New York Attorney General Letitia James’s lawsuit targeting former President Donald Trump and three of his grown children for alleged fraudulent business practices has had little noticeable impact on the closely-watched Senate races in which Trump-endorsed outsiders hope to best Democrat incumbents and candidates, analysts say.
Voters in the states where these races play out tend to consider the lawsuit, like other recent legal troubles faced by Trump such as the Department of Justice investigations and the Jan. 6 hearings, as distractions from crime that has risen precipitously in cities and a border crisis that has flooded “sanctuary” communities from coast to coast with more migrants than the cities’ social services are equipped to handle, according to one political strategist.
The latest polls of the states with contested Senate seats show that GOP nominees derided in the mainstream media in recent months for their alleged weakness as candidates and for their association with the former president are, in fact, much more competitive than supposed and that the outcome of the races is likely to be extremely close.
Running Neck and Neck
A Sept. 12 op-ed on The Daily Beast disparaged Georgia’s Trump-endorsed Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, as “an unqualified, lying buffoon” and stated that his campaign “is increasingly a train wreck,” while acknowledging that polls have shown Walker running neck-in-neck with the incumbent Democrat, Sen. Raphael Warnock.
While some might have expected the calculus to change significantly with the announcement of a new lawsuit spelling further trouble for the powerful GOP figure who endorsed Walker, the reality even now, as reflected in the latest polls, is an extremely close race. On Oct. 3, the polling website FiveThirtyEight reported Warnock enjoying the support of 47.3 percent of voters and Walker with 45.2 percent of the electoral pie, with the difference of 2.1 percent well within the margin of error, suggesting that The Daily Beast op-ed and other attacks in the mainstream media, and Trump’s latest legal troubles, have not registered at all in the minds of Georgia voters.
