Herschel Walker crashes and burns in debate with Senator Raphael Warnock

Because Herschel Walker’s incoherently insane behavior throughout his entire campaign has set expectations so perversely low, the fraction of last night’s debate where he was able to stick to the script has given right wing pundits an excuse to claim that he won the debate. But the reality is that even if Walker didn’t behave erratically for the entire debate, that didn’t matter, because the debate introduced his erraticism to a broader audience than ever.

Most people who watched the debate are only going to remember one moment from it, and most people who didn’t watch the debate are only going to hear about one moment from it. That’s the moment in which Senator Raphael Warnock called out Herschel Walker for having falsely claimed to be a police officer, and Walker responded by flashing a toy badge that looked like something he’d stolen from the toy box of one of his seventy-eight kids.

The moment instantly spawned a thousand memes across the internet, all of them mocking Walker for the inanity of the moment. Walker’s handlers may have thought they could blunt the scandal by having Walker show he wasn’t embarrassed by it. But instead, the stunt merely ensured that the next several news cycles about the Georgia Senate race will focus on the fact that Walker has previously pretended to be a cop and is now going around flashing a phony badge.

In other words, this badge meme will help reinforce upon persuadable voters that Herschel Walker is both a fraud and mentally incompetent. This means the debate is a win for Raphael Warnock. But because this is a swing state, the race will still end up being close. Now more than ever it’s important to donate to the Warnock campaign, which you can do here.