Big Lie Proponent Herschel Walker Is Getting Campaign Help From Officials He Suggested Should Go to Jail

The GOP candidate said people who certified the 2020 election should be imprisoned. Don’t tell Brian Kemp.

Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker campaigns with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp at a rally in Smyrna, Georgia on Nov. 19, 2022.Robin Rayne/ZUMA Press Wire

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Two years ago, Herschel Walker said that some state officials who certified Joe Biden’s election victory over Donald Trump should go to jail.

At a campaign rally last weekend, Walker embraced one of the people he seemed to suggest should be locked up: Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who stumped with Walker in a last-ditch effort to to boost the ex-football star’s struggling campaign as he faces a run-off against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.

Though it didn’t get much attention during Walker’s scandal-plagued Senate bid, he went all in on the Big Lie in the aftermath of the 2020 election, promoting an assortment of election fraud conspiracy theories. In the days and weeks after the November 2020 presidential election, Walker called on the Supreme Court to step in to change the election results; advocated for seven states to throw out their election results and hold new elections; argued that there was “country wide election fraud”; and pleaded for Trump to figure out who “stole this election.”

On December 27, 2020, Walker also took aim at state officials for not doing more to keep Trump in the White House, tweeting that “any person that certified Votes for their state when their state may have had voter fraud but they turned a blind eye and did no research and certified anyway, they need to go to JAIL ASAP. Our Country was built on LAW AND ORDER.”

In Georgia, one of the places Walker alleged there was rampant fraud, the primary people involved in certifying the 2020 election results were Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Kemp.

Walker took issue with both of them. He called out Kemp by name for not doing more to overturn the election results. “Why Is @Briankempga Refusing To Ensure That Voter Signature Verification Was Enforced? Shows That Something Is Up,” Walker tweeted on December 18, 2020.

He criticized Raffensperger for the release of audio from his infamous call with Trump, in which Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” Trump enough votes to overturn the election. “The Secretary of State in GA leaked a call he had with @realDonaldTrump….An elected official leaking calls- does that not tell you the type of man we put in office?” Walker tweeted on Jan. 31, 2021.

But now, Walker is getting assistance from both Kemp and Raffensperger.

On Saturday, for the first time, Kemp joined Walker on the campaign trail in the suburbs of Atlanta. “I know that Herschel Walker will fight for us,” Kemp said. “He will go and fight for those values that we believe in here in our state.”

Raffensperger has not stumped for Walker, but his office did just try to appeal a judge’s decision to allow early voting on November 26, the only Saturday that early voting would be available before the Dec. 6 run-off.

Before a judge ruled against him, Raffensperger tried to block early voting this upcoming Saturday based on his strict interpretation of a vague 2016 law, which he contends stipulates that early voting cannot take place within two days of state holidays. In the case of the 2022 run-off, Raffensperger argues that Thanksgiving and a holiday commemorating confederate general Robert E. Lee should prevent early voting on November 26.

The Georgia Court of Appeals declined Raffensperger’s appeals request on Monday, though the Georgia Republican Party is now appealing that decision at the state’s Supreme Court. If this appeal is successful, the elimination of the early voting day will likely boost Walker, as early voters are disproportionately Democrats.

Kemp and Raffensperger handily won their races against Democratic challengers. Kemp beat Democrat Stacey Abrams by a 53-46 margin. Raffensperger beat his Democratic challenger by a 53-44 margin. Meanwhile, Walker trailed Warnock by 38,000 votes, or roughly 1 percent, in November. (Georgia election law requires Walker and Warnock to proceed to a run-off since neither candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote.)

Experts credit some of Kemp and Raffensperger’s success to them bucking Trump by carrying out their legal obligations to certify the 2020 election results after there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

As my colleague Ari Berman reported in early November, Kemp’s refusal to be an accomplice to Trump’s attempted election thievery allowed him “to appear like a moderate without ever having to moderate any of his hard-line policy positions, such as supporting a six-week abortion ban, the right to carry a handgun practically anywhere without a permit, and refusing to expand Medicaid while Georgia hospitals close.”

Berman added: “Kemp’s certification of the last election—and the media’s fawning coverage of it—has allowed him to distance himself from the scores of GOP candidates this year who have questioned or sought to overturn the election results.”

Though Walker has been notably quiet on election fraud conspiracies since launching his Senate bid, his past statements speak for themselves, as does the support he’s received from at least one outright election denier, Jim Worthington, who once claimed there was “no doubt in [his] mind that the results reported in this election are inaccurate and corrupted and need to be challenged at every level legally or otherwise.”

Worthington, a Trump administration appointee who bused around 200 people to Washington on January 6, 2020, is the owner of Newtown Athletic Club, which last December donated $50,000 to a super-PAC supporting Walker. Pictures obtained by Mother Jones also show that Worthington’s business hosted an event with Walker in February 2022. 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate