(Bloomberg) -- US Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia has opened a double-digit lead in his bid for re-election next month against Republican challenger Herschel Walker, a new poll shows.

Warnock,  a first-term Democrat and pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, leads Walker by 50% to 38%, according to a poll of 1,076 likely voters taken from Sept. 30 though Oct. 4 by Survey USA for an Atlanta-based television outlet. Previous polls showed the race to be much closer or even statistically tied.

Almost all of the polling was completed before the evening of Oct. 3, when the Daily Beast reported that Walker had paid for a former girlfriend’s abortion 13 years ago. Walker, who supports a national ban on abortion, has called the Daily Beast report untrue. 

A former football star and longtime Donald Trump acolyte, Walker has also in recent days been publicly criticized and called a liar on social media by his 23-year-old son, Christian. 

Walker’s support is especially weak among women, according to the poll. Although male voters were evenly split on the two candidates, women favored Warnock by a margin of 29 points. The poll, conducted for WXIA TV’s “11 Alive” news, has a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points. 

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