By Chris Satullo

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: I’m more qualified to represent the great state of Georgia in the U.S. Senate than Herschel Walker is. And I’ve only spent five days of my long life in Georgia – three of them when I was 4 years old.

In other words, I’m rightly regarded as ineligible to be one of the Peachtree State’s two votes in the world’s (cough, cough) greatest deliberative body. So should Walker be. He’s utterly unschooled in policy, reliably incoherent in speech and, apparently, a pretty lousy human being, based on the testimony of his own influencer son, Christian, and of several women he’s impregnated in the past.

Yet, until last week, Walker – whose electoral appeal is based solely on his having run the football spectacularly well for the beloved Georgia Bulldogs way back in the day (1980s) – was neck and neck in the polls with the incumbent, Ralph Warnock, a reverend who preaches from the very same Atlanta pulpit as Martin Luther King Jr.

Then a series of bombshell reports came out. A woman never married to Walker claimed he – supposedly a family values/anti-abortion stalwart – knocked her up and urged her to get an abortion, for which he paid. Walker denied this report from the Daily Beast, but then the news site came up with receipts and some more detail about the identity of the still anonymous woman. Then, the Daily Beast and the New York Times both reported that the woman in question also had a child with Walker, after he had told her to abort it. He also denied knowing who this complaining woman was; then it turned out that his current wife texts regularly with the woman.

Meanwhile, on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show (talk about a home game!) Walker emitted this interesting spin: He didn’t do it, but he still deserves forgiveness, and even if he had done it, he’d have nothing to be ashamed of because other people have done the same thing.

Got that?

The latest poll, says Fivethirtyeight.com, gives Warnock a 4-point lead, while Nate Silver’s computer model now gives Warnock a 59 percent chance of holding onto the seat he won in 2021.

So, this latest scandal perhaps has hurt Walker’s standing with some moderate voters, who might just sit this one out. But definitely not with the MAGA faithful, who immediately began to dunk the old tailback in the fountains of Christian forgiveness (which they seem to reserve only for those blessed in The Donald’s eyes).

“We’re all sinners,” one Walker backer told HuffPost. “You can’t blame him always for things he’s done in the past.” (Well, OK, but I’m actually more into blaming him for things he’d do in the future if he got elected.)

This flagrant bad faith out in the fever swamps of the evangelical right would be stunning were it not by now so commonplace and predictable. But I’m not here to bury this high-test hypocrisy, but to explore its baseline logic, which I’m afraid vibrates inside plenty of voters of all hues, whether they like to admit it or not.

Imagine (I know it’s hard but try) that you’re a Southern evangelical convinced that abortion is utterly evil and should be made illegal nationally, not just state by state. Whatever oh-so-human Herschel may have or have not done in the past, you know he will be a reliable, if dim, vote for whatever anti-abortion bill Mitch McConnell might decide to run in a Republican-controlled Senate. And that is the moral bright line you truly care about.

Meanwhile, Warnock (whose ex-wife, by the way, is not exactly heralding him as a paragon of fatherhood or feminism) will be a reliable vote for abortion rights. So it’s really not all that hard, if you’re an evangelical voter, to convince yourself that the godly thing to do is hold your nose and pull the lever for the Heisman winner.

Dear liberal voter (and I am very much one of you), ask yourself: What if the script were flipped?

What if your state’s Democratic Senate candidate were alleged, at this late stage of the campaign, to have a Me, Too problem, or a history of racist utterance or some other left-of-center unpardonable? Would you drop him like a glowing charcoal and vote for the Republican – for Dr. Oz, Kari Lake, Don Bolduc or, God help us, ol’ Herschel?

Let me answer that for you: No, you would not. 

Some of the most fastidious among you might ponder briefly withholding your vote or tossing it away on some virtuous write-in. In the end, though, a voice would thrum in your head, repeating solemnly this ironclad advice, forged in the sad fires of 2016: Eyes on the prize, eyes on the prize.

You’d vote for that blue-tinged bad boy. Just like so many liberals who stuck with Bill Clinton until the last dog died, even though he did stuff far worse than the sins that get current-day entertainers and pols swiftly and fiercely cancelled.

To be honest, I would probably vote for that bad boy, too. Keeping McConnell away from the gavel is that important.

This election, with control of the U.S. Senate at stake, is too vital, not just for passion-inducing issues like abortion, climate change and gun violence, but for the very prospects of the American democratic experiment surviving in anything like its intended form.

So, on one level, we’re not all that different, are we, from our red-clay Georgia brethren, whom we’re so prone to label as outrageously ignorant hypocrites? We’re, all of us, living inside a toxically partisan, misshapen, dark-money-soaked political landscape, where lousy choices grow like kudzu and appetizing ones are harder to find than Umbrian truffles.

It makes flaming hypocrites of us all. Perhaps best to heed the old Biblical advice: Judge not lest ye be judged.

I’d love to have a longer discussion about how to dig ourselves out from under this smoking political rubble. But, right now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s an election I want to help the sort-of-good guys win.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia