that a useful number of Black voters who might otherwise default to supporting him will be swayed by another Black candidate with a famous name, regardless of his lack of credentials.
First, Walker’s incompetency may be overstated. The Times article reported,
In his early teens, Mr. Walker disappeared into books and devoted himself to fitness. He became a model student, a member of an honor society called the Beta Club. Ms. Caneega, the teacher who led the club, joked that she would have taught for free if she “had a class full of kids like him.”
More importantly, even without the latest allegation, the likelihood Walker’s candidacy would have swayed Black voters was negligible. Previous Black GOP candidates in statewide elections have garnered scant Black votes irrespective of their competency. In Michigan, the 2020 Republican Senate candidate John James lost to Democrat Gary Peters by about 80,000 votes. James, however, won among white working-class voters when virtually all Trump voters also voted for him. In Detroit, virtually every Biden voter also voted for Peters. This was decisive — if Detroit’s votes were removed, James would have won by 225,000.
In 2016, Republican senator Tim Scott of South Carolina won with 60.4 percent of the vote, compared with Trump’s winning percentage of 54.9 percent — a 5.5 percentage-point Scott advantage. In the seven most heavily African-American counties, the Scott vote outpaced the Trump vote by only 2.8 percentage points. By contrast, in the eight least-black counties, the Scott vote outpaced the Trump vote by 5.3 percentage points. This strongly suggests that more white voters than black voters crossed party lines to vote for Scott.
In each of the three northern Virginia counties that Glenn Youngkin lost in his 2021 Virginia election, the votes for the lieutenant governor candidate Winsome Sears was exactly the same as his. By contrast, in each of the four counties where the black population share was more than 30 percent, Sears received modestly more votes than Youngkin. These “excess” Sears votes amounted, however, to maybe an additional 5,000 votes in an election that had more than three million votes.
When nonwhite Republicans win, they are disparaged. Ignoring her Asian American and Latino supporters, Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart ventured that many of Sears’ white supporters were “motivated by the racist dog whistles – or nowadays bullhorns –that politicians play on racial fears for political gain.” Political pundit Jemele Hill went even further to rationalize the Youngkin/Sears victory: “This country simply loves white supremacy.” Indeed, Brendan O’Neill reported the words of black political scholar Michael Eric Dyson. He said of Sears: “There is a black mouth moving but a white idea… on the runway of the tongue.”
There were similar liberal responses when Republican candidate Maya Flores became the first Latina elected to Congress from Texas in 2022. Typical was a New York Times story headlined, “Mayra Flores and the Rise of the Far-Right Latina.” The article disparages Flores and the other two Republican Latinas who are running for Congress in adjacent border districts as extremists, a terminology never applied to even the most leftist Democratic Congresswomen: The Squad. The article never mentions Biden’s immigration policy as a catalyst for this shift towards the Republican Party; to do so would expose the myth that Latinos support the Administration’s border policies.
Nasser Hussain’s “The Tale of Two Latinas” documents the striking difference between the way the media has fawned over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and ignored Flores. Moreover, the article claims that Flores is a much more authentic Latina: a mother of four children from a poor background. Most accounts ignore the fact that AOC’s unexpected 2018 win in a low voter turnout primary was primarily a result of the white liberal votes from the Queens section of her district not from the Latino-dominant Bronx section.
What is most striking, however, is the willingness of white voters to be just as supportive of Black Republicans as they are of white Republican candidates. This lack of racial bias is ignored because it is hard to square with notions of white supremacist values being pervasive among Republicans; Biden’s supposed semi-fascists. We should applaud the election of more Republican nonwhite candidates, and we should welcome the continued willing of Republicans to vote for conservative candidates regardless of their race or ethnicity. This should be the America we all want.
Robert Cherry is a recently retired Brooklyn College economics professor and an American Enterprise Institute affiliate.
