Herschel Walker ran as the Republican Senate candidate in Georgia and lost one of the country’s most bitter midterm elections to incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock.
Walker earned enough to advance to a run-off election against Warnock, but lost the race that tipped ultimate control of the chamber to the Democratic Party.
As always with losing campaigns, fingers get pointed in every direction to assign blame for the loss. Walker is no exception to this. Neither is his wife.
According to The Daily Beast, Walker’s wife, Julie Blanchard, only got behind Walker’s decision to run when she realized she could profit off the campaign.
“Blanchard’s plan, according to these campaign sources, was to collect a commission from the campaign’s media buys,” Roger Sollenberger of The Daily Beast wrote. “Essentially, these sources said, Blanchard believed she could strike an agreement with a media company that employed a friend of hers—and then collect a percentage of the profit through a private agreement.”
The problem was that Blanchard didn’t know how to orchestrate her plan.
“It was clear from that point that Julie was going to be in charge,” one former adviser told The Daily Beast. “The dangerous thing is she had no idea about what the […] she was doing. She’s also got the worst political instincts of anyone I’ve ever met, and that’s a dangerous combination. It was clear she was just motivated by, ‘How can I control it? What are the ways I can make money?’”
Blanchard’s leadership reportedly led the campaign into the ground.
