GOP Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan says that every member in his party needs to hold former President Trump “accountable” for Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-Ga.) victory in Tuesday’s runoff election.
“The only way to explain this is candidate quality,” Duncan said in an interview with CNN, alluding to the controversies surrounding failed Republican challenger Herschel Walker, whom Trump had strongly encouraged to run.
Duncan added that he hopes Warnock’s victory will be a wake-up call for the GOP to examine their future with Trump as the face of the party.
“If we don’t take our medicine here, it’s our fault. … Every Republican in this country ought to hold Donald Trump accountable for this,” he said.
Warnock, a senior pastor at Atlanta-based Ebenezer Baptist Church, defeated Walker in Tuesday’s runoff, resulting in him earning a full term in Congress and giving his party an extra seat in their majority control of the Senate chamber, 51 to 49.
The Warnock-Walker showdown went into a runoff after neither candidate garnered more than 50 percent of the vote in last month’s general election.
Duncan is not alone among Republicans blaming candidate quality for their surprisingly underwhelming results in last month’s midterms. Several of the losing candidates, including Walker and Pennsylvania’s Mehmet Oz, had been all but hand-picked by Trump.
The former president, who faces a slew of state and federal investigations against him and his business, announced his third White House campaign at his Mar-a-Lago estate last month.
Duncan told CNN last week that he didn’t vote for Walker, a former college and professional football player, in Tuesday’s runoff, saying he “couldn’t find anything that made sense for me to put my vote behind” him.