MSNBC’s Joy Reid took issue with Herschel Walker’s campaign surrogates appearing alongside him and claimed it as evidence Republicans do not respect Black men.
Down the final stretch of the Georgia Senate runoff between Walker and incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), the former running back has had a lot of outside help. No one has appeared alongside the former Heisman Trophy winner more than Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
According to Reid and Democratic Party strategist LaTosha Brown, Black men are finding Walker’s campaign “insulting.”
“Black people are upset,” Brown said. “They feel insulted. They feel insulted that here the Republicans would actually pick a candidate and because he was a ballplayer, that in some way, and if they planted this narrative that Black men were not going to vote and are upset with the Democratic Party, that those two things would be enough for us to be fooled.”
She argued Black voters are more “sophisticated” than to be wowed by a former professional athlete, and Brown went as far as to describe Walker’s campaign as “racist”:
There’s a certain level of feeling insulted and that is racist. And there’s a motivating factor of who Warnock is. Warnock is a Southern Baptist preacher of Martin Luther King’s church. At the end of the day, that’s a lot of history, that’s a lot of connectivity to who we are in the South. Those things are working where I think Black folks are saying enough is enough. We can show you better than we can tell you.
Reid responded by saying Graham is “walking” the Republican around.
“I have heard this from a lot of Black men even if they’re not in Georgia,” Reid said. “There’s a certain disrespect that a lot of Black men, in particular, feel about particularly the way that Walker has been walked around by people like Lindsey Graham and sort of used and put forward. They don’t seem to respect him, and they don’t seem to respect Black people.”
Watch above, via MSNBC.
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