Lori Falce: Will Herschel Walker face same backlash as Tim Murphy?

Oh, the scandal.

A man with a documented stance on abortion is outed. He had an affair. There was a pregnancy. He asks her to get an abortion.

This could be the story of Herschel Walker, the football star turned would-be Republican politician running for U.S. Senate in Georgia. A Daily Beast report this week broke about the case in which a woman said Walker asked her to have an abortion in 2009.

Walker has denied it, but the article includes corroborated details like receipts for the procedure and reimbursement as well as a signed get-well card. That didn’t stop Walker’s son, conservative social media influencer Christian Walker, from openly denouncing his father online, saying, “You don’t get to pretend you’re some moral family guy.”

But it isn’t Walker’s story. It’s much closer to home.

The “abortion is wrong unless it benefits me” narrative is nothing new. It’s the kind of thing that has risen its hypocritical head before. The last notable time it happened on the national stage was when Republican Tim Murphy stepped down from his seat in Congress in 2017.

Murphy’s story has been referenced amid the Walker saga. On Tuesday, Republican host of “The View” Ana Navarro cited it, along with that of U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn. The narratives follow the same template, like the plot of a depressingly trite novel.

The differences have yet to be seen.

Will Walker, with his endorsement from former President Donald Trump, win his Senate race? Hard to say. The last numbers had him trailing incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock, but Georgia is rapidly becoming the Pennsylvania of the south — a state with a diverse population and a large Democratic stronghold amid a vocal, rural GOP electorate.

But in a political landscape that has made abortion even more of an issue than it was five years ago when Murphy resigned, the potential impact is massive, and if Walker wants to know what his future holds, he can look to the Pennsylvania 18th District — at least as it was.

The vacancy left by Murphy set up a special election won narrowly by Democrat Conor Lamb, who followed that up with a 12.6-percentage-point win over Keith Rothfus in a general election win for the newly redrawn 17th district. Even in an electrified 2020 presidential race, Lamb kept that seat over a popular GOP candidate in Sean Parnell.

Murphy had held the 18th District by huge margins, keeping it in GOP hands so reliably that his last two elections were unchallenged. And then with an abortion scandal and the response within his own party, that changed.

The rules now may be different. The importance of abortion as an overall issue may be less important than the morality of it regarding one person. That is what will be seen on Nov. 8.

But the yardstick used to measure it won’t just be how the votes tally up in Georgia. It will be what happens with Walker compared to Murphy.