A growing number of Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate have ugly pasts
One top senatorial Republican candidate in Georgia is accused of threatening his then-wife’s life. Another in Pennsylvania could lose custody of his children during the campaign. One in Ohio is dating a subordinate on his campaign. And in Missouri, a leading candidate is the state’s former GOP governor, who resigned after a hairdresser with whom he had an affair accused him in gruesome detail of sexually assaulting her.
In a normal year, these candidates would be likely to be shunned by the Republican establishment, but the GOP has been put in the position of either supporting them or girding for their potential nomination, thanks to their ties to and even the support of former president Donald Trump.
And these races could determine which party controls the Senate next year. The Senate is split evenly, so Republicans need only a net gain of a single seat gain to retake majority control.
In the past, affairs and/or controversial remarks about sex have contributed to a number of downfalls of Senate candidates on both sides of the aisle. Just two years ago, Democrats lost a race in North Carolina with nominee Cal Cunningham, whose intimate texts with a woman who was not his wife burst into the open in the final days of the election. On the Republican side, a Trump-endorsed Roy Moore lost a Senate race in Alabama after allegations that he made sexual advances to teenage girls decades earlier.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/28/herschel-walker-sean-parnell-josh-mandel-past/
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